Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 2/8/2021: Open Science in France and Zoom Pays to Settle Privacy Violations



  • GNU/Linux

    • Games

      • Orbiter Space Flight Simulator goes open source | GamingOnLinux

        Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is a classic comprehensive 3D space flight simulator and the developer has recently made it open source as they've haven't had enough time for it.

        Worth noting that currently it only supports Windows, and it's a little on the older side with it using DirectX 7. However, since it's now open source under the MIT license, this gives it a much better chance of seeing more developers come along to potential upgrade it and bring it to more platforms like we've seen happen to other projects. There's already some options being talked about to make it more cross-platform friendly.

      • Iron Gate tease more of what's coming to Valheim in Hearth & Home | GamingOnLinux

        Sounds like development on the co-op survival game Valheim is progressing well, with the first major upgrade Hearth & Home currently on schedule for release this quarter. Hopefully then we will see Hearth & Home before the end of September, if all continues going well.

        [...]

        This is in addition to what they already announced previously including: darkwood roofs and window hatches; new cooking station extensions like a spice rack, butcher table, pots and pans; tweaks to how stamina and health affect combat to allow for more playstyles; a bunch of new foods like Eyescream, Shocklate smoothie, various wolf meats, and more plus onions you can plant.

      • Top 16 Best Android Games Under 20 MB For 2021 (Download)

        Many games are available on the Google Playstore but finding the perfect small size game with good graphics and best stress reliever is not that easy as it seems oh and action genre too! Follow through as we have listed 16 best Android games under 20 MB that you can download and play.

      • Space sandbox game Avorion has a huge 2.0 Beta available now

        Avorion is a single-player or online co-op space survival sandbox game, one where you construct your ships with individual blocks and go explore the galaxy. It's fantastic and is rated highly by users too and now they're getting close to a big free update with the 2.0 Beta.

        The list of what's new and improved is a long one. There's a whole new progression system, which they say is designed to challenge you. "The new progression is meant to challenge you on your way to the center of the galaxy. Players will be required to prove themselves in a new area before they can get their hands on the new building knowledge. But if you don't like that, you can just go for Avorion Classic!".

      • Valve talk about learning from mistakes with the upcoming Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

        As we all know the Steam Machines didn't go anywhere and Valve have clearly learned a lot from it, as they spoke about in a recent video from IGN (as IGN continue to have the exclusives on this).

        Valve are no stranger to hardware at this point of course. They didn't just do the failed Steam Machines but also produced the Steam Link, Steam Controller, worked with HTC for the original Vive and they also have their Valve Index VR headset too. By now, they have hopefully enough experience to know exactly what they need to make a success out of the Steam Deck and so far everything is looking rather positive on that.

        Designer Greg Coomer actually mentioned how "we actually did start out by working with other companies and seeing what we could make happen with partnerships, but it became clear we started prototyping and more and more we just started creating devices to solve problems for customers ourselves and really the Steam Deck feels like the culmination of a lot of that earlier work". Coomer goes on to directly mention their earlier stuff like the Steam Machines, Steam Link and also the Steam Controller.

      • Steam Survey: Linux Gaming Market Share Climbs to 1% For First Time in Years

        Valve has today published its monthly update for Steam Hardware Survey, with an update for July. Besides the regular fluctuations in the market share of CPU and GPU vendors, there is another interesting change slowly happening. According to the newest data from the survey, gaming on Linux has climbed to 1.0% for the first time in years.

        Back in 2018, Valve introduced Proton, a technology that translates Windows-specific API calls to Linux equivalents, enabling thousands of Linux gamers to play the games that they wanted to, but were unable because they weren't using Windows OS.

        At the same time, many Linux gamers were trying out the Proton software and the market share of Linux gamers managed to climb to around 2% of a much smaller Steam customer base. However, after this testing period ended, only 0.8-0.9% of gamers were still using Linux distros, and the percentages stayed within that range for some time.

      • Lutris game manager 0.5.9-beta1 is out adding Epic Games Store support

        It's been a while since we had a new major release of Lutris, the free and open source game manager that allows you to bundle together all of your games in a single application.

        Now available as a Beta, Lutris 0.5.9 is the biggest release for some time and adds in initial support for downloading and running games from the Epic Games Store. Much like the Heroic Games Launcher, since Epic don't support Linux all downloads will be Windows versions you need to then run through a compatibility layer (but Lutris sorts that for you).

