Ah, gentle reader, we find ourselves once again at that juncture of the week we call Who, Me? in which your fellow Regizens' tales of technical not-quite-competence brighten an otherwise dull Monday.
This week our story comes from "Charlie" who, some quarter of a century ago, was working on his PhD at "a large tertiary education institution on the south coast." The south coast of what? He doesn't say. Charlie is an enigma.
Charlie shared an office space with four other students, each of whom had their own desk with their own computer. Charlie's PC was running Windows NT4, but his dearest wish was to run Debian Linux like all the cool rebellious kids.
The problem was that the Debian installation required "something like a dozen CD-ROMs." These could be had by downloading from a federation of servers called Sunsite, which had an outpost nearby. Unfortunately, the internet connection in Charlie's office was slow and unreliable at the best of times, even when it wasn't being shared four ways.
It’s a debate that’s been going on since Android came onto the scene: Does simple use of the Linux kernel qualify an operating system to be a bona fide Linux operating system?
Several weeks back I came across some stats on operating system usage that showed Linux use at 3.08%, which is actually a pretty large number for Linux historically, so I wrote an article about it on July 13. After it was published, I did my usual shtick and posted a link to it on my favorite social platform, which is Mastodon.
Inkscape 1.3 is on it’s way to rawhide and Fedora 38. Particularly of note is that because of a test failure on i686, I’m taking this opportunity to end builds for that architecture. Assuming the change is approved, LibreOffice will be doing the same as of Fedora 39.
You’ve migrated over from Windows or Mac OS X to the wonderful world of Linux. You’ve selected a Linux distro (after a bit of fruitful distro hopping), chosen a desktop environment, and studied the basic Linux commands. Or you’ve been using Linux for decades, know the operating system like the back of your hand. Whatever your level of experience, you want some really useful free utilities. Software that enriches your workflow, offers new opportunities, and allows you to tap into new innovations. This article picks the finest open source software to maximize the goodness of Linux.
We frequently mention that customization is important. It empowers users and can serve as a way to get people to feel confident doing more complicated things on their computers. It’s a lot easier to think you can learn to code if you’ve already fixed a bunch of little annoyances on your computer.
The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. There’s a wide range of software we’ve recommended. There’s genuinely useful utilities, productivity software, and much more. All to download for nothing, and with full access to the source code. They offer great opportunities to enrich your computing experience.
Bioinformatics is very important in the field of human genome research. It has become crucial for large-scale measurement technologies such as DNA sequencing, microarrays, and metabolomics. The field of bioinformatics has been aided significantly by Linux-based hardware and software. There are a number of Linux distributions which offer an integrated bioinformatics workstation. The popular distribution Bio-Linux packages hundreds of bioinformatics programs spanning a number of different fields.
There’s a wide selection of Linux bioinformatics tools released under an open source license. This article identifies our favorite tools which are extremely useful for anyone interested in sequence analysis, molecular modelling, molecular dynamics, phylogenetic analysis and more. We hope this feature offers a useful resource for biologists.
Franz is your messaging app for WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram and many many more.
RSSOwl is a powerful open-source application to organize, search, and read feeds. It extremely has powerful search features and offers synchronization with Google reader and more.
Raven is a open source desktop news reader with flexible settings to optimize your experience. No login is required, and no personal data is collected.
Feed Compass is an open-source application that enables you to find and subscribe to RSS Feeds in your favorite RSS Reader and is built with Swift. It also has numerous default feeds, it supports drag-and-drop feeds to native RSS readers.
Manufacturing software refers to technology solutions that help manufacturers manage various aspects of their operations, from supply chain management to inventory control to production scheduling. These solutions are designed to optimize the manufacturing process and workflow management, improve quality performance, and ultimately, increase profitability.
slap is a Sublime-like terminal-based text editor that strives to make editing from the terminal easier.
Much of this based from the incredible guide by user (and my mentor) Juippis and his work over at The ultimate testing system with lxd. In fact most of what comes next comes directly from Juippis himself.
If this, then that else something else. Doesn't make sense? It will after you learn about the if-else statements in bash shell scripting.
