This week has been pretty interesting with some great software releases, starting with the highly-anticipated Transmission 4.0 and continuing with NetworkManager 1.42 and KDE Frameworks 5.103.
On the distro side of things, SparkyLinux 6.6, Endless OS 5.0, and EndeavourOS Cassini Neo are all out for you to play with on your personal computer. On top of that, I take a quick look at the upcoming official Fedora Linux 38 Budgie and Sway spins.
Linux gamers got a new Steam Client stable release and the chance to buy the next-gen AMD-powered gaming laptop from System76. Below, you can read the hottest news of the week and access all distro and software downloads available in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for February 12th, 2023.
Nearly six decades ago, a bunch of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric started work on a new multi-user operating system for General Electric mainframes called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, or MULTICS. After four years of work, the project was mothballed, but was reborning when Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs, created a single-user operating system based on the ideas behind MULTICS to run on a PDP-7 that Ma Bell had laying around.
This week the panel of presenters brought an app they use to share. Instead of choosing a specific application to try out or explore the panel decided that we would all bring something interesting that we use to share with others and explain why it was interesting.
Work on version 6.2 of the Linux kernel will stretch into an eighth release candidate, despite emperor penguin Linus Torvalds now saying it isn't really necessary.
In late January, Torvalds rated release candidate five as "fairly sizable" due to "pent up testing and fixes from people being off."
He therefore flagged his intention to extend this kernel development cycle beyond his preferred seven release candidates.
Having spent an evening hunting for software, experimenting, reading documentation, troubleshooting, reading log files, and trying various client applications I came to a few conclusions, most of which won't surprise anyone.
One of the more obvious is that "Top 10" lists of applications are usually useless. They typically don't provide a list of features or drawbacks, they never provide dependency information, most of them don't mention a license, whether the software is still maintained, or (in some cases) even include a link to the software's website. Most of them feel like copy and pasted blurbs from a Wikipedia list.
Docker can be a useful piece of technology if a person is using the latest version, has lots of free space on their root partition, isn't using a long-term support distribution, and has up to date documentation with which to work. When any one of these stops being true, Docker suddenly becomes a lot less useful. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there isn't any clearly presented information to tell the user which version of Docker a container requires or how much space it will use once installed.
Looking for a new editor to replace your old one? Look no further than Lapce – a lightning-fast and powerful code editor.
Most of the popular CAD (Computer Aided Design) software options are either proprietary or do not offer native support for Linux.
It does not mean that we do not have any FOSS alternatives to them. We already have valuable alternatives like FreeCAD and other CAD programs for Linux.
And, if we have more native CAD software options on Linux, it should make things better for designers and makers.
Design is an upcoming 2D CAD software tailored for GNOME that sounds interesting.
Apple Contacts is a computerized address book included with the Apple operating systems iOS, iPadOS and macOS. It includes cloud synchronization capabilities.
Contacts is proprietary software and not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.
HTML classifies both elements as “interactive elements”. The <details> element serves as the containing element for the widget, though it is not expected to be directly interacted with by users. Nor is <details> generally expected to be exposed to assistive technologies. The open attribute of the <details> element is used to modify the expanded or collapsed state of the widget. When present it represents the widget being in the expanded state, and when absent the collapsed state. While the attribute is used on the <details> element, the state is programmatically communicated by its required <summary> element.
Linux offers a built-in “tar” command tool to compress and extract the “tar” files and folders having formats “.gz”, “.bz2”, “.xz”, “.tbz” and many more.
Hello, friends. Getting network statistics is a basic task that allows you to monitor what is going on with your network. So, today, you will learn how to use the tcpdump command on Linux. We will also use examples to facilitate the tutorial.
Port forwarding is a network address translation (NAT) mechanism that enables proxy firewalls to forward communication queries from one IP address and port to another. Port forwarding is typically configured on Linux systems using iptables, a program for defining IP packet filter rules.
Linux provides an efficient memory management mechanism that ensures optimal utilization of memory by various programs and processes. H
Attackers are constantly on the prowl, conducting reconnaissance on web servers to retrieve crucial details such as the Nginx version. With this information at hand, they can then leverage known vulnerabilities associated with the version of the Nginx web server and initiate an attack.
Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania is shaping up to be the most exciting content expansion to Dead Cells yet and we don't have long to wait now as it's releasing March 6th. Are you as excited as I am? I might have to give the Netflix Anime a second run-through…
Released back in 2018, the one-button arcade game Ding Dong XL from Adamvision Studios that has an Overwhelmingly Positive Steam user rating gets upgraded ready for Steam Deck.
The GNOME desktop environment is a popular open-source desktop option for Linux users. It provides a user-friendly interface with various features to help you customize your workspace and get more done.
With this release, GNOME offers a few key improvements to its performance and adds some new features to enhance your experience.
Explore the improved GNOME 44 desktop environment and discover new features, customizations, and performance upgrades.
Linux. Ah, Linux. The operating system I’ve called “home” since 1997. Over the years, I’ve tried just about every distribution possible and every conceivable desktop environment. My life with Linux desktops began with Fvwm95 and then traversed a course of AfterStep, Enlightenment, Blackbox, KDE, Unity, Pantheon, and everything in between.
Eventually, I landed on Gnome and never looked back. I’ve tried to return to other desktops but always found them either too little or too much. Gnome fits right there in the middle, like the ideal desktop for Goldilocks.
DiscoBSD is a 2.11BSD-based UNIX-like operating system for microcontrollers, with a focus on high portability to memory constrained devices without a memory management unit. This microcontroller-focused operating system is the continuation of RetroBSD, a 2.11BSD-based OS targeting only the MIPS-based PIC32MX7. DiscoBSD is multi-platform, as it also supports Arm Cortex-M4 STM32F4 devices. Source code to the system is freely available under a BSD-like license.
