Van Alstyne holds several system and methodology patents and is credited for the original publication outlining the procedure for utilising US Department of Defense smartcards on Linux.
Seven months after the release of the Launch keyboard and five months after the Launch Lite keyboard, System76 has prepared a nice Christmas present for all of us, the Launch Heavy keyboard, a new model that comes in full size and with new features.
Apart from being a full-sized keyboard, the first of its generation, the Launch Heavy keyboard comes with 105 keys, including a function row, as well as additional extra keys, including the System76 logo, Pop!_OS logo, a rocket, and a robot as an alternative design for the Super key or another key of your choosing.
Docker is one of the most used containerization platforms and is highly loved among software engineers. It comes with a powerful CLI tool for managing Docker containers and other related tasks.
By default, you need root privileges to run any Docker-related commands on Linux. Of course, you can change this for convenience and run Docker commands without root privileges, but you should be aware of the security implications.
According to Istio’s support policy, minor releases like 1.14 are supported until six weeks after the N+2 minor release (1.16 in this case). Istio 1.16 was released on November 15th, and support for 1.14 will end on December 27th, 2022.
At that point we will stop back-porting fixes for security issues and critical bugs to 1.14, so we encourage you to upgrade to the latest version of Istio (1.16). If you don’t do this you may put yourself in the position of having to do a major upgrade on a short timeframe to pick up a critical fix.
Quick recording from Steen Schmidt that shows how to upgrade Oracle Linux Automation Manager to the latest 2.0 release.
Cloud emerged in the late 2000s as a new model of computing, - the third in the history of the IT industry after the mainframe-based centralized computing and the PC-based client-server models. The internet is the defining technology of the cloud model.
Cloud has gone through three major stages over the past fifteen years. First came infrastructure-as-a-service, offering near unlimited scalability at very attractive prices. Then came software-as-a-service, offering a faster and less costly way of prototyping and deploying innovative applications with advanced tools like containers, Kubernetes, and microservices. Cloud computing has now entered the third stage, - a major engine of business transformation that’s helping companies adapt to the digitalization of the economy, - a digitalization which has significantly accelerated since the advent of Covid-19 in March of 2020.
A two for one offer this time - an update on IceWM 3.2.2 and a quick look at and use of RSfetch.... Because both were too short, I thought I would bolt them together and at least provide something of value :-)
Announcing a new text editor--Pulsar. The team behind Pulsar is a community that came about naturally after the announcement of Atom's Sunset and decided that they needed to do something about it to keep their favorite editor alive. This is a community-led project to modernize, update and improve the original Atom project into a contemporary, hackable and fully open editor.
For years people have been asking about HDR High Dynamic Range on Linux and the answer hasn't been that great but soon things will begin changing on Wayland but not so much elsewhere
joel solves the problem.
Virtualization showdown, The Birth of Standard Error, why Steam started picking a random font, Maintaining Sufficient Free Space with ZFS, updated Apple M1/M2 bootloader, code, FreeBSD on my workstation, and more
The Linux kernel has some exciting updates this week, including a significant Asahi milestone and some good news for Android. Then we take openSUSE's new web-based installer for a spin.
The BPF subsystem, which allows code to be loaded into the kernel from user space and safely executed in the kernel context, is bound to create a number of challenges for the kernel as a whole. One might not think that allocating memory for BPF programs would be high on the list of problems, but life (and memory management) can be surprising. The attempts to do a better job of providing space for compiled BPF code have, to date, only been partially successful; now Song Liu is back with a new approach to finish the job.
Even a single kernel oops is never a good thing; it is an indication that something has gone badly wrong in the system somewhere and a straightforward recovery is not possible. But it seems that oopsing a large number of times has the potential to be even worse. To head off problems that might result from repeated oopsing, there is currently work afoot to put an upper limit on the number of times that the kernel can be allowed to oops before just giving up and rebooting.
An oops in the kernel is the equivalent of a crash in user space. It can come about for a number of reasons, including dereferencing a stray pointer, hardware problems, or a bug detected by checks within the kernel code itself. The normal response to an oops is to output a bunch of diagnostic information to the system log and kill the process that was running when the problem occurred.
The system as a whole, however, will continue on after an oops if at all possible. Killing the system would deprive the users of the ability to save any outstanding work and can also make problems much harder to debug than they would otherwise be. So the kernel will do its best to continue executing even when something has clearly gone badly wrong. An immediate result of that design decision is that any given system can oops more than once. Indeed, for some types of problems, multiple oopses are common and may continue until somebody gets fed up and reboots the system.
Jann Horn recently started to wonder whether perhaps the kernel should just give up and go into a panic (which will cause a reboot) if it oopses too many times. This could be a wise course of action in general; a kernel that is oopsing frequently is clearly not in a good condition and allowing it to continue could lead to problems like data corruption. But Horn had another concern: oopsing a system enough times might be a way to exploit security problems.
An oops, almost by definition, will leave an operation halfway completed; there is usually no way to clean up everything that might need cleaning when something has gone wrong in an unexpected place. So an oops might cause locks to be left in a held state or might lead to the failure to decrement counters that have been incremented. Counters are a particular concern; if an oops causes a counter to not be properly decremented, oopsing repeatedly might well become a way to overflow that counter, creating an exploitable situation.
The merge window for the 6.1 release brought in basic support for writing kernel code in Rust — with an emphasis on "basic". It is possible to create a "hello world" module for 6.1, but not much can be done beyond that. There is, however, a lot more Rust code for the kernel out there; it's just waiting for its turn to be reviewed and merged into the mainline. Miguel Ojeda has now posted the next round of Rust patches, adding to the support infrastructure in the kernel. This 28-part patch series is focused on low-level support code, still without much in the way of abstractions for dealing with the rest of the kernel. There will be no shiny new drivers built on this base alone. But it does show another step toward the creation of a workable environment for the development of code in the Linux kernel.
As an example of how stripped-down the initial Rust support is, consider that the kernel has eight different logging levels, from "debug" through "emergency". There is a macro defined for each level to make printing simple; screaming about an imminent crash can be done with pr_emerg(), for example. The Rust code in 6.1 defines equivalent macros, but only two of them: pr_info!() and pr_emerg!(); the macros for the other log levels were left out. The first order of business for 6.2 appears to be to fill in the rest of the set, from pr_debug!() at one end through pr_alert!() at the other. There is also pr_cont!() for messages that are pieced together from multiple calls. This sample kernel module shows all of the print macros in action.
I'm announcing the release of the 6.0.12 kernel.
All users of the 6.0 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 6.0.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.0.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
Asahi Linux aims to be a port of Linux for Apple Silicon Macs; work started on it back in 2020, right after the launch of Apple's M1 chips at the WWDC event.
A small team is behind all the development behind Asahi Linux and reverse engineering stuff; they have been quite busy since the last time we looked at their work.
Previously, they worked on improving support for Apple SoCs such as the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max. They provided varying levels of support for devices that used these chips.
It still is a work in progress, but promising results in 2022.
Intel recently announced a big driver update for their Arc GPUs on Windows, because their DirectX 9 performance wasn't as good as it could have been. Turns out, they're using code from the open source DXVK which is part of Steam Play Proton.
Converter is an open-source graphical front-end that enables you to do that. It is a GTK4+libadwaita application.
You can convert the images to various file formats that include png, webp, jpeg, heif, heic, and bmp. It is safe to say that you get support for the most popular image file formats. So, it should come in pretty handy.
Vivaldi's making an effort to have more users join Mastodon with its new update. That's nice to see!
Vivaldi browser is one of the best web browsers for Linux (Windows, macOS, and mobile platforms). I know it is not an open-source pick, but it gets all the lead with its tab management, customizability, and productivity features. And it treats me better than Firefox nowadays (Mozilla, we still need you to do better
I tend to enjoy lightweight applications. They're good for low spec computers, for remote shells, for the impatient user (OK, I admit, that's me), and for the systems we scrap together to fight the inevitable zombie apocalypse. In my search for a perfect blend of a lightweight application with all the modern conveniences we've learned from experience, I stumbled across a file manager called nnn. The nnn file manager exists in a terminal only, but it feels like a modern keyboard-driven application with intuitive actions and easy navigation.
Support for a CSS property isn’t the only thing you can check with @supports(), you can also check support for a selector.
I knew you can check whether a property is supported by the current browser and apply styles accordingly.
On day 47, I introduced you to the overscroll-behavior property, and I showed you how to use it to disable scroll-chaining. There’s another feature we can disable using this property.
In some mobile browsers, you can refresh the page by swiping down when the page is scrolled to the very top. That's called pull-to-refresh. This is a great feature, but depending on what the user’s interacting with on the page, this can be undesirable.
The other day, I was working from home and wanted to bisect Firefox versions with mozregression (in order to chase down my Firefox window to tab bug). This normally works okay, but this time around there were two intertwined problems with it. The first was that mozregression's downloads were unusually slow, even for my home DSL link. The second is that having Firefox start up at random, delayed times is kind of disruptive to what else I was doing. The second factor is always there, but unpredictably slow downloads make it worse (when they're fast enough, I don't try to do anything else during a mozregression run).
The Linux command line environment has many functionalities. One of its primary roles is the installation and management of Linux software packages. There are several approaches to installing packages on Ubuntu Linux.
One of them is via the apt package manager, which is used to install a Linux package and may or may not always yield results. Due to various to-be-explained reasons, package installation failure via apt may yield the error message E: Unable to locate the package.
Google Chrome is arguably one of the most popular and widely used browsers across all computing platforms. It’s a fast, user-friendly, and intuitive browser that provides a vast array of features to provide a streamlined browsing experience.
Unfortunately, Firefox is the default browser that ships with most graphical Linux distros. With that in mind, you need to go an extra step and practically install the Google Chrome browser on your distribution.
This tutorial will teach you how to install Google Chrome on Ubuntu Linux. Basically, there are two main ways of installing Google Chrome on Ubuntu – Installing graphically and via the command line.
Rocky Linux users know that Firefox is, by default, installed on most Linux. This is no exception when it comes to Rocky Linux. However, as good as Firefox, desktop users may often prefer installing another web browser, in this case, Google Chrome which is still the most prominent used browser worldwide. With so many Google Chrome updates that are pushed as a result of being so popular, having the browser directly installed from the source instead of waiting for a maintainer from a third party to push it is better. Also, as a bonus, people who like testing edge software can install the beta or unstable repository builds using the same technique, with a bit of modification to the commands.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Google Chrome on Rocky Linux 9 or Rocky Linux 8 using the command line terminal and Google’s DNF repository for the latest version binary at all times. This ensures if an urgent update is required, you do need to wait for it to become live on a third-party repository.
Learn how to install Foobar2000 music player on Arch Linux and Manjaro using Wine, AUR, or Snap package manager.
The Fish is a modern (friendly interactive shell) program identical to its allies, like Bash and Zsh, but with sprinkles on top. What does that mean?
You already know about the Bash shell (because it’s the default login shell for most Linux distros) and the Zsh shell (don’t know about it, check out our detailed guide article).
Both shells are amazing, but one lacks a feature (referring to Bash) and the other requires manual configuration (referring to ZSH); taking advantage of that gap, Fish Shell arises.
Bash is the default shell for most of the Linux distributions, but it is not the only one; there are other shell interpreters like ZSH (and Fish) that are available.