      • Linux has finally hit that almost mythical 1% user share on Steam again

        The day I'm sure many have been waiting for, and just as many probably thought it wouldn't happen. Linux has finally hit 1% again on the Steam Hardware Survey.

        Not the first time, in fact years ago when Steam for Linux was pretty fresh we actually saw it remain over 1% for a while. That didn't last long though, and it's been bouncing around at sub 1% for multiple years now as we've been showing on our dedicated Steam Tracker.

    • Distributions

      • IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

        • Next Open NeuroFedora meeting: 02 August 1300 UTC

          Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 02 August at 1300UTC in #fedora-neuro on IRC (Libera.chat). The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend. You can join us over...

        • Use OpenCV on Fedora Linux ‒ part 1

          The technology world changes daily and the demands for computer vision, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are increasing. The technology that allows computers and mobile phones to see their surroundings is called computer vision. Work on re-creating a human eye started in the 50s. Since then, computer vision technology has come a long way. Computer vision has already made its way to our mobile phones via different applications. This article will introduce OpenCV on Fedora Linux.

        • How to Set Up Postfix SMTP Relay on CentOS/Rocky Linux with Sendinblue

          This tutorial is going to show you how to set up Postfix SMTP relay with Sendinblue on CentOS/Rocky Linux. Postfix is a popular open-source SMTP server. Previously I wrote an article on how to easily set up a full-blown email server on CentOS/Rocky Linux with iRedMail, which helped a lot of readers run their own email servers.

          However, some readers told me that port 25 is blocked by hosting provider/ISP as a way to control email spam, so they couldn’t send emails. Vultr would unblock port 25 if you ask them to, and ScalaHosting doesn’t block port 25 at all, so I recommend using ScalaHosting VPS. Some other hosting providers/ISPs like DigitalOcean would refuse to unblock port 25.

        • In The API World, Nobody Knows You Are An IBM i - IT Jungle

          One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

          Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. This was when IBM has doing its big e-commerce push and the WebSphere variant of the Apache Web server was not yet dominant and Netscape Communications, the big dog in Internet infrastructure servers, was getting ready to port its codes from Unix to OS/400. Netscape came and went, as did I/NET and a few other providers, and WebSphere came to dominate, as often happens when a vendor sells an integrated stack of technology.

          Fast forward to 2021, and the world has learned from the hyperscalers such as Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Amazon to think not in terms of Internet protocols and services, but rather at an abstraction layer one notch higher but still below the applications themselves, called appropriately enough the application programming interface, or API, layer. Now, APIs are how programs are stitched together and how infrastructure itself is controlled. So, as we say in the title of this essay, nearly three decades after that meme in the The New Yorker: In a world dominated by APIs, no one knows – or cares or needs to care – if you are an IBM i platform.

        • No More Shouting The Name "Power" (Well, Except In Our Title Here) - IT Jungle

          The marketing people at IBM have been at work again, apparently, and it looks like there will be some subtle branding changes coming with the launch of Power10-based servers later this year, very likely by September or maybe October.

          One of my pet peeves about the IT industry is that vendors sometimes feel compelled to shout their company names or product brands when it is completely unnecessary. They seem to choose a brand and then work backwards to come up with some abbreviation that they think is clever. It’s when they overreach that it gets annoying, and language is my thing so I get to have this pet peeve.

          The Stanford University Network Microsystems company, for instance, was SUN Microsystems, and its Scalable Processor Architecture was shouted out at SPARC. These are not particularly useful acronyms, and thank heavens SUN didn’t call its Unix operating system SOLARIS, with some preposterous meaning backcast on it like SUN Operating Linux Ain’t Real In Systems or even though of yet, since Linux Torvalds had only just started quietly working on it in 1991 for his PC and Solaris came out in 1992, seven years after SUN had started off in the workstation business using its own SunOS and then merged it with the AT&T System V Unix, both of which were variants of the open source Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, of Unix. Why shout some things and not the other?

          Why shout at all? Hewlett Packard (Enterprise was not yet its core and sole focus) didn’t shout for the sake of shouting, but it had a real acronym that meant something when it launched its Precision Architecture Reduced Instruction Set Computing (PA-RISC) processors for minicomputers running its HP-UX Unix variant and then eventually the HP-3000, which competed with System/3X and then AS/400 iron, had its Multi-Programming Executive, or MPE, operating system ported to these machines. (It never did make the jump to Itanium, as HP’s HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop platforms did. Also, they have all stopped years ago.)

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Programming/Development

        • Fortran newsletter: August 2021

          Welcome to the August 2021 edition of the monthly Fortran newsletter. The newsletter comes out at the beginning of every month and details Fortran news from the previous month.