Used by the happiest computer users: macOS, Slackware Linux, & Brave.
The new Web UI installer for Fedora has been in the works for over a year, though it is still not at par with the existing Anaconda installer. It is getting better day by day. It aims to replace the existing installer, which uses an old GTK3-based interface known for being inefficient and insecure in quite a few use cases.
We recently got a better look at its development, thanks to the progress updates shared by Martin Kolman (working for Red Hat, part of the team working on the Anaconda installer) at FOSDEM 23.
Then, this week, I was able to set up and synchronise the whole Ubuntu Ports repository, after David, the Director of cloud.mu, provisionned additional storage on the Ubuntu mirror server for an upgrade. I submitted the Ubuntu Ports mirror for review and that was completed the same day.
Three simple tips for CIOs to build an efficient IT strategy for 2023 to counter recession, inflation and layoffs and increase their team's innovation.
The Compute Blade runs Raspberry Pi OS, provided you are using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and the documentation is shared on Google Doc which is a bit unusual as I’m more used to GitHub wiki, standard wikis (e.g. mediawiki), Readthedocs website, or other solution that can more easily be found by browsing the web.
Three models of the Compute Blade are available: Basic, TPM, and Dev with different options.
The QEC-M-01 by ICOP is an EtherCAT system solution powered by the Vortex86EX2 dual-core processor for legacy OSes and RTOS. This embedded device features 3x RJ45 ports, DDR3 support, multiple storage options and it can be programmed using 86Duino.
The datasheet for the Vortex86EX2 specifies that it features a Master core for Operating Systems and a Slave core for real time I/O.
The KiCad project is proud to announce the release of version 7.0.0. KiCad 7 is a significant upgrade from KiCad 6, and comes with a number of exciting new features as well as improvements to existing features. The KiCad project hopes you enjoy version 7! Head to the KiCad download page to get your copy of the new version (note that some packages may still be in the process of being released at the time this announcement is published). Many thanks to all of the hard working folks who contributed to KiCad during the version 7 development cycle. In accordance with the KiCad stable release policy, KiCad 6.x will no longer be maintained, and we will release bug fix versions of KiCad 7.x over the next year as we develop KiCad 8.
A quick glance at the “Pi Terminal” built by [Salim Benbouziyane], and you might think he pulled an old CRT monitor out of a video editing bay and gutted it. Which, of course, is the point. But what you’re actually looking at is a completely new construction, featuring a fully 3D printed enclosure, a clever PCB control panel, and some very slick internal engineering.
VVenC and VVdeC are open-source software H.266/VCC video encoder and decoder respectively that are optimized to use SIMD instructions on x86 (SSE42/SIMDe and AVX2) and Arm, and the decoder runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android.
A small feature update for pdf-parser.py Statistics include unreferenced objects now: [...]
AI is a fascinating topic that seems to dominate the cultural conversation lately. Whether it’s AI being used to write anything imaginable or one of the many AI image generators making waves everywhere, there’s no denying the fact that AI is here to stay—and people are utilizing it in some very strange ways. AI inspires conversations on everything from copyright issues to regulation and potential job losses. But there’s also a distinct novelty to AI, and if you’ve been reading Tedium for a while, you probably already know where we’re going with this. In today’s Tedium, we’re looking at generative AI though our grainy, red-and-gray tinted glasses.
"Eminem bro, there's something that I made as a joke and it works so good — I could not believe it!" says Guetta. "Basically you can write lyrics in the style of any artist you like, so I typed: 'write a verse in the style of Eminem about future rave,' and I went to another AI website that can recreate the voice. I put the text in that and I played the record and people went nuts."
Of course there are many more chart types that are beyond the scope of this blog post. One reference is Top 50 ggplot2 Visualizations – The Master List (With Full R Code). A very cool chart type is the radar chart which you can see at How to Create Radar Charts in R (With Examples).
The whole game will be how fast they can be trained, on the most data, at the lowest cost.
It’s been at least a couple of months since we’ve seen a different 3D modeling language project, so here’s [Lukasz Janyst] with GhostSCAD: a take on creating OpenSCAD models, using the Go language as the front end, bringing all the delights this modern modular language has to offer (and a few of its own idiosyncrasies.) As [Lukasz] says in the blog, from a programmer’s viewpoint, openSCAD has a number of failings that make it not necessarily hard, just kinda annoying to work with, due to the way the geometry tree works. The OpenSCAD way of working ends up with the programmer requiring knowledge of the internal workings of sub-modules, in order to work at the top level (assembly) which is not an ideal situation from a code reuse perspective.
Hackathons are easy. How much thought do you need to put into them anyway? Just set a date, and people will show up. Well, that is not quite true!
While you may get lucky with that approach, the reality is that hackathons are a keystone experience in the tech industry, and attendees have specific expectations. Not only that, but your organization also has certain needs and should set goals for a hackathon. So, how do you ensure that a hackathon works for your organization and attendees?
A successful hackathon depends on several decisions that tend to be recursive. Decisions about what you want to achieve will impact what resources you allot and how you want to communicate. Those decisions affect whether you go virtual or in person, and that decision will once again impact the resources you need and how you communicate. Alignment when planning hackathons is not just about getting people to agree. You will have a whole suite of decisions that must internally align. For example, a technically difficult hackathon might not be able to attract a large audience (ask me how I know!) and will require a specialized recruitment strategy that requires different resources.
I've done many hackathons over the years, including just a few months back, when my organization hosted a hackathon that led to new features that we will incorporate into the next version of our open source product, Traefik Proxy 3.0. So, trust me when I say planning a hackathon that will enrich attendees and create valuable outcomes for your project is about more than hope, pizza, and chaos.