Kali Linux and macOS Catalina were early adopters of ZSH as the default login shell, replacing the standard Bash (although Bash is available in this system as an alternative).
But because Bash is the default on most Linux systems, people often forget about the Zsh shell. This is disgraceful, because once you try ZSH, you will never go back to Bash.
Learn how to list installed packages and dependencies with Pacman package manager. Also see how to count total number of installed packages.
Use the pmap command to explore how a process is mapped in memory to monitor or troubleshoot memory usage.
The root directory on a Linux system, which is represented by the / character, is the parent path to all files on the installation’s partition. All operating systems have a root directory. If you are familiar with Windows systems, they use the C:\ path as their root directory.
You will see references to the root directory all of the time. Even when looking at the absolute path to a random file, such as /home/linuxconfig/example.txt, you can see the / at the very beginning of the file path, which indicates the root directory. From this path, we can also derive that home is directly inside of the root directory /.
The term “root directory” can sometimes also be confused with the home directory for the root user account. This is typically located at /root, and resides one directory deep within the root directory /. The /root path is treated as any typical user’s home directory, and does not serve a similar purpose to that of the root directory /.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to navigate to the root directory on a Linux system. This means both the top most directory in the file system, /, and the root user’s home directory /root. Read on to learn how.
In this Linux tip, we’re going to look the tr command (translate) that is used to replace or remove characters in strings or files.
I watched another tutorial recently by Rick at IronEcho Design. He has done several tutorials about making landscape scenes. In another tutorial, he shows us how to make "brushes" to use with the spray paint tool, and makes trees. Actually, the spray paint tool allows you to use any object you want as a brush. Since it's close to the holidays, let's make some trees. First, let's look at the tool we're going to use.
If you open Inkscape and choose the spray paint tool, you'll see that there are many settings. The first three on the left are the modes of the tool. You can set it so it paints copies, clones or paths.
PHP 8.2 has continued to build upon the renewed base set forth by PHP 8.0 and PHP 8.1 and was released on December 8, 2022, and introduced new features and improvements such as readonly classes, redact sensitive parameters in backtraces, allow constants in traits, fetch enum properties in const expressions, new mysqli_execute_query functions, and mysqli::execute_query method as much more.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the REMI PHP Module and install PHP 8.2 on Fedora 37/36/35 server or workstation desktop, along with some tips about configuring Nginx with FPM using the command line terminal.
Unciv is a popular open source remake inspired directly by Civilization V. It's been around for a while now and it's finally heading to Steam. Available cross-platform for Linux, Windows and Android it's actually quite an impressive and expansive game that has been continuously upgraded for years.
Pixel Wheels also got an article in issue 187 of Full Circle Magazine, an independent magazine about Ubuntu. Pretty happy about it!
One reason the x86 PC became the dominant game platform in the early 1990s was the availability of affordable sound cards like the AdLib and Sound Blaster. These provided a quantum leap in sound quality compared to the PC speaker’s tinny beeps, thanks to Yamaha’s YM3812 chip, also known as OPL2. [Tyler] has made a detailed study of the various OPL series chips and wrote a comprehensive guide describing their operation.
Polychromatic, powered by OpenRazer, is a front-end UI for users to easily manage their Razer devices and a new release is out now with version 0.8.0.
It will come as no surprise to any regular reader here when I say that Nintendo is roughly the most annoyingly draconian protector of IP in the video game space. At this point, Techdirt posts discussing Nintendo’s copyright and trademark antics are legion. Notable among those posts for the purposes of this discussion are several online gaming tournaments that Nintendo has allowed to exist, often without a license, but which Nintendo has still been willing to shut down over the use of 3rd party tools that make it possible to stream older games on current hardware and over the internet better. Those shutdowns over the use of tools that have nothing to do with copyright infringement might seem ridiculous to you, but then you simply don’t know just how iron-fisted Nintendo likes to be when it comes to controlling anything that has to do with their products.
Have you ever wondered how many people sacrificed themselves so that you could defeat Bowser on your NES? Or Dr. Robotnik on your Sega Genesis? Well... You must be asking yourself: Sacrifice? What is this all about? Video games are just fun, where nobody gets hurt...
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but unfortunately, people get hurt in video games, and even die. Sadly, video games have a very dangerous dark side that few people talk about. I am referring to Crunch Time.
Valve has finished the current Proton Next testing, with Proton 7.0-5 now available as an update in your Steam Library replacing the previous Proton 7 version. Here's a run over what's new.
EVERSPACE 2 appears to be quite a success for ROCKFISH Games, not only is it doing well on Steam with a Very Positive rating in Early Access but they just got a big bonus from the German federal parliament. They've been given a grant of 1.65 Million Euro to help them expand the game.
It was pretty much a given that Dwarf Fortress was going to be popular on Steam, but the smash hit it has become is quite a surprise on just how well it's doing.
As part of their original initiative about sharing patent pledge to not go after others on accessibility, EA have recently released Fonttik as open source to help game developers. Available on GitHub under the BSD license,€ Fonttik is a way for developers to check€ text size & contrast to help with accessibility.
Vampire Survivors: Legacy of the Moonspell is the first expansion for the absolutely ridiculous smash-hit horde game. It releases on December 15th with a whole bunch of extra content.
Games like Guitar Hero were once massively popular but developers seem to have moved on, thankfully there's Clone Hero which is a free game based on the idea. Available cross-platform with support for Linux, macOS, Windows and Android. You can play it with any 5 or 6 fret guitar controller, any midi drum kit, any game controller and even your keyboard.
A fresh month and a new Humble Choice Bundle for subscribers to grab some more games, here's a run over what's included and the compatibility for Linux desktop and Steam Deck.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla has launched on Steam and that means getting it on Steam Deck and Linux desktop is much easier, since Valve have Proton. The experience on Steam Deck is surprisingly good too.
Grounded seems like a genuinely fun survival adventure, where you or you and friends can run around as miniturized people and survive against all kinds of critters. Out of the box on Steam Deck it's completely broken, so here's how to fully fix it.
Are you an avid gamer who loves the look of GNOME’s Adwaita theme? If so, there’s now an unofficial Adwaita theme for the Steam games client.
It’s called (no surprises) ‘Adwaita for Steam‘ and, by and large, it does exactly what you think it does: it makes Steam look (almost) like a regular GTK app. As Steam sports a dark appearance by default this third-party skin is also dark (fyi: are no plans to create a light version, sadly).
Xfce is the slow-moving, sensible Linux desktop option, and new versions only appear every year or two. Version 4.18 is coming soon, and you can try it in the early test builds of Xubuntu 23.04.
The next short-term release of Ubuntu will be 23.04, scheduled for April, and as the company's official Twitter page hinted, it will be called "Lunar Lobster."
This release cycle, the desktop that may see the biggest changes is Xfce. Xfce 4.16 appeared in 2020, and the new version is nearly ready.
Over the past couple of days I ported Plasma Browser Integration to Manifest v3. While I believe it is working well, I need your help to give it a thorough real-world test! Here’s how you can help...
KDE Gear 22.12 supersedes the KDE Gear 22.08 software suite and brings improvements to the Dolphin file manager with the ability to manage permissions remotely, a new feature called Selection Mode that makes it easier to quickly and easily select the files you want to work with, along with a new toolbar at the bottom of the view with various options of what you can do with the selected files.
The Gwenview image viewer app received the ability to adjust the brightness, contrast, and gamma of images as you preview them and the ability to open .xcf files created with the GIMP image editor, the Kate and KWrite text editors now feature a welcome window that makes it easier to create new files or open existing ones, as well as a new Keyboard Macro tool that you can activate in Settings > Configure Kate… > Plugins.
KDE Gear is back with exciting new features, performance boosts, and bugfixes for all your favorite KDE apps!
In this release: Kate extends a warm welcome, Dolphin offers you more choices, and a lot of apps serve up hamburgers galore!
During the summit I presented on two topics - Topic 1: "Starting the open-source journey, and sharing my GSoC experience" which was of 30 Minutes and Topic 2: "Pitivi - GTK4 port" which was of approx 5 min.
The conference was filled with amazing experience, but the journey to the stage was quite hard.
The tough times began with the unavailability of appointments for my passport, which delayed it to November, which got again delayed due to issues with address verification as I just started living in hostel.
But, fortunately, due to the constant support of my family, and my undying dedication to attending the conference, we got everything under control, then comes the visa. In a pleasant surprise, unlike others I got it in under 2 hours, the thing I was most scared of got to be the easiest lol.
Then what, with the help of the GNOME Foundation, I got my tickets confirmed (Thanks Melissa), and I got ready to fly, btw, this was my first ever flight, I never had the chance to even fly domestically, so exploring the airport, immigration, customs, the security check was all an adventure for me.
A new Linux distribution Kumandar Linux is under development (Alpha stage), and it makes switching to Linux easier with a default Windows 7 look.
[...]
At first glance, it reminds you of the Windows 7 look, which is the default window manager GTK theme used here. Per the team, the drive to make this distro is to provide Linux users with a friendly user interface (which peaked in Windows 7 from Microsoft and went downhill after that). In addition to the look, it also promises a lightweight distro experience with Debian stable and Xfce desktop environment at the core.
Deepin is the top Linux distribution from China, devoted to providing a beautiful, easy-to-use, safe, and reliable operating system for global users. (Global Ranking)
In deepin 20.8, a new application "Deepin Home" is added, which breaks the "information barrier" between the deepin team and users, and will work on product quality, software and hardware ecology to better serve deepin users. What is more, we have upgraded Qt to version 5.15.6, updated the DTK development library, fixed the underlying vulnerabilities, and further improved system compatibility and security. Besides that, we have developed and integrated a great number of practical functions based on the community users' feedback. Welcome to try it!
Once of the most beautiful operating systems is a Linux distribution from China called deepin. If you are dissatisfied with Windows 11 or macOS, and you are intrigued by Linux, deepin can be a great choice -- especially if you highly value beauty and well-designed user interfaces.
The newest version of that operating system, deepin 20.8 is now ready to be downloaded. This version of deepin gets improvements to the loading times of Wine apps from the App Store, plus new features in the File Manager app. The most notable change in 20.8 is the inclusion of the all-new Deepin Home app.
"In deepin 20.8, a new application 'Deepin Home' is added, which breaks the 'information barrier' between the deepin team and users, and will work on product quality, software and hardware ecology to better serve deepin users. What is more, we have upgraded Qt to version 5.15.6, updated the DTK development library, fixed the underlying vulnerabilities, and further improved system compatibility and security. Besides that, we have developed and integrated a great number of practical functions based on the community users' feedback," explains the deepin development team.
Deepin 20.8 is available for download powered by Linux kernel 5.15 LTS, bringing a new set of desktop features and improvements.
Deepin is a Debian-based distro well-known among Linux users who value a visually appealing desktop. Aimed at the average computer user, Deepin sets itself apart from all others with the in-house developed DDE, one of the best-looking Linux desktop environments.
The quest for the best possible user experience continues in the just-released Deepin 20.8. So let’s have a look at what has changed.
Free Download Manager is a popular download accelerator and organizer with many powerful features. It is available for most major platforms, and was recently added to the PCLinuxOS repositories. Some of its features include support for HTTP, BitTorrent, downloading videos, speed throttling, download scheduling, web browser integration, and more.