In many cases, auto-suspend is a convenient feature. It prevents screen burn and preserves power when you aren’t actively using your computer. If you work publicly, it can even protect your computer from snooping opportunists who may try to steal sensitive data while you’re away.
That’s not to say that auto-suspend is completely useful, however. It can frequently serve as a nuisance and interrupt your workflow, such as when you’re attempting to read a long webpage or actively run an application in the background. In these situations, disabling auto-suspend will allow you to make the best of your Linux system.
So I joined the Bitsummit 2023 in Kyoto, Japan, on Friday the 14th of July, about a week ago now.
The Steam Deck has something of a stranglehold on the handheld scene, with its more affordable price putting competing options to shame. However, a new challenger approaches, after modders have worked their magic in transforming the Nintendo Switch into a portable PC of sorts.
YouTubers Geekerwan have modded a Nintendo Switch to run Linux, opening the device up to the possibility of playing PC games. On top of this, they also managed to overclock the console in order to improve performance.
I have posted in the past couple of days about 'packages-templates' folder in woofQ:
Folder packages-templates has about 180 .desktop files, and most of those are English-only. I wrote a couple of scripts that will translate all of these .desktop files: [...]
I posted yesterday about KeePassXC crashing with "illegal instruction" when had v4 encrypted database. From a bit of reading of KeePassXC documentation, it seems that the v3.1 database does not use argon2, v4 does, which is a big clue.
The keepassxc binary is linked with libargon2.so.1, so it looks like the argon2 library is the culprit. I booted up on my Compaq Presario, with Intel Core2 CPU, and yes, the 'argon2' binary crashes: [...]
Forum member Caramel reported this. The menu has "Setup -> Default Applications Chooser" (or in the "System" tab in EasySetup); however, after a version update or change of SFS layers, these user-specified choices are lost.
The operation to move all of the icons from the desktop into the tray, and back, is hidden away in EasyJWM. I have now made it much more obvious.
There is now /usr/sbin/moveicons and /usr/share/applications/moveicons.desktop, so it will appear in the menu. It is now also listed in the "Desktop" tab of EasySetup: [...]
If you click the "kirkstone" icon, the complete EasyOS desktop will run in a container. Inappropriate entries are removed from the menu; however, the same was not done with EasySetup.
Click on "setup" icon on the desktop and EasySetup runs. This now will have reduced entries when run in a container. In fact, the entire "EasyOS" tab is empty: [...]
The EasyOS Kirkstone-series is built from packages compiled in a fork of OpenEmbedded/Yocto. There are some great packages in that repository, installable via PKGget.
The problem is that they are "off the radar" for users. For example, there is Scribus desktop publishing and OBS Studio video recording and live streaming. Users just don't realise they are there, and instead look for them as AppImage or Flatpak. The native apps are far superior.
I have wanted to do this for years, finally it has happened. A bit of background explanation is required...
woofQ has scripts '0setup', '1download', '2createpackages' and '3buildeasydistro', that are executed in sequence. '2createpackages' expands each package, be it .deb, .rpm, .pet, .tar.xz, or whatever, to a folder and processes it ready for '3buildeasydistro' to copy them all into sandbox3/rootfs-complete and hence create the 'easy.sfs' file.
When I cut down Roger's (radky in the forum) JWMDesk to have functionality only for JWM, I also took out the module to manager entries in the menu -- hide or unhide them.
There was a report in the forum that it is missing, so I have put it back in: [...]
I posted about 'sudo-sh', a replacement for sudo:
Then about electron-based apps ignoring the setuid bit onexecutables:
https://bkhome.org/news/202306/electron-ignores-suid-on-binaries.html
I have implemented a workaround. /usr/bin/sudo-sh.c now has this code at the beginning: [...]
We have talk already about how easy it is to adapt to OpenSUSE Leap when coming from CentOS. In this blog post, we will provide some guidance on how to plan and prepare for an actual migration and what considerations we should take into account.
Package reviews are an important part of how Fedora delivers well-built RPMs. When one contributor wants to add a new package, another packager has to check it first. It’s how we all hold each other to the high standard we’ve set for ourselves. Of course, that means to add a new package to the repos, you first have to find someone to do the review. Last week, I added a new way to do that: the Package Review Swaps category on Fedora Discussion. Huge thanks to Felix Kaechele for the idea and initial process design.