This downloadable guide serves as a model for you to outline best practices so that you can hold a successful hackathon with a sizable target audience that delivers results…
While trying to automate my workflow, I hit upon a configuration utility that defied meaningful automation. It was a Java process that didn't support a silent installer, or support stdin, and had an inconsistent set of prompts. Ansible's expect module was inadequate for this task. But I found that the expect command was just the tool for the job.
My journey to learn Expect meant learning a bit of Tcl.€ Now that I have the background to create simple programs, I can better learn to program in Expect. I thought it would be fun to write an article that demonstrates the cool functionality of this venerable utility.
This article goes beyond the typical simple game format. I plan to use parts of Expect to create the game itself. Then I demonstrate the real power of Expect with a separate script to automate playing the game.
This programming exercise shows several classic programming examples of variables, input, output, conditional evaluation, and loops.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been over 20 years since the great dotcom crash happened in 2001, which continues to serve as a harbinger of potential doom whenever cyclic tech is on a downward path. I remember quite distinctly hanging out with either unemployed or underemployed folks in the IT field shortly after the great crash in 2001. We were doing just that: hanging out with time on our hands.
During that time, one day in a park in New York City, Brookdale Park in Montclair, NJ, one of my friends was sitting on a park bench pounding away on his laptop, and he said there was this really cool thing for website creation called Java. It’s been around for a long time, actually, but described how amazing it was that you could program in Java code and deploy, where you want on websites, he said. And of course, have played a key role in transforming the user experience on websites compared to the days of the 1990s when HTML code provided the main elements of website design. Sure, why not, I’ll check it out, I said. And the rest is history as Java secured its place in history, not only for web development, but across IT infrastructure.
WebAssembly adoption is exploding. Almost every week at least one startup, SaaS vendor or established software platform provider is either beginning to offer Wasm tools or has already introduced Wasm options in its portfolio, it seems. But how can all of the different offerings compare performance-wise?
The good news is that given Wasm’s runtime simplicity, the actual performance at least for runtime can be compared directly among the different WebAssembly offerings. This direct comparison is certainly much easier to do when benchmarking distributed applications that run on or with Kubernetes, containers and microservices.
Towards the beginning of what is popularly known as the World Wide Web, there was JavaScript. JavaScript has been around since 1995 when Brendan Eich created the language to support Netscape, the now sadly defunct yet aesthetically pleasing web browser that was revolutionary for its time. Since then, the ECMAScript standard has served to underpin web development, representing the vast majority of applications that run in the web browser.
More recently, WebAssembly (Wasm) — which actually has been around for a while — has emerged. After the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) named it as a web standard in 2019, it has thus become the fourth web standard with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But while web browser applications have represented Wasm’s central and historical use case, again, the point is that it is designed to run anywhere on a properly configured CPU — this is where Wasm and JavaScript both bifurcate and become more integrated for some use cases.
One of the main attributes of WebAssembly is how it can accommodate a number of different languages that are deployed — in theory at least — wherever there is a CPU device that can run instruction sets. The languages Wasm can run include, in addition to JavaScript, Rust, Go, .NET, C++, Java, PHP — and Python (a lot more about Python below).
As an early web browser application, Wasm has been, and continues to be, heavily entwined with JavaScript. More recently, Rust has entered the fray, and its integration with JavaScript and even when running alone without JavaScript for WebAssembly applications is showing a lot of promise.
Cool technology often comes at a cost, and it’s not always that this cost is justified. For instance, [Rainfay] tells us about how the the ArtNet protocol’s odd design choices are causing incompatibility with certain Ethernet switches. ArtNet is a protocol for lighting control over DMX-512 – simply put, it allows you to blink a whole ton of LEDs, even literally. Unlike DMX-512 which can use different physical mediums, ArtNet uses Ethernet, taking form of the usual kind of network packets – and it does seem to do a great job about that, if it weren’t for this one thing.
Search and rescue teams are still at work amid an apocalyptic landscape in Nurdagi, a southeastern Turkish town near the epicentre of the January 6 earthquakes. But at this point they are looking for the remains of the dead, not survivors.
The Turkey and Syria earthquake's rescue phase is "coming to a close", with urgency now switching to providing shelter, food, schooling and psychosocial care, United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said during a visit to Aleppo in northern Syria on Monday. The combined death toll has surpassed 35,000.
Amid the anguish in quake-stricken Turkey, FRANCE 24 brings you the remarkable story of a baby girl called Aliye Dagli, pulled alive from the rubble of her home in Antakya almost six days after the devastating February 6 earthquakes – when experts say the chances of finding survivors is lower than 10 percent. Our reporters Julie Dungelhoeff and Nadia Massih have her story.
Turkish authorities have launched an investigation into contractors allegedly linked to deadly building collapses that occurred after amassive earthquake and aftershocksstruck last Monday.
More than 33,000 people have died across Turkey and Syria since a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck on Monday, as hopes of rescuing more survivors dwindle amid freezing conditions. The latest figures show that 33,181 have died across both countries.
It is truly heartbreaking and disturbing to see the images of utter destruction coming from Turkey and Syria. The powerful 7.8 and 7.6 magnitude earthquakes that occurred on February 6th, 2023, together with the subsequent aftershocks, have unleashed unsettling pictures over the landscape in the two countries.
Pakistan has made significant efforts to uplift the regional connectivity and contribute to its development. These efforts are of great significance in fostering regional unity and cooperation, promoting economic growth, and improving the standard of living for the people of South Asia. Pakistan’s active participation in regional organizations such as the South Asian Association for […]
"I really like the aspect of sailing by celestial navigation, sailing old school," she says, adding that she's always wanted to know "what it would have been like back then when you didn't have all the modern technology at your fingertips."