It has a nice, clean and modern look to the interface, and is very easy to use. From the toolbar at the top, you can add new downloads, pause and resume current downloads, and delete or move finished downloads. Tags can be used to help organize your downloads, allowing you to sort them by their type, such as torrents, music, videos, or your own custom tags.
I had originally planned to have part three of my PDF article series ready for the December issue. But, influenza A had other ideas. The time I had set aside to write the third part of my article series was consumed by getting over influenza. So, the PDF article series will just have to resume with the January 2023 issue.
The first six days of December have brought openSUSE Tumbleweed users six snapshots and developers plenty of conversation.
More than 200 messages about changing parts of the rolling release’s microarchitecture have been posted this past week on the Factory mailing list, but during this time Tumbleweed keeps rolling forward updating packages like vim, mutt and more.
AlmaLinux, a somewhat popular free Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), received a vote of confidence on Thursday from the European and American science communities.
CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, based in Switzerland, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), based in the US State of Illinois, said they will offer AlmaLinux as the standard Linux distribution for experiments at their facilities, based on discussions with researchers.
"AlmaLinux has recently been gaining traction among the community due to its long life cycle for each major version, extended architecture support, rapid release cycle, upstream community contributions, and support for security advisory metadata," the two research organizations said in a joint statement. "In testing, it has demonstrated to be perfectly compatible with the other rebuilds and Red Hat Enterprise Linux."
Linux Mint 21.1 is now available in Beta to get testing, based upon Ubuntu 22.04 with kernel 5.15€ it's a long-term support release so you'll be able to continue using it until 2027 before needing a major update.
Canonical is proud to announce the addition of support for Arm€® architecture to .NET for Ubuntu. Through this collaboration between Arm, Microsoft and Canonical, innovators worldwide can now enjoy the freedom of a best in class .NET experience on whatever platform best suits their needs.
Large enterprises usually have more than 1,000 systems running. Even smaller organisations may have hundreds of applications in their public cloud spaces or on their servers. In this world of IT systems, application migrations are common for the following reasons:
In addition to these three general motivations, there is a growing repatriation trend. The public cloud provides the optimal environment for most systems but not for all. For some systems, private cloud hosting can be more cost-efficient. Bringing back or “repatriating” an IT system from the public cloud to the private cloud can save companies significant costs.
This week we learned that Anker, the company behind the Eufy brand of connected devices, actively lied about serious security flaws in its smart home cameras. In the meantime, I spent the last few days immersed in discussions about privacy and cybersecurity.
So I figured it’s probably a good time to explain what I do to protect my home network and how I think about the risks of using various connected devices in my day-to-day life. Feel free to take any of this for your own use, and to ask questions (or tell me about flaws in my thinking) at stacey at staceyhigginbotham dot com.
If you own a Raspberry Pi 4 board and are looking for ways to put it to good use then we must tell you that there are so many good uses for Raspberry Pi boards. The Raspberry Pi board has numerous applications from DIY to full-fledged electronic projects. In this article, we have presented the 5 ways smart ways to use Raspberry Pi 4 in a good way.
Network commands are used in Linux-based systems like Raspberry Pi OS to get network system information and troubleshoot network settings. There are four major network types in Raspberry Pi that are configured and include a DNS network, static IP address, Wi-Fi, and a gateway network. In the article below we have enlisted the 10 useful networking commands for Linux that are equally useful for Raspberry Pi.
DAKboard is a customizable dashboard that connects through WIFI and provides a customizable display for photos, calendar, news, weather and much more. You can organize this dashboard according to yourself. It works as a digital calendar and can easily be sync with iCloud Calendar, Google Calendar and more. It is beneficial when someone wants to use the device for digital signage, like creating beautiful and informative welcome boards, scheduling meetings by displaying the schedule on the board and more.
Gowin R86S (aka GW-R86S) is an affordable Intel Celeron N5100 or Pentium N6005 Jasper Lake mini PC, router, and firewall appliance with 2.5GbE and 10GbE networking that sells for $310 and up on Aliexpress.
10GbE used to be reserved for the enterprise market due to the cost of hardware, but costs have gone down a lot as illustrated by the Gowin R86S system with up to three 2.5GbE ports, two 10GbE SFP+ cages, as well as ports that you would typically find a mini PC such as HDMI 2.0 video output, M.2 socket for NVMe SSD, two USB 3.0 ports, and a WiFi module.
[...]
The system comes pre-loaded with OpenWrt, but the company also lists Linux, Windows, Ubuntu, Proxmox, CentOS, and pfSense operating systems.
ESP32 is an IoT based microcontroller board which can be used to interface, control and read different sensors. PIR or motion sensor is one of the devices we can interface with ESP32 to detect movement of an object in the range of motion sensor using ESP32.
Before we start interfacing ESP32 with PIR sensor we must know how interrupts work and how to read and handle them in ESP32. Next we must understand the core concept of delay() and millis() function in ESP32 programming.
Let’s discuss the use of Bluetooth technology inside ESP32.
Working with ESP32 or any other microcontroller time is very important as the inbuilt timer is not that accurate so we can use a NTP server to fetch real time and can store it inside a variable that can be used later inside ESP32 code.
ESP32 is a microcontroller board having multiple input output pins. ESP32 like Arduino can read and control both digital input and digital output. So here in this article we will cover how to control ESP32 output and how to read digital input from external peripherals.
Reflecting is important within any line of work, and computing education is no different. Reflective practice is always valuable, whether you support learners in a non-formal setting, such as a Code Club or CoderDojo, or in a more formal environment, such as a school or college. When you reflect, you might for example evaluate a session or lesson and make changes for next time, or consider whether to reorder activities and learning across a longer time period, or even think broadly about what you teach and how you teach it.
The Apple ][ is the master work of engineer Steve Wozniak. But just as important as the Apple ][ was its disk drive system: the Disk ][. The genius of the Disk ][ comes from its decision to break with industry standards. At the time, most floppy disk drives were their own computer, and communicated with the PC over a standard bus like the parallel IEEE-488. But Wozniak reasoned that the Apple ][ had a perfectly good CPU right there, and if it controlled the floppy drive directly, it wouldn’t need to transfer the data over at all.
Tobias Schramm has a project is aimed at providing an option for fast, high reliability NVMe-based storage in devices that do not have any M.2 Key M but only mini PCIe slots.
One example of such a device is the PCengines APU2, an AMD64 network platform with up to two PCIe-enabled miniPCIe slots.
Ladyada and pt had an old NeXT keyboard with a strong desire to get it running on a modern computer. These keyboards are durable, super clicky, and very satisfying to use! However, they are very old designs, specifically made for NeXT hardware, pre-ADB and pre-USB! That means you can't just plug the keyboard into an ADB or PS/2 port or PS/2 to USB converter (even though it looks similar). In fact, I have no idea what the protocol or pinout is named, so we'll just call it "non-ADB NeXT Keyboard"
The scourge of air pollution claims several million lives globally each year, with industrial processes and energy production accounting for much of it. Because of its harmful nature, governments often set up air quality monitoring stations, although they have to cover large areas and yield low resolution data. To monitor the air quality of a neighboring ecological reserve, Guillermo Perez Guillen created a small, portable toolkit that can record data from almost anywhere and send it to the cloud.
Guillen’s system relies on two Arduino MKR WAN 1300 boards, which communicate with each other over the LoRaWAN long-range network, along with a Nano 33 IoT for sending the received data to a web API endpoint over WiFi. The transmitting MKR WAN 1300 is connected to a suite of sensors that measure temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the air. Then, at preset intervals, each sensor is read and the resulting measurements are sent to an awaiting receiver MKR WAN 1300 board.
As of late, concerns about the future of Twitter have caused many of its users to seek alternatives. Amid this upheaval, an open-source microblogging service called Mastodon has received a great deal of attention. Mastodon is not reliant on any single company or central authority to run its servers; anyone can run their own. Servers communicate with each other, allowing people on different servers to send each other messages and follow each other's posts. Mastodon doesn't just talk to itself, though; it can exchange messages with anything that speaks the ActivityPub protocol. There are many such implementations, so someone who wants to deploy their own microblogging service enjoys a variety of choices.
ActivityPub is a W3C Recommendation that describes how servers can exchange messages in the form of JSON Activity Streams. The ActivityPub protocol is highly flexible and is used for all sorts of things, but the scope of this article is limited to software that uses it to provide a Twitter-like microblogging service. The idea of federated microblogging was pioneered by a project called StatusNet, which was the software that originally ran at identi.ca, an early Twitter alternative. Instances of StatusNet, and eventually other software, were federated with each other using a protocol called OStatus.
ActivityPub and OStatus are not interoperable, but they have some parentage in common; Evan Prodromou, the creator of StatusNet, subsequently created pump.io and changed identi.ca to use it. Though development on pump.io seems to have stalled, its API formed the basis of ActivityPub. Some projects continue to support both protocols; Mastodon removed support for OStatus in 2019.
All of the various servers running this software exist in a federation somewhat like email, colloquially known as "The Fediverse"; usernames are similar to Twitter handles, but also include a domain component that identifies the server hosting the account. For example, LWN has an account at @LWN@fosstodon.org; it is hosted on Fosstodon, which is a Mastodon server for people interested in free and open-source software.
JavaScript screwed up …. AGAIN!
I've been tweaking my Apache configuration for the past two days, trying to figure out what I need and don't need, and these are just some notes I've collected on the process. I'm using mod_md for managing the secure certificates, and there isn't much out on the Intarwebs about how a configuratin for a website should look like. I can find plenty of pages that basically regurgitates the Apache documentation for mod_md, but nothing on how it all goes together. So here's an annotated version of a configuration for one of my less important sites: [...]
PostgreSQL is a relational database that has different functions for handling dates. You can work with timestamps or convert the timestamps to dates using different ways. Multiple date functions come with PostgreSQL including converting the string to date, timestamp to date, getting the current date, etc.
This guide focuses on five ways of converting the timestamps to date in PostgreSQL. Let’s dig in!
The sixteenth International Day Against DRM (IDAD) is next week, and all of us that contribute to the Defective by Design campaign are calling on you to help us send a message to purveyors of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) around the world, letting them know that DRM is unacceptable in any and all of its forms. This year's Day Against DRM will be held next Friday, on December 16, 2022.
In this year's IDAD, we want to celebrate and call attention to an increasingly rare, almost magical ability that most forms of media used to have, and which all ethical digital media still does today: the ability to be shared with a friend.
In our year-end fundraiser, we've been stressing the importance of sharing. Though sharing is the basis of human culture, the most staunch defenders of unjust copyright legislation would have you believe that every creative work is dropped wholesale out of the sky, without influence from anything that came before it. In 2022, monolithic mega-corporations would have you believe that these creative works should be "temporary," something that "expires" after it's seen once or twice under a restrictive license on restricting technology. (See, for example, section 3.a.ii of the Disney Plus Subscriber Agreement.)
This year, let's remind everyone that things didn't use to be this way, but more importantly, that they don't have to be this way. Just as DRM crept into our lives one choice at a time, it can be weeded out in the same way: with one conscious decision after another and support from a community of like-minded activists.
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 8.2.0. This release marks the latest minor release of the PHP language.
Version 8.2.0 of the PHP language is out.
PHP 8.2 is a major update of the PHP language.It contains many new features, including readonly classes, null, false, and true as stand-alone types, deprecated dynamic properties, performance improvements and more.
Before we tackle any tree-like structures, let's first write a nom parser for the input.
