Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 14/02/2023: Plasma 5.27 and Russia Builds M OS



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Giz ChinaA new operating system has been released in Russia

        The Russian software market has welcomed a new operating system called “M OS,” which is based on the Linux kernel. The operating system is specifically designed for use in educational institutions and is being developed by the Department of Information Technologies of the city of Moscow. The team responsible for the development of electronic services and IT systems in the capital has collaborated with Russian developers to create “M OS.”

        A team of 25 developers has worked on the development of “M OS”. And the distribution kit took six months to develop. The product is already supplied to Moscow schools as part of personal computers, laptops, and interactive panels. The Moscow Electronic School (MES) project team is supporting and developing “M OS.”

    • Server

      • Nicholas Tietz-SokolskyA systems design perspective on why chess.com's servers have been melting | nicholas@web

        January 2023 was a rough month if you wanted to play chess on the most popular chess website, chess.com. Their service has been experiencing an unprecedented amount downtime because of a huge influx of users. There have been days where it's all but unusable. It's frustrating as a user! It's also surely frustrating for the business behind the site.

        Chess has reached an all-time peak in popularity. In January 2023, Google search traffic exceeded the boom from the release of The Queen's Gambit. There's a huge influx of new or returning players, and they flock to the site with the obvious domain. Chess.com's app has hit #1 most downloaded free game on the iOS app store.

        Part of doing good systems design is planning for capacity. A general rule of thumb is that you should design a system for up to a certain amount of growth. Beyond some point, architectural requirements will be dramatically different. Planning for capacity does not mean planning for infinite capacity, but what may realistically happen.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Late Night Linux – Episode 216

        Canonical’s latest Ubuntu PR blunder, Mastodon and the fediverse are doing a lot better than some journalists seem to think, yet another telemetry row, the company behind Mycroft is struggling, KDE Korner, and more. €  News We now have a Discord server (as well as the Telegram group, Matrix room, and IRC channel).

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • KDEPlasma 5.27 Beta

          Today we are bringing you the preview version of KDE's Plasma 5.27 release. Plasma 5.27 Beta is aimed at testers, developers, and bug-hunters. As well as our lightweight and feature rich Linux Desktop this release adds a Bigscreen version of Plasma for use on televisions.

          To help KDE developers iron out bugs and solve issues, install Plasma 5.27 Beta and test run the features listed below. Please report bugs to our bug tracker.

          The final version of Plasma 5.27 will become available for the general public on the 14th of February.

        • 9to5LinuxKDE Plasma 5.27 LTS Desktop Is Out with New Welcome App, Tiling, and More

          Highlights of KDE Plasma 5.27 include a new Plasma Welcome app that helps newcomers to the KDE Plasma desktop environment easily and quickly configure various aspects like enabling Plasma Vaults, connecting their online accounts or mobile devices, adding more apps, etc.

          Another cool new feature in KDE Plasma 5.27 is tiling support for those with a large monitor. Tiling can be enabled and configured by pressing the Meta(Super)+T keyboard shortcut and there are three layouts to choose from. Windows can be placed in the tiled layout by holding Shift and dragging them to the edge of the screen until they stick.

        • Linux MagazineKDE Plasma 5.27 Slated for a Valentine's Day Release
        • KDEKDE Eco Handbook: "Applying The Blue Angel Criteria To Free Software"

          Today is "I ❤ Free Software!" day and KDE Eco is proud to announce the publication of the first edition of the measurement handbook "Applying The Blue Angel Criteria To Free Software: A Handbook To Certify Software As Sustainable".

          You can view the handbook at our website, where you can also download the PDF release for offline reading or for sharing with a friend or colleague.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Chromium

      • Mozilla

        • Niko Matsakis: Return type notation (send bounds, part 2)

          In theprevious post, I introduced the “send bound” problem, which refers to the need to add aSendbound to the future returned by an async function. I want to start talking about some of the ideas that have been floating around for how to solve this problem. I consider this a bit of an open problem, in that I think we know a lot of the ingredients, but there is a bit of a “delicate balance” to finding the right syntax and so forth. To start with, though, I want to introduce Return Type Notation, which is an idea that Tyler Mandry and I came up with for referring to the type returned by a trait method.

  • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • FSF

    • FSFI Love Free Software Day is here: Share your love, software, and a video

      The act of sharing takes effort because sharing anything requires us to take time out of our day to share with another person. It takes compassion because we must think of others and what their wants and/or needs may be. It also takes courage. This is because we must fight against our own doubt, battling against any feelings of failure or rejection. We must also courageously defend the freedom to share, as Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) threaten to erode people's ability and opportunities to share, even among those living under the same roof.

  • Programming/Development

    • Jussi PakkanenJussi Pakkanen: Plain C API design, the real world Kobayashi Maru test

      Designing APIs is hard. Designing good APIs that future people will not instantly classify as "total crap" is even harder. There are typically many competing requirements such as:

      • API stability
      • ABI stability (if you are into that sort of thing, some are not)
      • Maximize the amount of functionality supported
      • Minimize the number of functions exposed
      • Make the API as easy as possible to use
      • Make the API as difficult as possible to use incorrectly (preferably it should be impossible)
      • Make the API as easy as possible to use from scripting languages
    • Barry KaulerContinuing internationalization integrated into easy.sfs

      I posted about the abandonment of langpacks a couple of days ago:

      https://bkhome.org/news/202302/easysfs-internationalized-langpack-pets-abandoned.html

      The last couple of days there has been intense coding, implementing the details internationalization integrated into easy.sfs, or as a single "nls.sfs".

      Changes to /usr/local/petget/installpkg.sh, major changes to /usr/local/momanager/momanager, and in woofQ changes to 2createpackages and 3buildeasydistro....

    • Anders BorchSvelte Was Made By Vue Fans

      I actually like the declarative feel of Svelte. I just don't like that it reminds me of a product which endorses malware. I don't think that is something to want to emulate.

    • Reilly Tucker SiemensParsing TFTP in Rust

      For those who don't know, TFTP is the Trivial File Transfer Protocol, a simple means of reading and writing files over a network. Initially defined in the early 80s, the protocol was updated by RFC 1350 in 1992. In this post I'll only cover RFC 1350. Extensions like RFC 2347, which adds a 6th packet type, won't be covered.

    • University of TorontoThe case for atomic types in programming languages

      However, I feel that that the lie of atomic types is a genuine improvement in almost all cases, because of the increase in usability and safety. The problem with only having atomic operations is the same as with optional error checking; you have to remember to always use them, even if the types you're operating on can be used with ordinary operations. As we all know, people can forget this, or they can think that they're clever enough to use non-atomic operations in this one special circumstance that is surely harmless.

    • RachelMore than five whys and "layer eight" problems

      Perhaps you've heard of the OSI model of networking, where you have seven layers as a way to talk about what's going on in the "stack". I've seen some brilliantly snarky T-shirts that talk about "layer eight" and sometimes beyond as things like "corporate politics" and "management" and all of that good stuff.

      It turns out that when you start doing this root-cause analysis and really keep after it, the "squishy human realm" is actually the no-longer-hypothetical "layer eight" from those T-shirts.

    • New YorkerChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

      This analogy to lossy compression is not just a way to understand ChatGPT’s facility at repackaging information found on the Web by using different words. It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world. When we think about them this way, such hallucinations are anything but surprising; if a compression algorithm is designed to reconstruct text after ninety-nine per cent of the original has been discarded, we should expect that significant portions of what it generates will be entirely fabricated.

    • Vincent BernatBuilding a SQL-like language to filter flows

      Often, web interfaces expose a query builder to build such filters. I think combining a SQL-like language with an editor supporting completion, syntax highlighting, and linting is a better approach.

      The language parser is built with pigeon (Go) from a parsing expression grammar—or PEG. The editor component is CodeMirror (TypeScript).

    • Jussi PakkanenPlain C API design, the real world Kobayashi Maru test

      Designing APIs is hard. Designing good APIs that future people will not instantly classify as "total crap" is even harder. There are typically many competing requirements such as: [...]

    • ButtondownMaybe people do care about performance and reliability

      It’s well-established consensus that software is slower and more bloated than it was 20, 40 years ago. One explanation is that software engineers don’t care about their work. Another is that it’s the interplay of a lot of different factors and blaming it on apathetic devs is a convenient way to avoid understanding the actual problems.