Satellite phones are allowed, but only for communication with race officials and the occasional media interview. Each boat has collision-avoidance alarms and a GPS tracker, but entrants can't view their position data. There's a separate GPS for navigation, but it's sealed and only for emergencies. Its use can lead to disqualification. Entrants are permitted to use radios to communicate with each other and with passing ships. They're allowed to briefly anchor, but not get off the boat nor have anyone aboard. And no one is allowed to give them supplies or assistance.
But lately, on several platforms, the opposite seems to be happening for a variety of reasons, including a slowdown in the overall digital ad market. As numerous deep-pocketed marketers have pulled back, and the softer market has led several digital platforms to lower their ad pricing, opportunities have opened up for less exacting advertisers.
Over the past month, Google has been outgunned by malvertisers with new tricks.
By Juan Cole / Informed Consent Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) –€ The Jordanian newspaper€ al-Ghad€ reports that on top of the now nearly 30,000 known deaths in Turkey and Syria, millions people are estimated to have been made homeless. Not only are they without shelter, they now lack water and electricity, and often even€ food€ and the World Health Organization […]
Hong Kong Customs arrested a man over suspected smuggling after 40 mobile phones were found strapped to his body at Shenzhen Bay Control point last Thursday. The 39-year-old was heading into the mainland. The 40 phones had an estimated value of HK$35,000.
The Emergency Relief Coordinator of the UN Martin Griffiths Sunday declared that there has been a failure in the delivery of international aid to the people of northwest Syria. Griffith urgently calls for international support in the wake of a series of earthquakes that hit Türkiye, Syria, and the surrounding region.
With a crew of nearly 350 volunteers of more than 60 nationalities, Logos Hope ship is currently docked at Port Said, in northeastern Egypt, holding the world's largest floating book fair as part of its humanitarian mission to spread knowledge and foster cultural exchange.
Public education in the United States has always had very specific objectives: (1) It aims to produce qualified workers for a multilayered labor market. Two hundred years ago, at the college level, this meant doctors, lawyers and Protestant pastors. For the last one hundred years or so, higher education has served a broader middle class, white collar market. The shortage of “voc-tech” options is a function of modern cultural bias—such career paths have long been seen as lower class and traditionally came through an apprenticeship. These were careers that got one’s hands dirty. Even today such work does not lead to high starting salaries. Educational institutions did not create these dichotomies. They just conformed to them. (2) Public education aims to produce aware and loyal citizens. This used to be done at the lower educational levels in civics courses, but many of these have fallen victim to financial exigencies. U.S. history and courses on “government” offered at middle and high school stages were supposed to pick up where civics left off. However, this was never a systematic effort. When it comes to higher education, enrollment in courses in U.S. history and relevant political science offerings suffer due to the “consumer” approach to education. Students often see such courses as requiring “too much work” and, of course, what does one do with a “history major”? Business courses are all the rage—again for economic and class based reasons. Please note that the production of aware and loyal citizens is not the same as graduating critical thinkers. In fact there might be a contradiction between the two.
Today, public education at all levels is confronted with a curriculum crisis. Irate parents want to censor local and national history, the range of acceptable literature, and even set limits on what they believe is a tolerable approach to biology. At the college level, a “market” orientation has led state education administrators to favor the above-mentioned “consumer choice” approach. Under this system you get the following weirdness: philosophy should compete with English literature and/or history, etc. for “consumer” student enrollment—after all, all these subjects supply “the same humanities credits”. Education has finally turned its back on the ideal of a liberal arts education.
In the United States in 1939, television sets still had a long way to go before they pretty much sold themselves. Efforts to do just that are what led to RCA’s Lucite Phantom Telereceiver, which aimed to show people a new way to receive broadcast media.
A broken PlayStation controller would normally be a bummer, and if the issue is losing calibration that’s stored in a non-documented format, you might as well bin it. For [Al] of [Al’s blog], however, it’s a challenge, turning into a four-part story – so far. The first installment was published January 1st this year, and seeing the pure enthusiasm [Al] has reverse-engineering the DualShock 4 controller, you might guess that this is a New Year’s gift from someone who knows [Al] very well. The list of problems with the joystick is numerous, to begin with – it’s easier to list all the things that work properly, and it isn’t many of them. Perhaps, the firmware problem is is the most interesting one to start with.
Specifically, Google is warning outlets that there'll be extra scrutiny from its search team on AI-generated content regarding "health, civic, or financial information." So, basically, areas where you really want to get things right.
"These issues exist in both human-generated and AI-generated content," reads the new Google FAQ, speaking specifically to "AI content that potentially propagates misinformation or contradicts consensus on important topics."
A team of researchers from Linköping University in Sweden, the European University Institute in Italy, and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands say that better cognitive ability plays more of a role further down the pay scale.
"We find that the relationship between ability and wage is strong overall, yet above €60,000 (US$64,407) per year ability plateaus at a modest level of +1 standard deviation," write the researchers in their published paper.
As someone who has been following the antivaccine movement for over twenty years (and blogging about it for over 18 years), before the pandemic I never thought I would see my “provaccine” colleagues claim that children don’t need to be vaccinated against an infectious disease that kills at least as many children as measles did in the days before there was a vaccine. Indeed, that is basically the entire message behind the “Urgency of Normal” movement€ promoting a message during the Delta wave claiming that masks and COVID-19 mitigations in schools were not necessary because so few children die of the diseases, a state public health authority€ actively discouraging parents from vaccinating€ their children against COVID-19, and academics even€ recycling hoary old antivax tropes in a bioethics journal€ to argue against the need to vaccinate children against COVID-19. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, as I’ve been reminding my colleagues who are shocked at how many doctors are antivaccine that such antivax docs have€ always been among us, but the intensity and degree of the pushback among colleagues against vaccinating children against COVID-19 and their utter obliviousness that the arguments they were making were nothing more than old antivax arguments indistinguishable from the arguments antivaxxers used to make about measles vaccines surprised even me. What particularly surprised and disappointed me is the degree to which seemingly eminent academic physicians, while showing concern about reports of myocarditis after vaccination, seemingly€ shrug their shoulders€ about the disease, thinking it seemingly “natural and healthy” for children to die of a vaccine-preventable disease. They even argue, as antivaxxers did prepandemic for measles and chickenpox “parties,” that we should€ let children catch Omicron€ rather than impose anything resembling pandemic restrictions like masking or vaccine mandates in a school ever again.