Exactly one year ago, in December 2021, I published three articles of MQTT messaging with Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Pico and HiveMQ Cloud. On June 30th of 2022, Raspberry Pi released a new product, that is the subject of this post: the Pico W. Yes, a new version of the original Pico, but with Wi-Fi. The new board is for sale for 6$, compared to the 4$ of the original Pico.
In this post, we will rework the third project of the posts from December last year, where data was sent to HiveMQ Cloud using a Pico, separate Wi-Fi module and distance sensor. We can simplify that project now by using the new Pico W, removing the need for that separate Wi-Fi module.
Let us say that I ask you to find the number I am thinking about between -1000 and 1000, by repeatedly guessing a number. With each guess, I tell you whether your guess is correct, smaller or larger than my number. A binary search algorithm tries to find a value in an interval by repeating finding the midpoint, using smaller and smaller intervals. You might start with 0, then use either -500 or 500 and so forth.
It is interesting how, if you observe long enough, things tend to be cyclical. Back in the old days, some computers didn’t use binary, they used decimal. This was especially true of made up educational computers like TUTAC or CARDIAC, but there was real decimal hardware out there, too. Then everyone decided that binary made much more sense and now it’s very hard to find a computer that doesn’t use it.
The ability to use one device’s information as a trigger event for one or more other devices to change state is what I’d consider the next step forward for the smart home. It may not sound like a huge step, but it’s an important one. And as devices from different brands begin to communicate with one another through the new Matter standard, consumers will be able to get more value from the hardware and devices they buy or already own.
As an outsider, it is probably functionally impossible to accurately criticise the way any complex system works. It's possible to criticise the outcomes. Or the impact. Or the the way it makes you feel. But I don't think non-experts can meaningfully diagnose complex, multidisciplinary, or systemic issues.
Reading on screens is very difficult for me. I just cannot focus on the articles, especially when there are notifications coming in or even just other content on the screen1. I have a reMarkable tablet (RM), which I love dearly2 and much prefer to read on. But it's annoying getting articles onto it.
To put a blog post onto my RM, I copy the link from Firefox (my usual browser), open Chromium, load the page, and print it with the "Read on reMarkable" printer (which is only for Chrome-based browsers). And when I have five or ten articles I want to read, I have to repeat this for each one manually. Ouch.It's also annoying how the articles end up. I'd like to have them all tidy in one folder where I can read them, or even in one continuous document. If I send each one individually, they just litter the home screen (since you can't print to a specific folder) and displace other things I'm reading.
I decided to solve this by writing a web app to bundle up my reading and send it to my RM!
Now I don’t know about you, but everybody I know in tech is talking about the new “GPT-3.5” (https://chat.openai.com/). Give it a prompt and it generates text that matches that prompt. And if that prompt is a request for code, the code it generates can be surprisingly accurate. So far it’s solved several days of advent of code, passed the 2022 AP CS A test, and mimicked a virtual machine. It can even take a code snippet and inject a bug, and then explain what the bug is!
A debugger is software that runs your code and examines any problems it finds. GNU Debugger (GBD) is one of the most popular debuggers, and in this article, I examine GDB's step command and related commands for several common use cases. Step is a widely used command but there are a few lesser known things about it which might be confusing. Also, there are ways to step into a function without actually using the step command itself such as using the less known advance command.
Troubleshoot your code with the GNU Debugger. Download the cheat sheet.
Documentation is important for so many reasons. Readable documentation is even more so. In the world of open source software, documentation is how to use or contribute to an application. It's like the rulebook for a game.
There are many different types of documentation:
We asked some of the Opensource.com contributors about their technical documentation workflow, which markup language they preferred, and why they might use one over the other. Here's what they had to say.
Markdown standards are as diverse as they are popular. This cheat sheet provides you with a solid baseline of common commands along with some of the most fun, and unique…
This is the report for the Debian Python Team remote sprint that took place on December 2-3-4 2022.
The recent discussion of a proposed change to the Python language—the usual fare on the language's Ideas forum—was interesting, somewhat less for the actual feature under discussion than for the other issues raised. The change itself is a minor, convenience feature that would provide a reproducible iteration order for certain kinds of sets between separate invocations of the interpreter. That is a pretty limited use case, and one that could perhaps be fulfilled in other ways, but the discussion also highlighted some potentially worrying trends in the way that feature ideas are handled in the Python community.
Sometimes the simplest hacks can be the most useful or ingenious, and such is the case with [Keri Szafir]’s method of ensuring that potentiometers used in audio devices are matched. If you consider a typical stereo amplifier for a moment, you’ll see two amplifiers in one box with a single volume control. Two channels, one knob? Volume knobs are ganged stereo potentiometers.
When Morocco defeated Spain in a penalty shootout, advancing to the quarterfinals of the Qatar 2022 men’s World Cup, players celebrated by posing for their victory photos with a Palestinian flag. This World Cup featured memorable performances on the pitch—and powerful statements of solidarity with the Palestinian cause off it.
The Miami Heat are the hardest-working team in today’s NBA. If you pay attention to the league, you will consistently hear this message. It’s an identity sold by the team, its players, and the media in and outside of Miami. The organization gets the best out of its players because of a militaristic approach to conditioning and a team-first attitude and tireless work ethic. This is “Heat Culture.” It’s not for everyone, only those willing to put in the work.
This week we speak to Tim Bella author of the new “definitive” biography of hoopster and Hall of Fame talker Charles Barkley. We talk to Bell about how Barkley’s upbringing and experiences shaped Chuck into the person that we see every week on our TV sets.
The up-and-coming Wonder of the World in software and€ information circles, and particularly in those circles who talk about them, is AI. Give a magic machine a lot of stuff, ask it a question, and it will give you a meaningful and useful answer. It will create art, write books, compose music, and generally Change The World As We Know It. All this is genuinely impressive stuff, as anyone who has played with DALL-E will tell you. But it’s important to think about what the technology can and can’t do that’s new so as to not become caught up in the hype, and in doing that I’m immediately drawn to a previous career of mine.
There’s a famous scene in one of the Star Trek movies where Scotty, who has traveled to the past, teaches a metal company to create the transparent aluminum he needs to bring some whales back to the future. But [The Action Lab] shows that we already have see-through metal, just not aluminum. You can see a video about why metals are normally opaque.
Everyone wants to 3D print with metals, but it is a difficult task. You need high temperatures and metals with high thermal conductivity make the problem even worse. Researchers at Caltech have a way of printing tiny metal structures. The trick? They don’t print metals at all. Instead, they 3D print a hydrogel and then use it as a scaffold to form metallic structures. You can read the full paper, if you are interested in the details.
For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk’s Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations are harming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimed would never happen in the first place is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated.
Happy Computer Science Education Week, everyone!
The field of computer science has changed a lot over the past century or so (and even further back than that), and every new generation gets to learn about it in a different way. My dad studied computer science in college back in the 80s, and he loves telling stories about the punchcards they had to use to communicate with the computer – especially the one where his classmate dropped a box containing the ordered cards for a completed project down a flight of stairs. Trial and error was a time investment, and you had to make one entire statement for one machine instruction. The value in computers wasn't that they were smart - they weren't. But they were fast. As long as you told it exactly what to do, it's computational speed made it worth all the fuss.
Many rural schools face a “dire shortage” of teachers. At the start of the 2021-2022 school year, for example, the state of Colorado had 380 openings for educators in its public schools serving rural communities, and more than half of these remained unfilled by the end of the school year, Dobo reported. Consequently, schools had no choice but to hire staff that had not received proper training to become school teachers, especially in specialized courses.
Nevertheless, Bose reported, a variety of social factors have been driving “teachers of all demographic backgrounds” out of the field, including low wages, increased public scrutiny, micromanagement, and other issues exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Black male teachers and teachers from other underrepresented groups have been particularly impacted.
Distinguishing between the metaverse and virtual reality, Glenn Platt, a professor of emerging technology at Ohio’s Miami University, told the Hechinger Report that the metaverse is focused on the creation of digital identities: In a true metaverse experience, digital identity persists across the physical and virtual worlds. But, Platt noted, adopting metaverse technology could aggravate the already existing “digital divide,” a term used to explain the consequences of unequal access to digital technologies. “I know it’s shiny, and I know it’s really exciting. But I think we would all be better served if we could think about creating these types of experiences for the technology that the students have in hand right now,” Platt stated.
Your struggle today, along with ongoing struggles for a wide range of democratic rights–extending from justice for Indigenous and trans people to the struggle for students, workers, women, and others–speaks to a future of possibility that refuses to be contained in the shackles of the present. Your demands for a meaningful wage increase, relief from higher tuition increases, and guaranteed access to TA work in Year 5 testify to your willingness to fight for labor conditions and a work environment that do justice to your sense of dignity, € professionalism, and your willingness to stand firm against a university whose model of governance refuses to take seriously how education and democracy inform each other. I mention dignity, because it is hard to believe that this administration does not recognize the hardship imposed on TAs whose wages have barely kept up with inflation, especially when combined with the extreme cost of housing. Such policies steal your time and crush your spirits. This is more than an act of imperious disregard; it is an act of moral and social irresponsibility.
My argument today is not restricted to McMaster University, but to higher education more broadly, especially in North America. Your strike cannot be separated from wider struggles over the university as site of critical teaching and learning, a site that embodies a vision of social justice, and a vision that refuses to turn the university into an adjunct of corporate ideology and values. The university is more than a market; it is more than a space in which the only interactions that matter are based on a commercial exchanges, and it is more than a site in which higher education is harnessed to the demands of the warfare state, fossil fuel industries, and the needs of corporations. You have refused a corporate-based ideology that defines you as commodities, a casual labor force, and consumers. Your vision is much larger than this repressive view of higher education. Your struggle is fundamental to the success of the university as a public good and its potential role as an invaluable resource for defining itself as a critical institution in the service of civic society, civic courage, social responsibility, and democracy itself. Your refusal to give up brings to life an image of the university as a site of critique, academic freedom, and social justice, while making clear that it has a noble civic purpose that rejects a corporate model that often confuses education with a form of training and sterile management methods.
Education pundits are a lot like the guy in the "Distracted Boyfriend" meme.
The HUNSN RJ17 is a fanless mini-PC which supports the i7-1165G7 11th Gen Intel processor. The device is offered as barebone or it can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM and up to 512GB of SSD storage.
But in this blog post, I'll guide you through some of the highlights, and maybe you'll learn a bit more about how talk and music radio makes its way to your car speakers—at least here in the US—using a technology less than 100 years old and rife with technological change.
At their cores, UEFI and BIOS are two firmware interfaces for computers. The sole purpose behind them is to act as interpreters between the operating system and the computer firmware. Both are used at startup to initialize the hardware components and load the operating system onto the hard drive.
The Republican governor announced an emergency cybersecurity directive to prohibit the platforms' use, saying they could be involved in cyberespionage, government surveillance and inappropriate collection of sensitive personal information.
"There may be no greater threat to our personal safety and our national security than the cyber vulnerabilities that support our daily lives," Hogan said in a statement, adding: "To further protect our systems, we are issuing this emergency directive against foreign actors and organizations that seek to weaken and divide us."
Last Tuesday, New York Mayor Eric Adams announced an immediate expansion of an involuntary hospitalization policy in the city, alongside a harrowing legislative proposal aimed at peeling back many of the few legal and administrative barriers that prevent involuntary psychiatric commitments. In his administration’s announcement, the plan is billed as a “compassionate new vision” to address mental illness, invoking a “moral mandate” to “deliver for our most vulnerable.”