This is a summary of the work done on initiatives by the CPE Team. Each quarter CPE Team together with CentOS and Fedora community representatives choose initiatives that will be being worked on in this quarter.
Red Hat strives to get better at what we do, faster at how we do it, while maintaining high quality results. In modern software development, that means focusing on security as early as possible into our software development process, and continuously driving improvements by listening and acting upon early feedback in the Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL). One important tool toward that goal is the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), a community-developed taxonomy of flaws.
As the IT security landscape continues to evolve, so do the practices that IT organizations use to mitigate threats and maintain a more secure operating environment. Staying ahead of attackers and minimizing the cost of defense requires constant and appropriate reflection and analysis to improve processes and strategies. In this series, we explain what a CWE is, share our background on CWE collection, and explain how Red Hat has evolved our usage of CWEs over the past few years.
It’s been nearly a decade since Google released Android 4.4 KitKat, which brought memory improvements, initial support for identifying the source of phone calls from unknown numbers, the introduction of the “OK Google” voice keyword, an immersive mode for apps and games, and other features… some of which have survived through the years in one form or another.
But it’s a 10-year-old operating system that no longer receives security updates. Fewer and fewer modern apps support KitKat. And now Google has announced that the Google Play Services framework will no longer support Android 4.4. Starting in August, new versions of the framework will only run on Android 5 or later.
Banana Pi launched today, a mini router board built on the MediaTek MT7986 wireless networking System-on-Chip optimized for routers. The Banana Pi BPI-R3 Mini Router Board also supports wireless connectivity and starts at ~$78.95.
The product announcement indicates that this new router board integrates the MediaTek Filogic 830 SoC with a 12nm process.
ARBOR’s ELIT-1060 triple display terminal is a rugged fanless mini PC powered by an Intel Celeron N6210 dual-core Elkhart Lake processor with two HDMI 2.0 ports and one DisplayPort connector each supporting up to 4Kp60 resolution. The system comes with a 4GB DDR4 SO-DIMM, 32GB eMMC flash, two 2.5GbE Ethernet ports, an M.2 socket for wireless expansion, several USB 3.0/2.0 ports, and one RS232/422/485 serial port. While the company markets it for “high-intensity digital signage applications”, I could also see it being used in various other applications thanks to its networking capabilities and expansion ports.
Intel AVX10 SIMD instructions will succeed AVX-512 instructions with AVX10.2 adding support for Intel E-cores to bring multimedia and AI acceleration to low-power cores, while the earlier AVX10.1 will add version-base enumeration and make 512-bit instructions optional, but still only work on Intel (Xeon) P-cores. The new Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 10 (AVX10) architecture was unveiled in an update to the Advanced Performance Extensions (Intel APX) bringing AVR-512-like support to new hybrid processors with P-cores and E-cores, as well as potentially their entry-level versions with E-cores only.
STMicro STHS34PF80 is a new IR sensor designed for IoT and Smart Home devices requiring motion and/or presence detection that offers an alternative to traditional passive infrared (PIR) sensors and is mostly useful for building automation. The latest IR sensor from STMicro contains thermal transistors (MOSFETs) that can not only detect motion but also stationary objects, something that’s not feasible with conventional PIR detectors that require motion for object detection.
Snooping in on satellites is getting to be quite popular, enough so that the number of people advancing the state of the art — not to mention the wealth of satellites transmitting signals in the clear — has almost made the hobby too easy. An SDR, a homebrew antenna, and some off-the-shelf software, and you too can see weather satellite images on your screen in real time.
Huawei is preparing to officially announce HarmonyOS 4.0 in August, the company just confirmed in a Weibo post. An image of some ArkTS code, written to return “What to expect in August” and a big digit “4” points to next month, when the annual HDC (Huawei Developers Conference) will take place.