The echoes still linger from that national sigh of relief last month when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, slammed into cardiac arrest during a game on January 2nd, was declared out of danger. It was a justified sigh. A vibrant young life had been spared.
Trump’s no longer president, but he and his racism could still be responsible for millions more American deaths from a new pandemic disease. How and why? I’ll explain in just a moment, but first let’s look at the disease itself.
One reason egg prices are so high right now is because a new strain of bird flu — H1N5 — has popped up among egg-laying chickens. The disease has a shocking mortality rate, leading to the death (both from disease and from euthanizing flocks to stop its spread) of almost 60 million domesticated birds in the US alone, so far.
Health workers Sunday€ protested€ in Madrid, Spain over staffing issues and what protesters claim to be the favoritism of private health services. According to the protesters, the public health system has broken down due to the conservative regional authorities favoring private health services and disbanding public health services—leaving many hospitals poorly staffed.
A coalition of 22 states Friday filed an amicus brief opposing a proposed preliminary injunction that would withdraw or suspend the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the abortion medications Mifepristone and Mifeprex.
The outbreak has been contained to just one farm near Hong Kong's border with the mainland.
Official figures show a continued, rapid decline in deaths.
While the open source has always been about sharing the code for one and all, this ideal has been increasingly at odds with a range of factors, including software fragmentation, politicization, weaponization, and a creeping techno-nationalism, which all can negatively impact open source’s vital collaborative framework.
Addressing these issues is a new report from the Linux Foundation, “Enabling Global Collaboration: How Open Source Leaders are Confronting the Challenges of Fragmentation,” authored by Anthony D. Williams, founder and president of the research firm the DEEP Centre.
The report was sponsored by Futurewei, Huawei’s U.S.-based research and development arm, and is a product of the Linux Foundation Research, founded in 2021.
Mandiant has continually observed threat actors use compromised, stolen, and illicitly purchased code-signing certificates to sign malware, lending legitimacy and subverting security controls such as application allow-listing policies. Attestation signed drivers take the trust granted to them by the CA and transfers it to a file whose Authenticode signature originates from Microsoft itself. We assess with high confidence that threat actors have subverted this process using illicitly obtained EV code signing certificates to submit driver packages via the attestation signing process, and in effect have their malware signed by Microsoft directly.
Communications by important people over the past thousands of years have been regularly encrypted, making the breaking of this encryption both an essential and also a fascinating historical field. One recent example of an important historical discovery by codebreakers are letters dating back to 1578 through 1584 by Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots in the 16th century. While deemed lost for centuries, researchers came across them in a stash of encrypted letters that were kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s (BnF). After decrypting these 57 letters, they realized what they had come across.
Ukraine accused former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Monday of spreading Russian propaganda...
After the invasion of Ukraine, the West imposed sanctions on its longtime trading partner, Russia. But they appear to be hitting the Russian economy much less than expected, writes German magazine FOCUS. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in the foreseeable future Russia will grow even faster than Germany.
Just over a month after hostilities ceased in Ethiopia’s Tigray province, an African Union (AU) joint committee overseeing agreement for lasting peace in€ the east African country met for the first time.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Boeing Business Jet (BBJ) will be out of action for some time following a hangar incident in Cape Town that damaged its tail.
The mortal remains of South African Air Force (SAAF) Sergeant Vusimusi Mabena, killed by a sniper in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), were repatriated on Sunday 12 February to Air Force Base (AFB) Waterkloof in Centurion.
Ukraine said Monday the situation was "difficult" in a village just north of Bakhmut, a day after the Russian paramilitary group Wagner claimed control of another settlement near the eastern Ukrainian city that has been the stage for the longest battle of the invasion.
China accused the United States on Monday of flying balloons over its territory, hitting back against Washington's claims that Beijing has been sending alleged surveillance aircraft.
A US fighter jet shot down an “unidentified object” over Lake Huron on Sunday on orders from President Joe Biden. It was the fourth such downing in eight days and the latest military strike in an extraordinary chain of events over US airspace that Pentagon officials believe has no peacetime precedent.
The Philippine Coast Guard on Monday accused a Chinese coastguard vessel of shining a “military-grade laser light” at one of its boats in the disputed South China Sea, temporarily blinding crew members.
The Philippine Coast Guard said the Feb 6 incident caused temporary blindness to crew members.
NATO plans to increase its targets for ammunition stockpiles, which are being depleted by the war in Ukraine...
Russia will seek to gather more intelligence about Norway's oil and gas infrastructure...
According to Ukrainian Health Minister VIktor Liashko, 1,218 Ukrainian health facilities have been damaged, including 540 damaged hospitals, 173 of which were totally destroyed. The leader of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner said Sunday that his troops had taken an eastern Ukrainian village a few kilometres from the key city of Bakhmut which Moscow has been trying to capture for months.
The new charges of making a gun and damaging a building are expected to end investigations.
See the following threat assessment report by The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israeli Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center: [...]
The policy has been condemned by rights groups.
Opposition lawmakers say the new visa changes will encourage more asylum-seekers to try to reach Australia by sea and would “enliven opportunities for people smugglers.”