Two weeks ago, I wrote a not-so-Respectfully Insolent review in my own inimitable fashion of a video entitled Died Suddenly. As you might recall, this 68-minute pseudodocumentary went viral, positing a conspiracy theory in which COVID-19 vaccines are supposedly causing young healthy people to “die suddenly.” The cause as claimed in the film is massive clots caused by the spike protein produced by the mRNA vaccines, and the “evidence”—such as it was—includes anecdotes by embalmers relating how supposedly they’ve been finding more and more clots in bodies that they have been embalming. Chief among these is an embalmer named Richard Hirschman, whom we’ve met before feeding clots to Mike Adams to incompetently analyze by mass spectrometry and determine that they are not clots but rather “self-assembling nanostructures.” More recently, an experienced embalmer named Benjamin Schmidt subjected himself to the movie, and his take on Hirschman’s claims that the clots he was finding in bodies was not positive. To boil it down, Schmidt points out that (1) the clots shown in the movie are nothing unusual (in fact, they’re normal); (2) there’s no evidence presented that embalmers are finding more clots in the recently deceased; and (3) Richard Hirschman is a talented embalmer but an utterly incompetent scientist, given how easily he’s taken in by confirmation bias, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.
In communities across America, trains come to a stop at railroad crossings, sometimes blocking traffic for hours. The federal government has amassed tens of thousands of reports of such incidents in the past year alone from nearly every state.
This is more than an inconvenience: Our reporters have heard from emergency medical workers and patients about trains blocking crossings in ways that have kept ambulances and those in need of assistance from hospitals, and members of fire and police departments have told us about delayed responses to calls. We have witnessed people climbing through or over the cars of stationary trains, including students trying to get to school.
When LaTunja Caster started working at the Olin Corp. chemical plant outside of McIntosh, Alabama, she had no idea that asbestos was used in the production process. But when she became a union safety representative around 2007, she started to pay attention. In certain parts of the plant, “you would see it all the time,” she said. “You definitely breathed it in.”
Russia’s Health Ministry has denied the accuracy of new data from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) that lists Russia among the five countries in the world with the highest HIV infection rates.
Amidst the lackluster headlines spanning these events, though, Guterres—whose own agencies have warned of industrial animal agriculture’s climate perils for more than 15 years—issued a more grassroots plea.
Speaking to the leaders of the C40 cities who gathered last month at a climate summit of their own, he declared, “With more than half of the world’s population, cities are where the climate battle will largely be won or lost.”
Cygwin, a Linux-like environment for Windows, released version 3.4.0, comes with full ASLR enabled by default.
Cygwin is a well-known tool among computer users who, in the recent past, have been looking for a way to run Linux emulation on Windows. But, of course, we’re talking about days when Windows and Linux were on opposite sides of the fence, and concepts like Windows Subsystem for Linux seemed more like a script for a science-fiction movie.
Let’s explain in a few words what Cygwin is. It is a set of open-source tools that enable Linux applications to be compiled and executed on a Microsoft Windows from a Linux-like command line interface. The tool was developed by Cygnus Solutions, which Red Hat later acquired.
Microsoft fired its opening salvo in what could be a major confrontation with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the tech giant’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. On Monday, Microsoft President Brad Smith penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal saying that the deal would benefit gamers and developers by making Microsoft more competitive with rival Sony.
Microsoft is working to address a new known issue affecting apps using ODBC database connections after installing the November 2022 Patch Tuesday Windows updates.
According to Redmond, affected apps might fail to connect to databases via connections using the Microsoft ODBC SQL Server driver.
"After installing this update, apps that use ODBC connections through Microsoft ODBC SQL Server Driver (sqlsrv32.dll) to access databases might not connect," Microsoft explains.
More than 173,000 hospitals have registered with a federal program to digitize health records since its launch in September 2021. The program assigns patients numbers that are linked to medical information stored by hospitals on their own servers or in cloud-based storage. Experts fear that hospitals may not have the expertise to ensure digital security.
Google Takeout has been around for a decade. It's a feature that allows you to export your entire Google data history in a series of zip files. Google search history, Google Docs, Contacts, Calendar, Maps, Wallet, Voice, and many other Google products are included in the data export. Other companies like Meta have similar services.
However, nobody really uses these data export tools. There are no competing products that make use of this data. Other than a few curious downloaders or some tin-foil programmers who want to keep backups of their data, it seems more like a failed exercise in data portability.
Anker, the popular maker of device chargers and the Eufy smart camera line, proudly proclaims on its website that user data will be stored locally, “never leaves the safety of your home,” footage only gets transmitted with “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, and that the company will only send that footage “straight to your phone.”
The team behind NordPass, the same people behind NordVPN, have released their 2022 list of the 200 most common passwords. Many of these notoriously WEAK passwords can be hacked in less than one second.
The number one most common (and exceptionally weak) password is ... drum roll ... password. Perennial favorites like "123456789" or "7654321" or "1234554321" are also on the list, and are all capable of being guessed by a hacker in under one second.
We've run password security articles so many times during my 13.5 years tenure as the editor of The PCLinuxOS Magazine that I've actually lost count. I've attempted to go through past issues several times to count the number of times we've run password security articles, but I keep coming up with a different number every time. Your mileage may vary.
But, there are common and recurring themes. To better protect your private, personally identifiable information, adhere to these basic security rules that follow.
In this Help Net Security video interview, Eric Leblond, CTO at Stamus Networks, talks about The Security Analyst’s Guide to Suricata, a book he co-wrote with Peter Manev.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (dlt-daemon, jqueryui, and virglrenderer), Fedora (firefox, vim, and woff), Oracle (kernel and nodejs:18), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-ibm and redhat-ds:11), Slackware (python3), SUSE (buildah, matio, and osc), and Ubuntu (heimdal and postgresql-9.5).
CISA has released three (3) Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on 08 December 2022. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.
Today, CISA published a Phishing Infographic to help protect both organizations and individuals from successful phishing operations. This infographic provides a visual summary of how threat actors execute successful phishing operations. Details include metrics that compare the likelihood of certain types of “bait” and how commonly each bait type succeeds in tricking the targeted individual. The infographic also provides detailed actions organizations and individuals can take to prevent successful phishing operations—from blocking phishing attempts to teaching individuals how to report successful phishing operations.
A bunch of Android OEM signing keys have been leaked or stolen, and they are actively being used to sign malware.
[...]
This is a huge problem. The whole system of authentication rests on the assumption that signing keys are kept secret by the legitimate signers. Once that assumption is broken, all bets are off...
Google has confirmed yet another zero-day vulnerability impacting the Chrome web browser client, the ninth this year. In a posting to the official Chrome releases blog, Google states that users of Chrome on the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms as well as Android, are impacted by the high-severity CVE-2022-4262 0day security vulnerability. An urgent update has started rolling out across all platforms, and Google is withholding the technical details of the zero-day until a majority of Chrome users have updated.
Two women are suing Apple over its AirTags, claiming the trackers made it easier for them to be stalked and harassed.
The women filed a class-action lawsuit Monday in the U.S. Northern District Court of California and said Apple has not done enough to protect the product from being used illicitly.
A leak from the European Data Protection Board reveals that the EU's top privacy regulator is about to overrule the Irish Data Protection Commission and declare Facebook's business model illegal, banning surveillance-based ads without explicit consent:
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-win-personalized-ads-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-declared-illegal
In some ways, this is unsurprising. Since the GDPR's beginning, it's been crystal clear that the intention of the landmark privacy regulation was to extinguish commercial surveillance and ring down the curtain on "consent theater" – the fiction that you "agree" to be spied on by clicking "I agree" or just by landing on a web-page that has a link to some fine-print.
Apple has taken a long needed step forward for human rights by introducing new security features, and rolling back the previously proposed client-side scanning feature that would undermine end-to-end encryption, expanding the scope for surveillance and unauthorized access. This is a welcome brick in people’s online privacy and security wall.
Access Now supports Apple’s commitment to strengthening its Communication Safety features and urges the company to continue engaging with stakeholders to build robust online safety mechanisms.
“Encryption bolsters privacy and security for all, and undermining it to achieve online safety is an oxymoron. Collective efforts must focus on building long-term solutions that don’t sacrifice the right to privacy, and consequently free expression, for the mere possibility of any increase in safety — one cannot exist without the other,” said Namrata Maheshwari, Policy Counsel at Access Now. “Apple’s decision to roll back the client-side scanning feature puts the company’s privacy commitments into practice, and strengthening Communication Safety features helps protect its most vulnerable stakeholders.”
We applaud Apple for listening to experts, child advocates, and users who want to protect their most sensitive data. Encryption is one of the most important tools we have for maintaining privacy and security online. That’s why we included the demand that Apple let users encrypt iCloud backups in the Fix It Already campaign that we launched in 2019.€
Apple’s on-device encryption is strong, but some especially sensitive iCloud data, such as photos and backups, has continued to be vulnerable to government demands and hackers. Users who opt in to Apple’s new proposed feature, which the company calls Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, will be protected even if there is a data breach in the cloud, a government demand, or a breach from within Apple (such as a rogue employee). Apple said today that the feature will be available to U.S. users by the end of the year, and will roll out to the rest of the world in “early 2023.”
We’re also pleased to hear that Apple has officially dropped its plans to install photo-scanning software on its devices, which would have inspected users’ private photos in iCloud and iMessage. This software, a version of what’s called “client-side scanning,” was intended to locate child abuse imagery and report it to authorities. When a user’s information is end-to-end encrypted and there is no device scanning, the user has true control over who has access to that data.
In the rest of this post I want to zero in on end-to-end encrypted iCloud backup, and why I think this announcement is such a big deal.
"I would guess at least some Middle East and North African [MENA] officials would not wish to air any problems or dissatisfaction with China lest this compromise their relationship," he says.
Custer says that the participants were afforded various levels of anonymity, but she cannot exclude the possibility that some may have felt intimidated.
In early morning raids on Wednesday, authorities arrested 25 alleged members and supporters of a far-right terrorist organization accused of plotting to violently overthrow the German government.
Roughly 3,000 officers took part in the raids across Germany, and two people were arrested in Austria and Italy, according to a lengthy statement from federal prosecutors. The organization was formed last year and those detained include members of the right-wing extremist Reichsbürger (Citizens of the Reich) movement and people influenced by QAnon conspiracy theories.
Update: So we had this post about SF supervisors approving the killer robots in their initial vote, and had a note at the end that it still needed one more round of approvals by the Supervisors… and apparently widespread protests last night convinced the board to drop the proposal! The original (mostly obsolete) post is below.
In one week, San Francisco and the greater Bay Area rallied to tell the Board that this policy was unacceptable. That rallying cry was so loud and undeniable that it was impossible for the Board, and the world, to ignore. The campaign to stop killer robots was covered by news outlets all over the world as people waited to see what kind of precedent would be set for law enforcement. Opponents staged a rally against the policy, and over 50 local organizations signed a coalition letter demanding that the Board reverse course on killer robots,€ … and they did.
But even as we take this moment to celebrate, make no mistake: the fight to stop killer robots in San Francisco, and around the country, is not over.