    • Python

      • Didier StevensUpdate: xor-kpa.py Version 0.0.7

        I added extra plaintexts for the modulus of Cobalt Strike’s public RSA key. xor-kpa_V0_0_7.zip (http)MD5: FB8155E56234648CC3AFFD890BFE9043SHA256: 069DCA2A1901D448DBF2CF202B5CE49846EFCBAACB73BF35B20AA085AAB31BA9

    • Rust


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Fresh IBM Layoffs Reported in Europe and North America, Jobs Allegedly Moved to South Asia (Low Salaries)
As usual, IBM does not talk about this
Microsoft Has Not Much Left to Show Investors, Shares Fall Almost 20%
It's not even clear how Microsoft makes money anymore
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 11, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Crossbow murders: prevention, missed opportunities
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
This yt-dlp Bug Report Shows Us That the Future of YouTube is DRM and It's Time to Leave (yt-dlp Should Also Leave Microsoft GitHub, Which Censors YouTube Downloaders)
GAFAM traps aren't "free hosting"; they herd us all into a world of tollbooths and locks, surveillance and planned obsolescence (you own nothing, you only rent)
Ukraine Didn't Take Twitter/X Down, Microsoft or Windows Likely Did
There are many debunkings (to likely false accusations), but won't that just be another example of Windows TCO, exacerbated externally in the form of Windows botnets?
The Fall of the Open Source Initiative (OSI): Worse Than What the Media Has Focused on, Losing Sight of Who Owns and Runs the OSI
Members' dues are less than 3% of the income; where does the 97+ percent come from other than Microsoft?
Apple Seems to Have Run Out of Things to Boast About After Apple Vision Pro Failed Spectacularly
With "Apple Intelligence", Apple has finally named a product after what target customers lack
Slopwatch: Reckless FUD and Machine-Generated Spam from LinuxSecurity.com, cybersecuritynews.com, and gbhackers.com (Google Boosts LLM Slop About "Linux")
Google and so-called 'Google News' continue to yield anti-Linux misinformation
Gemini Links 11/03/2025: 'Chainsaw Politicians' and Proprietary Software Hell
Links for the day
Links 11/03/2025: Covid-19 5 Years On and Violence in Syria
Links for the day
Links 11/03/2025: NASA Besieged and "DOGE Has Become What It Claimed To Destroy"
Links for the day
Illuminating Injustice is Critical When Reckless Microsofters and Law Firms Try to Silence Reporters of Violence Against Women
I want to clarify that I'm well within my right (and not running afoul of any rules) by explaining what goes on here
EPO Central Staff Committee: "The Strategy of the Office Lacks Transparency and Cannot be Understood"
Microsoft and the EPO violate data protection laws
Links 11/03/2025: Spring and Misfin Server
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 10, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, March 10, 2025
Latvia (and Lithuania) Stepping Away From GAFAM, Microsoft
Windows becomes unessential as Android and GNU/Linux rise
Microsoft Layoffs Are Infectious (Don't Get Acquired or Become a Partner)
It seems like companies choosing to become "buddies" with Microsoft are dooming themselves and their products
The Fall of the Open Source Initiative (OSI): The OSI Election is Rigged, Biased Against People Who Oppose the Openwashing of GPL-Violating Bots Operated by Microsoft for Profit (OSI Gets Paid to Promote This)
they reckon that pretence of calm would serve them best, helped by puff pieces
A Closer Look Inside the EPO, Courtesy of Benoît Battistelli's Submissive Lapdogs Roberta Romano-Götsch and Elodie Bergot
new report comes from the Local Staff Committee Munich (LSCMN)
In Vietnam, statCounter Sees Microsoft Windows Falling Below 7% "Market Share"
Can Microsoft still demand $500 or more per Windows licence?
Links 10/03/2025: Staff Strikes, Mass Layoffs in Gaming Industry
Links for the day
Gemini Links 10/03/2025: "Eat The Rich" and Two-Year Anniversary of the 'Space Elevator' Orbit (Like 'Webring')
Links for the day
Links 10/03/2025: Small Web Praised, LLM Chatbots Exposed as Worse Than Useless Again
Links for the day
A Call for GNU/Linux and BSD Developers to Unite Against GAFAM and the Regime They Empower
We have long encouraged and continue to encourage people who value Software Freedom to altogether boycott GAFAM
The Ludicrous Mythology of Commonality as Signal of Value, Merit, Popularity
Devalue what's true, promote marketing?
[Video] Richard Stallman on the Four Essential Freedoms (Manuel Cuda News, 2025)
Added to a channel several days ago by Manuel Cuda News
Gemini Links 10/03/2025: Realisation About Young People, Punks, and Discord IPO
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 09, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, March 09, 2025