A new video posted by the Wagner mercenary group’s semi-official Telegram channel appears to show the murder by sledgehammer of Dmitry Yakushchenko, an ex-convict who joined Wagner Group from prison before apparently surrendering to Ukraine on the battlefield. The gruesome clip comes just three months after a similar video surfaced that showed the murder of Yevgeny Nuzhin, another former Wagner fighter. Here’s what we know about the Yakushchenko video so far.
Perhaps the most agonizing experience for a family, for any€ bystander, even for humanitarian professionals, is a double tragedy—a death or calamity where they are refused access, where they€ are forced to helplessly witness suffering, unable to offer succor.€ This is surely what faces millions of able-bodied Syrians today. It€ affects Syrians within the stricken nation along with their faraway€ relatives and friends.
Anyone seeing suffering is involuntarily driven forward– to assist.€ Yet Syrians globally, those most affected by the agonizing images€ and stories emerging from the earthquake sites, feel both€ immobilized and shy behind their tears and frustrations. It’s not any€ threat of personal danger in a war zone that inhibits them from€ joining the rescue. It’s the international embargo against Syria.
Some reps in Congress assert that dismantling qualified immunity (“QI”)—a police officer’s so-called good faith defense to a civil rights lawsuit—is a “non-starter” in negotiations to pass the George Floyd Civil Rights Act. In reality, meaningful police accountability is a non-starter without discarding QI.
For over a week, U.S. corporate media have been captivated by a so-called “Chinese spy balloon,” raising the specter of espionage.
An article by The Washington Post titled “Pentagon looks to restart top-secret programs in Ukraine” contains some interesting information about what US special ops forces were doing in Ukraine in the lead-up to the Russian invasion last year, and what they are slated to be doing there in the future.€ […]
Sixteen years ago, on 10 February 2007, Russian President Putin delivered a landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference, a clear statement of post- Cold War Russian foreign policy, focusing on the need for multilateralism and international solidarity.€ The mainstream media did not give much visibility to Putin’s security analysis in 2007, and still fails to do so.€ Yet, it is worth our while to revisit that speech.
In 2007 I did recognize the implications of Putin’s speech and even distributed the text to my students at the€ Geneva School of Diplomacy.€ Sometimes I distribute the Putin speech together with President John F. Kennedy’s brilliant commencement address at American University[1] on 10 June 1963, an appeal to rationality that is as relevant today as it was then.€ If everyone would read it and implement what is in there, we would not be in the dangerous and tragic situation we are in today.
To write her most recent novel, Demon Copperhead (2022; 549 pages; $32.50; Harper Collins) her tenth in the past 35 years, Barbara Kingsolver turned for inspiration to Charles Dickens whom she calls her “genius friend.” In the acknowledgements, she writes, “I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society.” She adds, “Those problems are still with us.” Isn’t that obvious? Why hit us over the head with it?
In the body of the novel, Kingsolver’s protagonist and narrator— a poor white kid, a drug addict, an orphan and a born again artist— explains that while Dickens was a “seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Jesus Christ did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.” For Copperhead, whose hair is the color of copper wire, “around here” means Appalachia, where Kingsolver lives on a farm with her husband. The time is now, though there are very few references to contemporary events. The Iraq war is one of them.
Advocates of peace, truth, and basic human decency on Sunday excoriated the National Football League's "whitewashing" of former Arizona Cardinal and Army Ranger Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan by so-called "friendly fire" and the military's subsequent cover-up—critical details omitted from a glowingly patriotic Super Bowl salute.
If we do not build left-right coalitions on issues such as militarism, health care, a living wage and union organizing, we will be impotent in the face of corporate power and the war machine.
Wagner Group founder and Kremlin-backed tycoon Evgeny Prigozhin says that Wagner fighters have occupied the village of Krasna Hora, located 7 kilometers (about 4 miles) north of Bakhmut.
Over the course of the past week we saw a faction within the American polity exhibit collective panic about a Chinese balloon that floated across the US. Whatever the nature of the balloon, the fears ...
As the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches, ASPI’s Executive Director Justin Bassi speaks to historian and writer Olesya Khromeychuk.
On 4 January, Chinese President Xi Jinping clasped hands with his Philippine counterpart under very different circumstances from the last time he welcomed a Philippine leader to Beijing.
As it seeks to expand its presence in the Sahel region, Russia appears to be following the same playbook in Burkina Faso that it used to embed itself into Mali’s security apparatus. Despite recent denials, Burkina Faso has courted Russian support, possibly including Wagner Group mercenaries.
Summing up his tenure as MONUSCO force commander, Lieutenant General Marcos da Costa maintains much was done under his watch, with more work needed to guarantee peace in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Torrential rain and localised flooding in KwaZulu-Natal is putting the ingenuity of the national defence force’s logistic specialists to the test as they battle the elements and the clock preparing for Armed Forces Day (AFD) and associated events.
Any move by Taiwan to down such a balloon would likely prompt an angry response from China.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers will toughen laws around tax agents who are involved in confidential talks about overhauling the tax system.
For both companies, maintaining computer systems to help with search engines is already a resource-intense operation. AI chatbot integration will make the operation even heavier and will lead to more energy consumption.
According to a report by Wired, the power that is needed to train a single AI can produce a huge amount of carbon emissions. Meanwhile, internet usage produces nearly 4% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
The report also mentions that experts have warned that the computing prowess required to combine AI with a load of search engine queries will be increased for companies like Google and Microsoft by up to 5 times. With more computers, greenhouse gas emissions will also increase.