The Board sent the killer robot back to its Rules Committee. We may have to debate all over again the rules for police robots in San Francisco. The community will have more opportunities to give public comments. So will the police. They may try to find a more reasonable way to sell the idea of armed robots. We will stay vigilant and engaged.
For some time now, news media have been conflating crime, homelessness and mental illness, demonizing and dehumanizing people without homes while ignoring the structural causes leading people to sleep on subways and in other public spaces. With New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ latest announcement that he would hospitalize, against their will, unhoused people with mental health conditions—even those deemed to pose no risk to others—in the name of “public safety,” the local papers once again revealed a propensity to highlight official narratives and try to erase their own role in conjuring the crime hysteria that drives such ineffective and pernicious policies.
A coalition of more than 100 advocacy, faith-based, and news organizations on Wednesday urged members of Congress to adopt Sen. Bernie Sanders' War Powers Resolution to block U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, where the recent expiry of a temporary cease-fire has renewed suffering in one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
"We, the undersigned 105 organizations, welcomed news earlier this year that Yemen's warring parties agreed to a nationwide truce to halt military operations, lift fuel restrictions, and open Sanaa airport to commercial traffic," the signatories wrote in a letter to congressional lawmakers. "Unfortunately, it's been almost two months since the U.N.-brokered truce in Yemen expired, violence on the ground is escalating, and there is still no formal mechanism preventing a return to all-out war."
Can you imagine the audacity to fail a multi-trillion dollar audit of public funds, and then ask for even more of those taxpayer dollars?
In late May 2022, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church declared its full independence from the Moscow Patriarchate (though it didn’t sever relations with the Russian institution completely; for example, its primate is still confirmed by the Moscow Patriarchate). Six months later, the Ukrainian Security Service began conducting raids on Ukrainian Orthodox Church sites, including the historic Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, in search of “weapons or members of sabotage and reconnaissance groups.” According to Ukrainian authorities, intelligence officers found “symbols” of the now-banned pro-Russian party Opposition Platform — For Life in the churches, as well as “brochures calling for a peace deal with the ‘brotherly Russian people’ and glorifying the ‘Russian land’ and ‘Russian soldiers.’” In response, Kyiv imposed sanctions against multiple Ukrainian Orthodox Church priests, and Volodymyr Zelensky issued a decree banning the activities of “religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence in Russia.” Meduza spoke with Ukrainian Orthodox Church representative Metropolitan Kliment about these developments.
Nikita Tushkanov, a history and social studies teacher in Russia’s Komi Republic, was arrested on charges of “justifying terrorism” on Wednesday, local media and OVD-Info reported.
In a new interview with Ukrainian journalist Yury Butusov, Russian POW and convict Alexander Bolchev recounts joining the war in Ukraine after being recruited by PMC Wagner.
The Russian “economy contracted for the second quarter in a row,” according to a November 16€ article€ in the Financial Times, which attributed this downturn to the Western sanctions. Undermining the sanctions through a variety of methods, including€ cooperating€ with other countries with sanctions evasion experience, has become an even greater priority for the Kremlin.
Russia has€ decades of history€ in helping other countries evade sanctions. In recent years, Russia has€ exported oil to North Korea and employed its laborers€ in Siberia in violation of international sanctions, while Russian entities have also been€ sanctioned for aiding North Korea’s weapons programs.
Two days in a row this week, the Ukrainian Armed Forces used drones to strike targets deep within Russia. Satellite images from December 5 show that Ukraine hit the Engels air base near Saratov and the Dyagilevo air base near Ryazan. Within a few hours, the Russian Aerospace Forces used aircraft and cruise missiles from those same airfields to launch strikes in Ukraine. Then, on December 6, a Ukrainian drone hit another target at a Russian air base: an oil storage tank in Kursk. That same day, a drone targeting Crimea's Belbek air base was reportedly shot down by Russian air defenses. This new wave of Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory could prove to be a turning point in the war; Kyiv has now shown that it, too, is capable of striking infrastructure targets on enemy territory. Meduza lays out what we know about Ukraine's drone capabilities€ and what that portends for the coming months.
An armed man in military fatigues who opened fire at the local police officers on December 6 has been arrested near the mining city of Novoshakhtinsk.
The First Appellate Court of general jurisdiction has dismissed the journalist Ivan Safronov’s appeal, upholding the 22-year sentence issued by the Moscow Municipal Court, which found Safronov guilty of treason. The journalist’s sentence is now coming into effect. Safronov will soon be transferred to a penal colony.
These administrations could not have been more wrong, and it is important to know why. The Reagan administration was dealing in disinformation, using the politicized intelligence of the Central Intelligence Agency led by two ideologues—Director William Casey and Deputy Director Robert Gates.€ I was a Soviet analyst at the CIA in those years and testified to Gates’ deceit in his controversial confirmation hearings in 1991.€ My testimony contributed to the decision of a newly-elected president, Bill Clinton, to end Gates’ stewardship of the agency in 1993.€ Sadly, the Clinton administration then turned around and, resorting to misinformation, ignored the commitments of the George H.W. Bush administration to foreswear expansion of NATO and unnecessarily expanded the military alliance against Russia.
The conservatives in the Reagan administration (e.g., Casey, Gates, Secretary of Defense Weinberger, Deputy Defense Secretary Perle) never understood the importance of arms control agreements to the Kremlin. The SALT and ABM treaties in 1972 from the Soviet point of view meant that the United States finally recognized Soviet power as legitimate and natural and that detente with the United States would include European detente as well. The significance of the West German ratification of the Renunciation of force Agreement between Bonn and Moscow was similarly not appreciated.€ The treaty signaled Bonn’s acceptance of the post-war territorial status quo and served as a catalyst for East-West detente.
In advance of the Russian president’s annual meeting with members of the Presidential Human Rights Council (“SPCh”), the Kremlin and the SPCh head Valery Fadeyev have finalized a list of topics not to be raised by council members in conversation with Putin.
Russian FSB agents in Birobidzhan, the capital of Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region, have arrested geodetic surveyor Valery Kachin on suspicion of state treason, TASS reported on Wednesday.
Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin’s sentencing hearing has been rescheduled from December 7 to December 9, according to the press service of Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court.
As with all new technologies, Einstein was hopeful, that this new technology will be used for good to bring peace by better understanding between nations and individuals alike.
Of course – everybody knows – what happened in 1933 and what it was used for then.
Progressive lawmakers in Congress and outside environmental campaigners celebrated a defensive victory overnight and into Wednesday after a much-maligned oil and gas industry giveaway was left out of the major military NDAA spending bill introduced for passage in the U.S. House.
"We cannot, and will not, stop until Manchin's dirty deal is completely defeated."
The recent United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh offered encouraging but insufficient signs of an emerging political consensus on the need for global solidarity in the face of global warming. Now, world leaders need to attend to another existential risk to people and the planet: the alarming and growing loss of biodiversity.
Climate and environmental campaigners on Wednesday hailed the first-ever U.S. government offshore wind power lease sale off the Pacific coast, an auction that drew over three-quarters of a billion dollars in winning bids.
"Today's lease sale is further proof that industry momentum—including for floating offshore wind development—is undeniable."
The Putin administration and the Russian government are currently considering three possible policies to respond to the price cap on Russian oil imposed by the EU, the G7, and Australia, Vedemosti reported on Wednesday.
It appears that the U.S. fracking boom is ending far earlier than many industry experts and CEOs predicted. After an understandable dip in 2020 due to the pandemic, oil production still has not regained the record levels achieved in 2019, and predictions that the industry would set new records this year have not materialized, despite 2022’s high oil prices.€ €
In late 2018, DeSmog first raised the alarm about the reality that the U.S. shale industry was likely to hit peak production much sooner than most experts expected.€
He explained: "People can't afford to come to the pub like they used to anymore. The cost of a pint when I first started coming here was about 8 shillings and 10 pence," which equates to around 45p in today's money.
A team of experts monitoring child welfare reform in New Mexico has found that foster kids have been placed in homeless shelters and other inappropriate settings, corroborating an investigation by Searchlight New Mexico and ProPublica that showed struggling teens have languished for weeks or months in shelters without the mental health services they need.
These teens often have complex, trauma-related mental health problems that cannot be addressed in shelters, Searchlight and ProPublica found. In some cases, teens were moved from psychiatric hospitals directly to shelters.
The Real Goal of Fed Policy: Breaking Inflation, the Middle Class or the Bubble Economy?
Here's an interesting fact: Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 165 million years—and they assumed they always would.
Probably the most important US labor event of 2022 has been the 115,000 US railroad workers and their unions attempt to bargain a new contract with the super profitable Railroad companies. As of December 2, 2022, however, that negotiations has not turned out well for the workers. The US government—the […]
Houston, like California, follows the Housing First model, but Texas’s most populous city has a vast supply of low-cost homes.
We saw much more job growth in the November jobs report than most analysts, including me, had expected. By any measure, 263,000 new jobs in an economy near full employment is strong growth. It is not plausible that the economy can continue to add jobs at this pace.
Furthermore, we had a 0.6 percent jump in the average hourly wage in November. Annualized, that comes to over 7.0 percent wage growth. That is clearly not consistent with the Fed’s 2.0 percent inflation target, or anything close to it. The 1.4 percent three-month increase annualizes to 5.6 percent, which is not all that much better.
The list, for which UNESCO is responsible for observing, includes some 678 traditions from 140 countries. The Slovenians have beekeeping, for instance; Tunisia has harissa; Zambia can call upon the significance of the Kalela dance.€ Such traditions can span several countries: the listing of states for the Lipizzan horse breeding tradition reads like an inventory of the lost Austro-Hungarian empire, echoing Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch.
The baguette, one of France’s grandest gastronative examples, is celebrated as a labour-intensive product marked by patience.€ Lengthy periods of fermentation are required, including wheat of appropriate quality, leaving a distinct gold crispness.€ Fats are eschewed, as are any improvers or additives, which are prohibited by the decree of September 13, 1993.€ The characteristic cuts with 14 facets act like ceremonial scars.€ It is also the hallmark of the traditional boulangeries, which are struggling, notably in rural areas, to survive.
The White House and mainstream journalists have echoed each other to assert that Biden would face no serious challenge to renomination if he runs again.€ But his blatant intrusion into the DNC’s process for setting the primary calendar is a sign of anxiety about potential obstacles to winning renomination.
Unlike all other states under consideration for early primaries, South Carolina is€ not€ a battleground state. Everyone knows that the Democratic ticket won’t come close to winning in deep-red South Carolina in 2024. But that state — which Biden obviously sees as vital to his renomination — has a party apparatus dominated by Biden’s€ powerful corporatist ally, Congressman James Clyburn.
The widespread concern over Bill C-11 has largely focused on the potential CRTC regulation of user content. Despite repeated assurances from the government that “users are out, platforms are in”, the reality is that the bill kept the door open to regulating such content. The language in the bill is clear: Section 4.2 grants the CRTC the power to establish regulations on programs (which includes audio and audiovisual content by users). The provision identifies three considerations for the Commission, most notably if the program “directly or indirectly generates revenues.” The revenue generation provision is what led many digital creators to argue they were caught by the bill and for TikTok to conclude that any video with music would also fall within the ambit of the legislation.
"Welcome back!" read my friend Allan's email. "So happy to have you back and seeing that hard work paid off. Thank you for all that you do. Please don't cook this evening. I am bringing you a Honduran dinner—tacos hondureños and baleadas, plus a bottle of wine." The tacos were tasty indeed, but even more pleasing was my friend's evident admiration for my recent political activities.