At the heart of all computers is a clock, a dedicated timepiece ensuring that all of the parts of the computer are synchronized and can work together to execute the instructions that the computer receives. Clock speeds for most modern off-the-shelf computers and smartphones operate around a billion cycles per second, and even clocks that tick at a human-dizzying speed of a million times per second have been around since at least the 1970s. But there’s no reason a computer can’t run at a much slower speed, as [Greg] demonstrates in this video where he slows down a 6502 processor to a single clock cycle per second.
After laying off nearly 900 employees last year, Biogen is trimming its headcount once again.
In a news release on July 25, the biotech company announced plans to cut around 1,000 jobs, or 11 per cent of its workforce, as part of its new “Fit for Growth” program.
The reduction comes as Biogen prepares to launch its recently approved Alzheimer’s drug, Leqembi, in the U.S.
“Biogen’s business is in transition. Accordingly, we have taken a bottom-up view to shift our resources to the areas of greatest value creation,” President and CEO Christopher Viehbacher said in the release.
Just yesterday, I was a suit-wearing Musk-eteer, deep in thoughts of “wow, what a world we live in. With artificial intelligence (AI) definitely sluiced into the public consciousness with good intentions, and the continued persistence of cloud computing trading on the thrown scrap of convenience and cost-effectiveness against the dark ‘service-as-a-service’ whims of any company comically evil enough to enter into a consortium.”
Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-git and renderdoc), Red Hat (edk2, kernel, kernel-rt, and kpatch-patch), Slackware (kernel), SUSE (firefox, libcap, openssh, openssl-1_1, python39, and zabbix), and Ubuntu (cinder, ironic, nova, python-glance-store, python-os-brick, frr, graphite-web, and openssh).
Supposedly Google is starting a pilot program of disabling Internet connectivity from employee computers:
The company will disable internet access on the select desktops, with the exception of internal web-based tools and Google-owned websites like Google Drive and Gmail. Some workers who need the internet to do their job will get exceptions, the company stated in materials.
Google has not confirmed this story.
Details have emerged about a now-patched flaw in OpenSSH that could be potentially exploited to run arbitrary commands remotely on compromised hosts under specific conditions.
"This vulnerability allows a remote attacker to potentially execute arbitrary commands on vulnerable OpenSSH's forwarded ssh-agent," Saeed Abbasi, manager of vulnerability research at Qualys, said in an analysis last week.
Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, economies around the world were affected a lot and due to lockdown, almost brought everything from working and studies to a halt, but only for a brief time. People were able to overcome the difficulty fast as they make good use of personal computers and smartphones to get things done.
However, not many are aware of the dangers of straying out of safe zones of the Internet and easily trusting unknown people on the web. And, end up infecting their systems. In the latest instance, the state-run Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has warned a new ransomware Akira is on the prowl and is a threat to Windows and Linux-based PCs.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta of the District of Columbia has ruled that Covington & Burling must disclose to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission the names of seven clients whose information may have been exposed in a 2020 cyberattack that impacted the firm.
“Covington shall produce to the Commission the names of the seven clients as to whom it has not been able to rule out that a threat actor accessed material nonpublic information,” Mehta wrote in his opinion Monday.
The Norwegian National Security Authority (NSM) has confirmed that attackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Ivanti’s Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) solution to breach a software platform used by 12 ministries in the country.
The Norwegian Security and Service Organization (DSS) said on Monday that the cyberattack did not affect Norway’s Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
IBM Security’s newly-released annual Cost of a Data Breach Report says that the global average cost of a data breach reached $4,45-million in 2023 – an all-time high for the report and a 15% increase over the last three years.
Detection and escalation costs jumped 42% over this same time frame, representing the highest portion of breach costs and indicating a shift towards more complex breach investigations.
According to the 2023 IBM report, businesses are divided in how they plan to handle the increasing cost and frequency of data breaches. The study found that while 95% of studied organizations have experienced more than one breach, breached organizations were more likely to pass incident costs onto consumers (57%) than to increase security investments (51%).
The details are scant—the article is based on a “heavily redacted” contract—but the New York subway authority is using an “AI system” to detect people who don’t pay the subway fare.
Joana Flores, an MTA spokesperson, said the AI system doesn’t flag fare evaders to New York police, but she declined to comment on whether that policy could change. A police spokesperson declined to comment.