The ongoing war in Ukraine is not exactly a conducive environment to building new nuclear power plants. But… just past week, the Ukrainian energy minister, Herman Halushchenko, announced that his country had ordered two new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors for the Khmelnytskyi site in the western part of Ukraine, ‘Counterpunch’ writes with surprise.
The European Commission has today (February 13) proposed rules for the definition of renewable hydrogen in the EU with two Delegated Acts under the Renewable Energy Directive (RED).
They are valued for their English proficiency and computer skills, he said.
Syndicates have been trafficking workers from across South-easts Asia and ensnaring them in slave labour camps.
The activists are demanding that Metsähallitus stop logging in the area until conservation proposals have been processed by the Ministry of the Environment.
The economic think tank offers four economic policy options aimed at helping Finland's political leaders balance the state's books.
The number one question I've gotten in the past week has been "how can I support people affected by the layoff?"
First, some general advice:
- For everyone, remember to "comfort in, dump out" - vent your frustrations to people less affected, support those who are more affected than you.
- To support Xooglers,€ don't ask "how can I help?" as that places more burden on them.€ Offer specific ways€ you can help them - "Can I write you a Linkedin recommendation? Can I connect you with this person I know at this company who's hiring?". People are affected disproportionally, and if you want to prioritize your help, consider starting with the€ people on a visa€ who are now on a tight deadline to find a new sponsor or face leaving the country.
- To support your colleagues still here, remember we're not all having the same experience. In particular, people outside of the US will be in limbo for weeks or months to come. People can be anywhere on a spectrum of "long time Googler, first mass layoff" to "I've had to go through worse". Don't assume, lead with curiosity, and listen.
Prepare for a US debt default and a recession that will drag down corporate earnings, according to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan. In an interview with CNN, the head of the second-largest US bank said he hoped the government wouldn’t slip into default on its debt.
Nearly a million people took to the streets of cities across France on Saturday during the fourth round of nationwide protests against President Emmanuel Macron's plan to raise the country's pension eligibility age from 62 to 64.
The players are preparing to face off, but billionaire NFL owners are all on the same team.
There is nothing Gautam Adani will not do for money.€ In this sense, he is admirably dedicated to greed, so much so he has become its foremost caricature worthy of permanent enthronement.€ Mark this man’s name in the scriptures of eternity: There was nothing he did not do for the filthy lucre.
For the unfamiliar reader, the $218 billion Adani imperium, one specialising in transport, infrastructure, and mining, is vast, with far reaching feelers, prongs and tentacles that have made their mark in a number of countries.€ Along the way, Adani’s companies have made quite a name for themselves.€ Employment laws have been breached and treated with disdain.€ Broader human rights abuses have featured.€ Governments and regulators have been lied to.€ No environment is ecologically safe from the company’s activities, despite their assertions to the contrary.
Meta Platforms Inc. is reportedly planning more layoffs in March as part of an efficiency drive after having laid off around 11,000 employees in November. The Financial Times, referencing employees familiar with the situation, Saturday reported that Meta has delayed finalizing multiple teams’ budgets ahead of the planned cuts.
A pro-Beijing heavyweight has said it would not be suitable to begin legislative work to enact Hong Kong’s own security law this year, citing the city’s need for post-pandemic recovery and the run-up to Taiwan presidential elections.
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Thai police said romance scams reported last month mainly targeted women in their 40s.
“Together, we did what America always does at our best. We led.”, said US President Joe Biden as he summed up American foreign policy in his 2023 State of the Union Address. However, what remained conspicuously absent from one the most important events in Washington’s political calendar was any reference to the Taliban.
Israel's far-right Security Cabinet on Sunday approved the immediate "legalization" of nine Jewish-only settler outposts in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem over what critics called the empty objection of benefactor the United States and in violation of international law—under which all Israeli settler colonies are illegal.
A protest took place in Khabarovsk in support of the former governor, Sergey Furgal, who was recently sentenced to 22 years in prison for allegedly ordering business-related contract killings in 2004 and 2005.
A regional court in Vladimir dismissed a case brought by military officer Farhad Dzhabbarov, who was asking to be removed from the military register and stripped of his rank because he disagrees with the actions of the Russian authorities.
Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world. 1.Mink farms for the chop? For some reason the MSM have turned their collective fire on Mink farming this week. Apparently mink farms are dangerous …
An interesting essay by New York Law School professor Rebecca Roiphe. A taste:Many, if not most, students have bought into academic lessons peddled in the 1980s and '90s as an outgrowth of what's often called critical legal theory. Among them: Law is not a neutral institution designed to ensure the peaceful resolution of disputes in…
President Cyril Ramaphosa presented his State of the Nation Address (SONA) on 9 February, when he concentrated on four elements that Concern South African most: 1) load shedding, 2) unemployment, 3) poverty and the rising cost of living, and 4) crime and corruption.
Cyprus voters on Sunday elected the former foreign minister Nikos Christodoulides as the next president of the small EU member state, with his rival conceding defeat and congratulating him.
Former legislator Au Nok-hin, one of the 47 pro-democracy figures charged in a landmark national security case, has begun his testimony as the first prosecution witness at the trial of his 16 co-defendants.
Shuttered independent Hong Kong media outlet Stand News published op-eds about the pro-democracy camp’s 2020 unofficial primary election based on “public interest” and the importance of the issue, a court has heard, as the sedition trial against the platform’s former top editors continued. The prosecution’s questioning of the former chief editor of Stand News Chung […]
Opposition supporters in Albania Saturday took part in anti government protests€ in opposition of Prime Minister Edi Rama.€ During the demonstrations, protestors were seen congregating by the main government building and throwing smoke bombs as they called for Rama to resign as prime minister.
After seeing promising results in Eastern Europe, Google will initiate a new campaign in Germany that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation.