The Supreme Court appears hell-bent on making America bigoted again. Step-by-step, they're undoing every bit of progressive legislation from the past 80 years that they can find.
With more than 95% of voting precincts reporting results in Georgia's U.S. Senate runoff election on Wednesday, Sen. Raphael Warnock had beaten Republican challenger Herschel Walker by fewer than three percentage points—prompting sighs of relief among Democrats while a number of progressive observers suggested the close margin was hardly cause for celebration.
"That Walker had any support is a sign of enduring problems in our democracy."
Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Twitter and how it handled something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. If you’re new here, you may not know that I’ve written a similar post for people who are wrong about Section 230. If you’re being wrong about Twitter and the Hunter Biden laptop, there’s a decent chance that you’re also wrong about Section 230, so you might want to read that too! Also, these posts are using a format blatantly swiped from lawyer Ken “Popehat” White, who wrote one about the 1st Amendment. Honestly, you should probably read that one too, because there’s some overlap.
Corporate Democrats in the U.S. House tightened their hold on the caucus Tuesday as Rep. Abigail Spanberger was elected by a group of 53 lawmakers from swing states to represent them to the party's leadership team, winning out over the more progressive Rep. Matt Cartwright.
The Virginia Democrat was elected to become the party's first battleground leadership representative, a position created with the passage of a new rules amendment late last month.
By now, word is out about the election-detonating dangers posed by the so-called "independent state legislature theory." So in recent months, the theory's proponents have tried to persuade the Supreme Court and the broader public that there are more moderate, less problematic variants of the theory out there. But there's no "lite version" of the independent state legislature theory. The gerrymanderers who put the theory on the Supreme Court's doorstep in Moore v. Harper are asking for a radical upending of election law and all the chaos that comes with it, no matter how they try to soft-pedal it.
Friends and family of Tyler Evans—a designer for progressive movements and leaders, including Sen. Bernie Sanders—have launched a GoFundMe to raise money for the Evans family in the wake of his hospitalization.
The "solidarity fund" webpage explains that "Tyler has been in ICU care for the last week with subdural and epidural hematoma (blood accumulation between the brain and skull). He will have a road to recovery once he leaves the hospital, which will take several months, potentially up to a year."
After two impeachments, a private charity and university shuttered thanks to fraud charges and other financial irregularities, a special prosecutor’s investigation (with another one now pending), more than 20 sexual assault allegations, and a private-sector career riddled with allegations of fraud and self-dealing, Donald Trump now boasts his first adverse legal verdict. A state jury in Manhattan has found the Trump Organization guilty on 17 charges, including falsifying business information, a scheme to defraud, tax fraud, and conspiracy.
With these words, Herschel Walker conceded the Georgia Senate run-off. He also echoed the calm, often gracious, concession speeches made across the country a few weeks earlier by candidates of both parties.
As we enter the holiday season, can extend this political calm? Research shows we can. Those concession speeches are a key.
Stated another way, the American Bar Association defines the rule of law as a set of principles, or ideals, for ensuring an orderly and just society.
Many countries throughout the world strive to uphold the rule of law–where no one is above the law; where everyone is treated equally under the law; where everyone is held accountable to the same laws; where there are clear and fair processes for enforcing laws; where there is an independent judiciary; and where human rights are guaranteed for all.[2]
Like almost all modern software companies, Twitter depends on open source, says Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. In the aftermath of Elon Musk’s purchase, however, the company’s relationship to open source has shifted dramatically.
Will Norris, Twitter's former open source lead, “believes Twitter has become irrelevant in open source communities.” In an exclusive interview with Vaughan-Nichols, Norris said: "Open source communities are built on relationships and trust, and now Twitter has neither with these groups. They've lost any ability to participate meaningfully in those communities."
Google, which provides the Android software, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Glenn Greenwald delivers two astutely frightening monologues on the state of free speech in an internet space dominated by Big Tech monopolies.
Phew. As we’ve noted over the past few weeks, there’s been a big push by some in Congress over the last couple of weeks to sneak in some really terrible bills, among them JCPA, KOSA, INFORM, and SHOP SAFE. We’ve covered the problems with each of these bills and the very serious problem with trying to slip them into year end “must pass” bills like the NDAA, often skipping over several levels of congressional process while doing so.
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg on Tuesday dared U.S. prosecutors to come after him like they have Julian Assange by revealing in a BBC News interview that the WikiLeaks publisher sent him a backup of leaked materials from former military analyst Chelsea Manning.
"Let me tell you a secret. I had possession of all the Chelsea Manning information before it came out in the press," Ellsberg said to BBC's Stephen Sackur in the on-camera interview. "I've never said that publicly."
Latin America’s leftist presidents are leading the campaign to free Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks journalist has the support of Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya.
Free press advocates this week urged people to contact Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's office and ask the New York Democrat to pass legislation protecting journalists from government abuses during the closing days of the current Congress.
"Now is crunch time to make the PRESS Act the law of the land before this Congress adjourns."
Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded enthusiastically to the idea of criminalizing the use of leaked personal data, including the leaked databases often utilized by investigative journalists.
In “Death by Policy,” the newly launched investigative unit of Pulitzer Prize-winning Futuro Media reveals how the U.S. Border Patrol’s policies push migrants attempting to cross from Mexico to the U.S. into dangerous areas, especially the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. The longstanding “prevention through deterrence” approach, which funnels people into unsafe migration routes, has contributed to thousands of deaths since the 1990s. For more, we speak to Futuro Media’s Maria Hinojosa, who hosts the new podcast on Latino USA and draws connections to the new bipartisan immigration Senate reform bill. We also speak with Peniley Ramírez, co-host of the unit’s new five-part podcast series ”USA v. García Luna,” which looks at Mexico’s former secretary of public security, García Luna, who will soon become the highest-ranking Mexican official ever to face trial in the United States for his alleged role in drug trafficking. “This person was at the same time, according to the accusation, working for the Mexican government, working for the Sinaloa Cartel and cooperating with U.S. agencies, especially the DEA,” says Ramírez.
The Latvian Association of Journalists came to the defense of TV Rain, whose broadcast license Latvian authorities revoked earlier this week.
Following the revocation of TV Rain’s broadcast license by the Latvian National Electronic Media Council (NELPLP), social media users unearthed a trove of past tweets by the agency chairman Ivars Abolins, in which Abolins deprecated Ukraine and praised Putin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin denies that authorities will launch a second wave of mobilization in Russia in the near future. He made an announcement to that effect during a meeting with members of the Presidential Council for Human Rights.
A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.
In Afghanistan, the rules of engagement sometimes were stricter than use-of-force rules for civilian police in America. Erica Gaston, a human rights lawyer who studied the military's rules of engagement in Afghanistan, said that especially was true in the later years of the war.
As the Advocate reported, critics of the hiring, such as Kathy Hischar, argued that Medford’s children “should not have to question why their teacher is a girl but dresses like a boy.” Another district resident, Tanner Fairrington, whose children are home-schooled, said that “exposure to the complexity of preferred pronouns and gender roles is not appropriate for this age group.”
We partnered with law firm Wilson Sonsini to file this case in 2016 because Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act violates the First Amendment by threatening security research, remix video, media literacy education, access to culture for disabled people, and even the right to understand how your car works so you can repair it. Originally designed to inhibit copyright infringement of DVD, CDs, and books, the law has come to reach far more broadly, thanks to the proliferation of software. That’s because the law forbids accessing any copyrighted work – including the code in your devices – if you’d have to bypass a technical protection measure (aka DRM) to do it.
Section 1201’s prohibition was a departure from previous copyright law and the traditional rules that allow people to make fair uses and make use of the non-copyrightable ideas in a copyrighted work. While the law traditionally protected research, remix, and so on, Section 1201 makes that work impossible unless you fall within narrow exceptions or get permission (which must be renewed every three years) from the Copyright Office and Librarian of Congress.€ Our appeal was supported by amicus briefs from independent filmmakers, disability advocates, media literacy educators, copyright scholars, and those seeking to understand technology in order to exercise their right to repair.
The DC Circuit refused to consider either the challenge to the law on its face or most of the speech harms caused by the law, focusing instead on a narrower question of whether the First Amendment protected the plaintiffs’ rights to publish code that included instructions for circumvention. Dr. Green sought to publish a book on security research, including code snippets and other speech that would teach a reader how to circumvent access controls in the course of doing security research. Dr. bunnie Huang and his company Alphamax sought to publish code that would let people read the data in an encrypted video stream in order to analyze it, adapt it, and otherwise make lawful uses of it. bunnie also sought to use this technology himself for video analysis, translations, education, and archiving.
Over 1,000 New York Times workers are planning a full-day walkout and afternoon rally on Thursday, December 8 amid ongoing negotiations with newspaper management about pay and healthcare contributions.
Times Guild members, represented by the NewsGuild of New York, are pushing for a $65,000 salary floor and "funding employees' health insurance sustainably."
Now that Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock is headed back to do his job in Washington, D.C., while Republican Hershel Walker heads God knows where, but likely to his actual home in Texas, can we finally talk about what a shit show these last few months have been?
"Tonight, the people—young, Black, Brown, and working people—expanded the Senate majority, neutralized the power of Joe Manchin, and defeated yet another fascist," the Sunrise Movement cheered.
Senator Raphael Warnock makes history defeating Republican Herschel Walker in Georgia’s closely watched Senate runoff, becoming the first Black senator to be elected to a six-year term in Georgia. His victory in Tuesday’s special election will give Democrats control of 51 seats in the Senate. It also marks a major defeat for former President Donald Trump, who had handpicked Walker, a former football star who had no political experience, to be the standard-bearer in Georgia. Walker is the eighth Trump-backed Senate candidate to lose this year, despite earlier predictions that Republicans would regain control of the Senate. Warnock received 51.4% of the vote compared to Walker’s 48.6%. LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, says intense on-the-ground organizing was able to put Warnock over the top, but she warns that the tight result is a “red flag” signaling the continued threat from Trump. “We’re still fighting voter suppression. We’re still fighting fascism,” says Brown.
Kanye West’s appearance on the Alex Jones show, where the singer praised Hitler and Nazism, has brought the problem of anti-Semitism to the fore. To take up the issue, I spoke with Sarah Posner, a columnist at MSNBC and author of the valuable book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump.
But nowhere do these basically autonomous troops combine into larger associations, nowhere do members of the same species, though clearly knowing themselves to be essentially related, attempt to create large- scale units of social control. “Superorganizations, alliances made up of two or more troops,” as anthropology expert John Pfeiffer notes, “have never been observed among baboons or any other nonhuman primates.”
In a healthy brain, though there are many major processes operating at once, there is none, either physical or psychological, that is dominant. In the words of neurologist Gary Walter:
Southern Berkshire County has seen a large increase in Latinx speaking families, with ten percent of its public school students being non-native English speakers. Parents, Latinx organizations, and teachers have rallied together to provide academic, emotional, and legal support for Latinx students, who can struggle with the language barrier.
Thankfully, a bill to change that just became law.