If we spent just one-tenth of the effort we spend prosecuting the poor on prosecuting the rich, it would be a very different world.
Snap, owner of Snapchat and the first major social platform to report quarterly results, on Tuesday said second-quarter sales slid 4% from a year earlier to $1.1 billion, narrowly beating expectations from analysts surveyed by FactSet. That followed a 7% decline in first-quarter revenue that was the first in Snap’s history as a listed company.
Microsoft’s Revenue Growth Likely Slowed Last Quarter Amid Sluggish Corporate Demand
Microsoft’s revenue growth is expected to have slowed down in the last quarter due to weak corporate demand. Analysts are closely watching the software company’s results for signs of how the growing interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting its business.
According to analysts surveyed FactSet, Microsoft’s sales are predicted to have risen approximately 7% in the three months leading up to June, compared to a growth rate of 12% in the same period last year.
For the fiscal year ending in June, analysts anticipate that Microsoft’s revenue growth will be less than 7%, which is a significant decline compared to the 18% growth in the previous fiscal year, marking the slowest rate in seven years.
While Microsoft has been relatively sheltered from the tech downturn due to its revenue primarily coming from companies rather than advertising and consumer spending, it has still been affected the end of pandemic trends. The company recently announced layoffs of over 1,000 employees, separate from previous companywide layoffs.
Bain Capital has agreed to acquire 90% of Adani Capital and Adani Housing, it announced in a press release Sunday (July 23). The transaction will buy out 100% of the Adani family’s private investments in the company.
Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney says the proposed Indigenous voice would be a two-way relationship that’s key to solving long-running issues.
As campaigning ahead of the referendum ramps up, Ms Burney said the dynamic between government and the proposed body would be based on trust.
The fallout from Robodebt continues, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accusing predecessor Scott Morrison of lacking contrition over the affair.
Federal police and the national anti-corruption watchdog are considering civil and criminal evidence against unnamed individuals in relation to the tarnished debt collection scheme run by the Morrison government.
Jacob Mchangama (of Justitia, and now a Research Professor at Vanderbilt) has a detailed item about it; an excerpt: In 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt, serving as the first Chairperson of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, was involved in a bitter€ dispute€ about the limits of free speech.
Prisoners refused food, demanding changes to solitary confinement. Now they are pushing to end the practice altogether.
On 22 July, AutoStore and Ocado announced a complete settlement of all claims between the companies in their global patent dispute, avoiding further litigation and associated costs.
On July 14, 2023, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) entered a final rejection of all claims of U.S. Patent 10,726,822, owned and asserted by SoundStreak Texas LLC, an NPE and entity of Quest Patent Research Corporation.
Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Vibhor Dimri, was awarded $2,000 for his prior art submission on U.S. Patent 8,035,644, owned by Douglas G. Richardson. The patent was formerly owned by Cine Graphic Solutions, an NPE and a subsidiary of Strategic Intellectual Solutions, LLC.
On July 21, 2023, just five weeks after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the USPTO granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,793,336, owned and asserted by Mobile Data Technologies LLC, an NPE.
Introduction On 17 July 2023, the English Court of Appeal handed down its decision in a dispute between J.C. Bamford (JCB) and Manitou about the confidentiality of information disclosed in the course of litigation between JCB and Manitou relating to the validity and infringement of certain of JCB’s patents.
My British colleague has already commented brilliantly on the UK ruling in this case from the point of view of plausibility (see here). For my part, I’d like to comment the French ruling in the same case, which takes the opposite view to the UK decision.
United Therapeutics Corp. v. Liquidia Technologies, Inc., 2022-2217, 2023-1021 (Fed. Cir. July 24, 2023)
United Therapeutics sued Liquidia for infringing two patents€ covering the treatment of pulmonary hypertension using the drug treprostinil (US10716793) and a purified form of the drug itself (US9593066).€ The patentee won on the treatment patent but lost on composition patent, with the district court holding that the broader composition claims were anticipated while the narrower claims were not infringed.€ Both sides appealed, and the Federal Circuit affirmed on all grounds.