The tech giant plans to release a series of short videos highlighting the techniques common to many misleading claims. The videos will appear as advertisements on platforms like Facebook, YouTube or TikTok in Germany. A similar campaign in India is also in the works.
It's an approach called pre-bunking, which involves teaching people how to spot false claims before they encounter them. The strategy is gaining support among researchers and tech companies.
The Hamburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution warned against joining the demonstration. The radical Islamic network Muslim Interaktiv (MI), which has the same ideology as the terrorist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT), was behind the protest. “Anyone who takes part in this demonstration stands side by side with enemies of the constitution who want to enforce a form of society incompatible with our free democratic basic order,” it said in advance.
Reports of scholars being retired early or dismissed indicate that the Iranian government has ordered a cleansing of academia in the wake of protests that have gripped the country since September. Demonstrations were triggered by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, who was accused of wearing her hijab “improperly”.
“We can expect more expulsions of students and faculty and a more conservative academic curriculum in the coming months,” said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, author of Iranian Intellectuals and the West and vice-provost of Missouri University of Science and Technology.
Paris' defence minister on Sunday condemned the latest instalment of Marvel's Black Panther franchise, which depicts French troops caught trying to steal resources belonging to the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda.
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“It’s only Voice of Democracy that speaks about the truth," a protester said.
A Bangladesh migrant has been arrested in Italy for kidnapping, imprisoning, beating, and starving his 20-year-old daughter. The 52-year-old father was “punishing” his daughter for having a relationship with a young man he disapproved of. The father wanted the daughter to have an Islamic arranged marriage with a boy he had chosen in Bangladesh.
Anna Rivina, the founder of the Russian anti-domestic violence advocacy group Nasiliu.net (“No to Violence”), has been denied entry to Georgia, where she’s been living since leaving Russia, the independent news outlet Holod reported on Sunday night.
Access to abortion has been decimated in the United States since June when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and took away our right to control our own bodies. Laws banning abortion are now in effect in more than a dozen states, denying more than 20 million people of reproductive age access to essential health care. And as hideous as this is, we know that is only the latest step in their plan to ban abortion and other essential health care nationwide.
By David Story / Labor Notes Unionism has seen a resurgence in popularity the past few years. The problem is, it’s very difficult to get our members organizing in their communities when they hate the way our leadership (I use that word loosely) is operating. Our unions shouldn’t be, and I’d argue weren’t meant to […]
Thousands of Israelis protested outside parliament Monday against the government's controversial judicial reform plan, which aims to give lawmakers substantially more control over the supreme court.
"It's a big, complex question," said Fredrik Jejdling when asked about his organization's current stance on open radio access network (RAN) technology. Jejdling manages Ericsson's networks business, which generates about 70% of company revenues. A noisy infant today, open RAN is often depicted as one of the biggest future threats to this business. Even Ericsson believes it will account for about a fifth of RAN market sales by the end of this decade.
The number and types of firms operating in an industry and the nature and degree of competition in the market for the goods and services…
A lower court had previously forced the Finnish food company Pouttu to change the names of its plant-based balls and burgers. The burgers were given a reprieve by the Supreme Administrative Court.
Russian online streaming services will lose access to Disney’s library of films when their current contact with the U.S. entertainment firms expires in March, Vedomosti reported. [...]
Copyright holders are doing all they can to dissuade people from using the popular pirate streaming app PikaShow. In addition to criminal referrals, this also includes efforts to remove PikaShow references from Google's search results. This isn't without collateral damage, as TorrentFreak's news reports are mistakenly flagged too.
The Australian government has released the 2022 edition of its Consumer Survey on Online Copyright Infringement. At 159 pages it's a big read, but in the spirit of showman P.T. Barnum, it has something for everyone. Almost 90% of the most dedicated Aussie consumers obtain content strictly legally, but it can also be argued that 40% of the population are pirates.
In which I discuss recent repairs and upgrades I've done for several of my devices.
Written on a MacBook Pro while listening to the Bugsnax Original Soundtrack by Seth Parker.
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For the past several years I've been using a 45€ W MacBook Air charger for my Macbook Pro, because the real 85€ W MacBook Pro charger I had got burnt out from a power surge or something at a previous school; new ones cost $80 so I never got it. But using the much lower power charger meant that my comptuer would often still die even when plugged in, and it ruined the battery life because it was acting like an online UPS where the battery was being constantly charged and drained.
Mirrors are what powers all distros: they're a (de)centralized solution for downloading pre-compiled binaries and scripts for your operating system.
Another month, another... something. Still wrestling with the issue at work, still killing my mental health, to the point of driving me to want to quit. I feel like I'm close to a solution now. But being essentially the one person in my field, I also have to shoulder all of the projects related to that. I'm in over my head. I've told my boss that I need another person working with me, and the guy at the help desk that handles some of it is nice, but that's not a real solution.
So I had played like three seconds of Popeye on a home computer (guessing the C64) at a distant relative’s house and had two Game & Watches (Life Boat and a non-Nintendo space shooter, both of which I loved), but the first real video game I really played was Duck Tales.
Loved it, amazing game, kind of sad to start with one of the best games of all time since it was all downhill from there, but point of the story is that I play a couple of levels, get to Transylvania, start talking to Webby, and… I have no idea how to move forward. I was stuck on the same screen for an hour.
Because I didn’t know to press A to continue the dialogue.
I must’ve accidentally hit A without realizing it because I was stuck again the next time, a li’l bit shorter since that time I did figure it out.
In honor of World Give Up GitHub day, here’s a quick guide to how to serve up your own git repos.
In an empty directory readable from WWW (that has the URL you want your repo to have, for cloning) that you also can write to over SSH, run
git init --bare mv hooks/post-update.sample hooks/post-updateMake sure the directory has the permissions you want for web (world readable, not writable).
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.