The Safe Connections Act (S. 120) was introduced in the Senate on January 2021 by Senators Brian Schatz, Deb Fischer, Richard Blumenthal, Rick Scott, and Jacky Rosen and in the House (H.R. 7132) by Representatives Ann Kuster and Anna Eshoo. This common sense bill would make it easier for survivors of domestic violence to separate their phone line from a family plan while keeping their own phone number. It also requires the FCC to create rules to protect the privacy of the people seeking this protection. This bill overwhelmingly passed both chambers of Congress, and it was signed by the President on December 7, 2022, making it Public Law 117-223.€
Telecommunications carriers are already required to make numbers portable when users want to change carriers. So it should not be hard for carriers to replicate a seamless process when a paying customer wants to move an account within the same carrier. EFF strongly supports this bill.
A man arrested by Swedish police in 2021 has been charged with crimes relating to pirate IPTV service, Smart IPTV. The indictment, which contains a seizure order worth $1.2 million, reveals the man was logged into email accounts and crypto wallets during a police raid. An earlier case, involving IPTV, an uncooperative defendant, and a crypto hardware wallet, delivered quite a surprise at the 11th hour.
Powerful French movie industry groups have filed a lawsuit against several major ISPs. The action has the ultimate goal of blocking access to a quartet of file-hosting platforms - Fembed, Uqload, Upvid, & Uvideo. This is the first attempt to have so-called cyberlockers blocked in France but if successful, could undermine operations at dozens of other sites.
Scammers are abusing official European Union platforms to advertise 'pirate' sites. The advertisements come in the form of keyword-filled PDF files that have now made their way to the top results in search engines. The advertisements link to dubious platforms that appear to use false piracy promises to lure people to malicious sites.
Music streaming services are great – for listeners, who gain access to huge quantities of music, even if they don’t end up owning any of it. But it’s hardly a secret that streaming services produce very little income for the musicians involved – even the big names earn a pittance – with most of the money ending up with the recording companies. That doesn’t mean that streaming services are beyond redemption. It just requires a little imagination to think of ways in which they can be great for artists and audience alike.
[...]
What’s also notable is that this approach is built on local music. It means that the music already has a link with the people who are likely to try it out. That sense of connection is a vital element for all art, and is sometimes missing with the global streaming services, which can seem distant and deracinated in comparison. MUSICat is a great example of how a technology can be radically re-thought for the benefit of artists, their fans and the community they are part of.
Being in the moment is more important than capturing it!
I'm a gearhead. I grew up in and around cars, my grandparents and parents had a Citroën dealership. Before I studied Computational Linguistics, I did a three-year apprenticeship for automobile technician, and I still consider it one of the best times of my life.
I shop at the Unpackaged Store. Stuff that comes without packaging is weirdly twice as expensive as the packaged alternatives. Local, seasonal vegetables, they cost an arm and a leg compared to the apple from New Zealand. It's probably the correct price if I want everyone to be paid fairly and not externalize costs, but boy, I can only afford this because I have a good job. When I haul my expensive groceries home on my cargo ebike, along a narro, bumpy bicycle lane that surely leads to broken eggs unless I packaged them really well in the material I brought along, car traffic flows by on a smooth road -- when it flows, as the road is too narrow for all the parked SUVs and the ones being driven by angry people doing a quick shop at Lidl, yes I'll have a bag, thank you.
Don't take a day off after not sleeping enough the previous night. That would be wasting the holiday allowance. It wouldn't be possible to enjoy my free time anyway, so why not just work? There's still a way for an IT Engineer to be productive (sometimes even more) with half or less of the concentration power available!
My best take would be: In the daily lives of most people, most of the time, "reality" doesn't actually matter. Politics don't affect them right then, right here. What matters is walking to the groceries, not falling off your bike, driving your car, cooking your food, eating, sleeping, anger management, looking at flowers, raising your kids, talking to your friends, raising a family. All of these things you can do with "fast thinking" (Kahneman), or "feelings". Sure, as somebody from the outside, you might feel like saying that voting matters, that politics matter, that international politics matter, but as an individual, you might respond: all that matters is what affects me directly, and what I can affect directly. Everything else is an illusion, a fantasy. You are getting worked up over nothing.
One of the most common misplaced concerns about DMing I see online is that the player characters are winning most of the time.
In college I played a lot of music. I was in the university orchestra a couple years, playing bassoon. I joined the improv music collective, which I played in for four years. I eventually even took electronic music history and production classes, opera (music history), ethnomusicology, and composition classes. I DJed on the college radio station as well, a program dedicated to experimental and electronic music. All this is to provide some background to attest that I'm supposedly not a totally complete idiot when it comes to music! Okay, with that said, onto my story:
I've been working part-time for most of this year. 20 hours a week, 4 hours a day, half the pay. I just changed back to full time this week after one of my managers resigned and his responsibilities were distributed between the team.
Firstly: after some time of part time, I've come to realize that half time = half pay is mightily wrong. More is done on the first four hours of work than on the last. Let's be generous and say 60% on the first 4h, 40% on the later 4h. And yet you're seen like a bit of a slacker when someone calls or emails you after you've done your time and answer with "sorry, I just clocked out, I'll do it first thing tomorrow". I mean, you should be thankful I've even picked up the phone.
I grew some epsom salt crystals in a jar. I saturated hot water with the crystals, poured some in a jar, and set the jar on a shelf for about a week. After about half the water evaporated, a thin layer of crystal on top of the water was slowing down further evaporation, so I just dumped out the remaining water and and let it dry for another night. I placed a small piece of purple sponge in the jar, which made the photos a little more interesting. Here is a photo of the jar:
I've been enjoying this show, based on a 2014 William Gibson novel. The first season is trickling out and is almost complete.
No spoilers; just watch it. It is pretty satisfying, if all y'all can get over the Texas drawl of a number of main characters. It's Gibson all the way; jack in and enjoy the ride.
While I am at it, I do need to bitch about the video quality of Amazon algorithms. It's sharp, but it sucks in a terrible and pedestrian way: the foreground high contrast images are sharp and good, but out-of-focus backgrounds kind of freeze in a blotchy way, and update at the rate of a few blotches per second.
When I did my apprenticeship as automobile technician, we were assigned different stations in the workshop, each lead by another master technician. Herr Drexl was the one I admired most. He was an expert in rebuilding automatic transmissions, and when they left his hands, they worked better than when they came from the factory brand-new. He built his own tools to measure tolerances perfectly -- tools they didn't even have at the factory.
Its real: I got the ok from my company to migrate them to free software.
I have totally free reign and as long as there is a working system at the end of it i can do whatever i want to migrate (at least our workstations) to Linux. I think it helped a little that the big company on the other side of the industrial complex where we reside did make this step last year and got good coverage about this in our local newspapers.
Fosshost, a hosting provider that offered free VPS hosting for FOSS projects is officially shutting down.
Adding wall textures, camera height, and fixing the fish-eye effect in the PICO-8 raycaster.
I noticed that the Vivaldi package on Manjaro stopped updating the proprietary media codec after installing or updating. It appears that some Linux distributions have gotten spooked. And maintainers have started to withdraw support for proprietary codecs in general.
On my system, hardware acceleration is provided by a proprietary Nvidia driver. So, I just need the codec to restore video performance.
You can update the Vivaldi codec yourself by running the update script like the package used to.
cmus[1] uses a file called autosave (~/.config/cmus/autosave) to store configuration settings. This file is loaded every time cmus is launched. Settings changed during a session will be written to autosave on exit. This can make changing settings a bit finicky. A few times I've accidentally changed a setting by pressing the wrong hotkey, and then not been able to change it back. There is another file called rc (~/.config/cmus/rc) which can store persistent settings. These settings are loaded after autosave and will not be overwritten on exit.
Some people say that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. I saw the best response: "I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are questionable."
The Olimex OLinuXino LIME2 is an open hardware board with 1GB RAM, 1Gbps LAN and optional onboard eMMC/NAND storage and SPI flash. This guide will explain how to install Alpine Linux 3.17.0 on it, including how to compile the U-Boot bootloader.
Note: Throughout this guide I use the command 'doas' to run commands with root privileges. Your distribution might instead be using 'sudo', so simply replace 'doas' with 'sudo' if it does not work.
One of my goals for 2023 is to use YouTube as little as possible.
However, I still want to be able to watch videos occasionally, I just don't want the 'time-suck' element of youtube, where you end up with an endless stream of (admittedly interesting) content thanks to the suggestions provided by the algorithm.
When I was young, I used to be quite into astronomy (I was into a lot of things before computing came along and hypnotised me to the exclusion of much else for a big chunk of my life which I'll never get back). I never owned a telescope or even, as far as I recall, binoculars, and to be honest I'm not sure I even felt the need. I grew up somewhere moderately remote, where light pollution wasn't really an issue, so you could just go outside and look up on a clear night and behold the Milky Way whenever you felt like it. Shooting stars and satellites were things you could easily spot multiple times on any given night. I had one of those little rotating cardboard wheel star chart things, and I learned my way around the sky pretty well and spotted plenty of planets. I guess maybe all of this is more what you would call "stargazing" rather than amateur astronomy per se, although maybe that's a bogus and snobbish distinction to draw. I guess it took a while even after the internet and computing appeared in my life for this interest to completely wane, I remember taking a degree of geeky pride in making the objectively unwise decision to interrupt my sleep at some ungodly hour the night before my final high school physics exam in order to watch a meteor shower (I still did fine). And I was even in my university's astronomy club, although to be honest that was mostly just a social club for hypernerds and any kind of genuine astronomy-based event was outnumbered more than ten to one by quiz nights, video nights, fundraising BBQs, etc. Good times, to be sure, but I spent more time staring at the skies by myself as a kid. Until very recently, it had been definitely over a decade since I'd done *anything* like any of the above.
I am kind of burned out on writing more or less exclusively about my "big picture" thoughts on ideas at the intersection of computing technology and environmental sustainability. I'm still very much interested in and thinking about and reading about those issues, and rest assured you Shall Not Be Spared the future walls of text which will inevitably arise from this. But nobody wants to read that kind of stuff all the time. I don't even want to *write* that stuff all the time, writing exclusively in negative tones, beating dead horses. Here on the small internet I'm largely preaching to the choir anyway. I miss how much more casual and varied and uncontrived my writing used to be in "the good old days" (my phlog is over five years old now, I missed the anniversary once again). So I'm going to try to kick myself back into that groove for a bit. Excluding my upcoming ROOPHLOCH entry, which is going to talk mostly about how the post was made, I'm setting myself the goal to write three posts this year which have nothing to do with computers, nothing to do with the internet, and nothing to do with the terrifying realisation that the sun isn't going to die for another five billion years and even the greenest Utopian fantasy vision of future civilisation has no hope of lasting that long without running into some kind of problem.
It's shaping up to be a long week. I'm preparing a longer post on the subject of so-called "AI" models, the longtermist ideology that is driving their technical development, and their effect on human dignity - but that's a post for another day. Instead I'll simply drop off a couple of links that resonate with me tonight.
The WP2Smol plugin now generates an Atom feed at /gemlog/atom.xml for purposes of updating CAPCOM[1], et al when new posts are made.
Following the recent exodus of Twitter users to Mastodon, the Fediverse saw a lot of chatter from new users talking about the superiority of the Fediverse over other solutions. This reminded me somewhat of Gemini's popularity a couple of years ago, which saw a lot of users announcing their departure from the clear web to embrace Gemini full-time. I made a jokey post about it based on my experience with Gemini back in the day.
Mastodon has a feature which enables you to verify that a website in your profile belongs to you [1], and I've now added the same capability for website and blog links in Epicyon [2].
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.