  • Leftovers

    • Rebirth of a Nation: US History According to DW Griffith
    • Science

      • France recognises open source in its National Plan for Open Science 2021-2024 Permalink

        The French Ministry of Research shared its Second National Plan for Open Science for the years 2021-2024 on 6 July. The Plan foresees several initiatives aimed at increasing the reach of open science principles, and, for the first time, includes open source as a critical component of scientific research that needs to be recognised and supported.

      • Second National Plan for Open Science: Generalising open science in France: 2021-2024

        This second National Plan extends the scope to include source code from research, structures actions promoting data sharing and openness through the creation of the Recherche Data Gouv (Gov Data Research) platform, increases the number of transformative levers available to generalise the practice of open science and is divided up into different disciplines and themes. It is firmly attached to a European-wide vision and, in the context of the French presidency of the European Union, proposes to act in favour of open science being effectively taken into account in both individual and collective assessments for research. This involves initiating a process of sustainable transformation in order to ensure that open science becomes a common and shared practice, encouraged by the whole international ecosystem of higher education, research and innovation.

    • Hardware

      • Will Nvidia’s huge bet on artificial-intelligence chips pay off?

        Now Mr Huang wants to make it broader and deeper still. In September Nvidia confirmed rumours that it was buying Arm, a Britain-based firm that designs zippy and energy-efficient chips for most of the world’s smartphones, for $40bn. The idea is to use Arm’s design prowess to engineer central processing units (CPUs) for data centres and AI uses that would complement Nvidia’s existing strength in specialised chips known as graphics-processing units (GPUs). Given the global reach of Arm and Nvidia, regulators in America, Britain, China and the European Union must all approve the deal. If they do—a considerable “if”, given both firms’ market power in their respective domains—Nvidia’s position in one of computing’s hottest fields would look near-unassailable.

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Ransomware attacks hit record 300 mn in 1st half of 2021: Report [iophk: Windows TCO]

          Ransomware attacks globally surged in the first half of 2021, with 304.7 million, surpassing 2020's full-year total (304.6 million), says a new report.

          After posting record highs in both April and May, cybersecurity firm SonicWall recorded another new high of 78.4 million ransomware attacks in June 2021 alone.

          The ransomware showed massive year-to-date spikes in the US (185 per cent) and the UK (144 per cent).

        • Security

          • Privacy/Surveillance

            • Elite students are debating hot-button issues on an invite-only TikTok clone

              This is Polemix, a new, exclusive app aimed at promoting free discourse among young people. As the world’s biggest social networks continuously battle misinformation and draw controversial lines between dangerous and appropriate speech, the founders of Polemix believe they’ve found a better solution: a free market of ideas, with selective admission. So far, the app has attracted a young community that’s eloquent, outspoken, and passionate about the app’s stated philosophy. But it has also served as a microcosmic experiment with online debate culture in concentrated form, and a real-world demonstration of the caveats required to bring such a lofty ideal to life.

            • FB developing AI, new ways to detect users under age 13

              Admitting that it is not easy to detect and remove accounts belonging to people under the age of 13, Facebook has said that it is looking at ways to convince people under age 13 to not lie about their age, including using the artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

            • Zoom settles user privacy case for $85M

              The case alleges that the teleconferencing software program was sharing personal data with various social media platforms, including Facebook and LinkedIn, and was allowing “Zoombombing,” where hackers would disrupt meetings by sharing pornographic images and racial slurs.

              A preliminary settlement, which still requires approval from a judge, was filed on Saturday.

            • Zoom reaches $85 mln settlement over user privacy, 'Zoombombing'

              Subscribers in the proposed class action would be eligible for 15% refunds on their core subscriptions or $25, whichever is larger, while others could receive up to $15.

              Zoom agreed to security measures including alerting users when meeting hosts or other participants use third-party apps in meetings, and to provide specialized training to employees on privacy and data handling.

              The San Jose-based company denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle.

            • Zoom Settles Consumer Claims Over Privacy for $85 Million
            • AI Log Analytics Startup Coralogix Closes $55M Funding Round

              Israeli startup Coralogix, a company that develops advanced machine learning log analytics, announced on Thursday that it raised $55 million in a Series C funding round led by Israeli VC firm Greenfield Partners, with participation from Red Dot Capital Partners, StageOne Ventures, Eyal Ofer’s O.G. Tech, Janvest Capital Partners, Maor Investments, and 2B Angels.

              The investment brings the company’s total amount raised to $96 million.

              Founded in 2015, Coralogix built a platform, Streama, that helps engineering teams manage their log data and provides them with automatic insights while reducing cost. The solution processes millions of log file records and gives monitoring, visualization, and alerting capabilities with no reliance on storage or indexing, solving the challenge of data growth in large-scale systems.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Opinion | George W. Bush Should Shut Up and Go Away

        By now, George W Bush should have completed volumes one and two of his prison letters.

      • We Don’t Need to Wait for Centuries to Build a Better World

        If the above were true, then there would have been no revolutions in history. That is quite obviously not the case. Consciousness can change rapidly. It does so exceptionally and under rare circumstances during periods of social upheaval. Yes, not everyday occurrences. But they do happen. “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,” Lenin famously said. To read this article, log in or or Subscribe. In order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.

      • Burkina Faso sees more child soldiers as jihadi attacks rise

        She and her family are among the lucky ones who survived the June attack, in which about 160 people were killed — the deadliest such assault since the once-peaceful West African nation was overrun by fighters linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State about five years ago. As that violence increases, so too does the recruitment of child soldiers.

        The number of children recruited by armed groups in Burkina Faso rose at least five-fold so far this year, up from four documented cases in all of last year, according to information seen by the AP in an unpublished report by international aid and conflict experts.

    • Environment

      • Energy

        • Forgotten oil and gas wells linger, leaking toxic chemicals

          The crisis unfolding on Watt’s 75,000-acre ranch offers a window on a growing problem for the oil industry and the communities and governments that are often left to clean up the mess. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells exist in the United States. About a third of them were plugged with cement, which is considered the proper way to prevent harmful chemical leaks. But most haven’t been plugged at all.

          Many of the wells are releasing methane, a greenhouse gas containing about 86 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide over two decades. Some are leaking chemicals such as benzene, a known carcinogen, into fields and groundwater.

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Pitchers’ Star Naveen Kasturia On Censorship: It Is Like Judging Your Own People’s Maturity

        Censorship in OTT is among the hot topics which pop out every now and then, what are your views on it?

        To me censorship is not a good idea, either for OTT or films, people can’t be forced to watch or restrained from watching certain things. And by the end people will watch what they want to, as everything’s available on the internet. Makers too have to self censor themselves and good stories getting suffered from censorship shouldn’t happen. There could be a certification for the content but censorship is like judging your own people’s maturity. I’m against it.

    • Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

      • Body of Reuters Photographer Was Mutilated in Taliban Custody, Officials Say

        “Danish always chose to be on the front lines so that abuses and atrocities could not remain hidden,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “The brutality with which Taliban fighters punished Danish proves the abuses that he was documenting.”

        Human Rights Watch and other watchdog groups say the Taliban have carried out a series of revenge killings in Kandahar Province, where some of the most brutal episodes in Afghanistan’s last four war-torn decades have occurred.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • What US in-house want from China counsel [Ed: This propaganda mill continues to be just an amplifier of parasitic lawyers' agenda (because they pay for it)]

          Sources from four US companies, including Teleflex and USG, say they want regular updates and insight on CNIPA from outside lawyers

        • Software Patents/Hey Hi

          • Australian court rules an AI can be considered an inventor on patent filings [Ed: Two more patent offices have gone completely bonkers. It's time to consider if this sort of moment is a suggestion we need to scrap the patent system and start it over again. It's rigged and unhelpful to actual innovation. In COVID's case, it is killing millions of people unnecessarily. For profit.]

            An Australian Court has decided that an artificial intelligence can be recognised as an inventor in a patent submission.

            In a case brought by Stephen Thaler, who has filed and lost similar cases in other jurisdictions, Australia's Federal Court last month heard and decided that the nation's Commissioner of Patents erred when deciding that an AI can't be considered an inventor.

            Justice Beach reached that conclusion because nothing in Australia law says the applicant for a patent must be human.

            As Beach's judgement puts it: "… in my view an artificial intelligence system can be an inventor for the purposes of the Act.

      • Copyrights

        • U.S. Govt: Persistent 'Copyright Troll' Lawyer Should Serve Full Prison Sentence

          The U.S. Government is opposing a request from copyright troll lawyer Paul Hansmeier, who asked the court for a reduced prison sentence due to the hardships he endured under coronavirus restrictions. The U.S. attorney notes that these conditions were the same for everyone, and highlights that the lawyer continues to make new victims from his prison cell.



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