Star Labs introduce the small and mighty StarLite Mk IV

Usually when we get to talk about laptops from Linux hardware vendors their thick and pricey but Star Labs are serving the underserved here with the new StarLite Mk IV. Coming with a sleek 11-inch ARC display with fancy anti-reflective matte coating for work and play in all environments.

Star Labs was formed back in 2016 by “a bunch of geeks” and they offer something not many vendors do with Linux support out of the box, open source firmware support that allows you to switch between American Megatrends (AMI) Aptio V or coreboot any time you feel like it. They even have their own open source coreboot configuration UI, that allows you to tweak all sorts of hardware settings.

StarLite Mk IV is budget Linux laptop with an 11.6 inch FHD display

Linux laptop maker Star Labs is updating its entry-level StarLite laptop with a new Mk IV model that packs an 11.6 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel display, an Intel Pentium Silver N5030 processor, and 8GB of RAM.

The new StarLite Mk IV is available for order from Star Labs with prices starting under $500, but you’ll probably have to wait until January for the laptop to be delivered because it’s still in production.

Full Circle Weekly News #232

Linux overview | Feren OS 2021.10 – Invidious

In this video, I am going to show an overview of Feren OS 2021.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.

Feeling Wyze | Self-Hosted 56

Local self-hosted video capture with AI object detection just got easy. Morgan joins us to detail his Frigate setup and its optional tight integration with Home Assistant.

Plus, our new favorite up time monitoring tool and an easy way to add Tailscale and other apps to OPNsense with community plugins.

Hackaday Podcast 141: LowFER Badges, Outrun Clocks, Dichroic Lamps, And Piano Action | Hackaday

Hackaday editors Mike and Elliot Williams catch up on a week’s worth of hacks. It turns out there are several strange radio bands that don’t require a license, and we discuss this weekend’s broadcast where you can listen in. It’s unlikely you’ve ever seen the website check-box abused quite like this: it’s the display for playing Doom! Just when you thought you’d seen all the ESP32’s tricks it gets turned into a clock styled after Out Run. Mike geeks out over how pianos work, we’re both excited to have Jeremy Fielding giving a Keynote talk at Remoticon, and we wrap things up with a chat about traffic rules in space.

How A 85€ Laptop Is Helping Me Go Through Uni! – Kockatoo Tube

Proxmox VE Full Course: Class 13 – Networking – Invidious

Setting up a separate network for your virtual machines is a great idea, especially since that allows you to segregate your management network.

Valve just FIXED the Steam Deck’s BIGGEST PROBLEM! – Invidious

SMLR E327 – The Second Reboot

Intro:
Tony Bemus, Tom Lawrence, Phil Porada and Jay LaCroix

Sound bites by Mike Tanner

The LawrenceSystems YouTube Channel Where videos

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTecknowledge

Jay’s Site

https://www.learnlinux.tv/

Jay’s Bash Prompt https://pastebin.com/kzPjE8y4

Show Notes
We took a break and we are back.

Purism and Linux 5.14 and Linux 5.15

The Purism team is continuously working on improving the hardware and software support for the Librem 5. These innovations contribute directly to the mainline, upstream kernel so that the hardware can be supported as part of the development community in the future.

Following up on our report for Linux 5.13 this summarizes the progress on mainline support for the Librem 5 phone and its development kit during the 5.14 and 5.15 development cycles. This summary is only about code flowing upstream.

Ventoy 1.0.56

Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With Ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them. Both Legacy BIOS and UEFI are supported in the same way. Most type of OS supported (Windows/WinPE/Linux/Unix/Vmware/Xen…)

MAKE MORE with Inkscape – Papercraft et al.

Inkscape, the most used and loved tool of Fedora’s Design Team is not just a program for doing nice vector graphics. With vector graphics (in our case SVG) a lot more can be done. Many programs can import this format. Also, Inkscape can do a lot more than just graphics. The last article of this series showed how to use Stroke or Hershey Fonts for engraving and other such methods with Inkscape. This article will look at several Inkscape extensions for making Papercraft or that otherwise help to flatten out three-dimensional (3D) objects.

Rapid Prototyping is an oft-mentioned word (even more so since the advent of 3D-Printing). Sure, you can easily 3D-print computer designed objects. But the downsides are the cost and the amount of extra work you have to put into the 3D printed objects to get a clean surface.

Essential System Tools: Czkawka – data cleaner

This is the latest in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For details of all tools in this series, please check the table in the Summary section.

Even though the cost of storage per GB continues to fall, it’s common for users to need to find and remove duplicates files. The process of finding and removing duplicates is time-consuming. Fortunately, there are a number of tools that are designed to remove the laborious nature of finding duplicates. We recommend fdupes, an excellent command-line tool. We know that many users prefer software with a graphical user interface.

Czkawka is an app that finds duplicate files, big files, empty files, similar images, and much more. Czkawka is free and open source software.

Top 5 Free PDF Readers in Ubuntu / Debian Linux

The PDF file format is the conventional document format for sharing text files over the internet. Whether it’s for professional, school, or informal use, PDF files are a convenient way of sharing information.

How To Install Icinga 2 on Debian 11 – idroot

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Icinga 2 on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Icinga 2 is an open-source monitoring solution that is used to monitor the availability of various network resources including host metrics such as system uptime, load, memory, disk space, running processes, network, and many more. Icinga 2 has a user-friendly web interface, but it also comes with a command-line interface that can be used to monitor networks, servers, and services with specific commands.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Icinga open-source network monitoring on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

How and Why to Install Latte Dock From Source Code

Latte Dock is one of the most popular and versatile panel and menu replacements for the KDE Plasma desktop. When you install it from source code, you get the very latest features and functions that are unavailable in most distro package repositories.

No matter which Linux distribution you use, you probably install most if not all of your software through your distro’s package management system. Since the package manager generally handles all of the necessary dependencies and updates for whatever program you want, it’s usually the safest and most efficient choice.

Sometimes, though, even if a program is available in your distro’s software repositories, you’ll end up with a much better final product if you download, compile, and install the program from source code. This is the case with Latte Dock.

How to install Apache, MariaDB and PHP (LAMP) on Debian 11 – VITUX – TechStony

The LAMP stack is a collection of open-source software products that are frequently used in conjunction. The acronym LAMP is used to describe a computer system that has the following components: Linux, Apache HTTP Server (or just server), MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python.

A user can install all of these components separately on a single computer or, more commonly, on separate computers connected by a network; however, some components are dependent upon other components – for instance, it is not possible to install Apache without first installing Linux – hence the standard installation practice is to install all components on a single computer system.

The LAMP stack is the combination of open-source software to form a server environment most commonly used in web development.

Open source refers to something, especially an application or operating system, whose source code is made available for free use or distribution, although certain user restrictions may apply. This allows users to create copies of any product and make whatever changes they like.

Installing the LAMP stack on Debian 11 will be shown in this article. Once complete, you’ll have a web server that serves your sites and applications with ease. Here we show how to install them manually from the terminal if you want full control over your system settings like editing config files yourself.

How to install Chromium Browser on Debian 11 (Bullseye) – VITUX – TechStony

Google’s Chromium browser is a Google project. It is an open-source web browser whose major objective is to make online browsing safer and quicker for all users. This browser is not designed for end-users, but rather for developers or programmers, because Google makes changes to its source code practically every day. As a result, it is critical to obtain the most recent version of this web program. The Chromium browser is available for nearly every Linux distribution, including Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, and Fedora, as well as Windows, Android, and macOS.

In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to install the Chromium browser on the Debian 11 bullseye distribution. The instructions for installing the Chromium browser will also work for other Linux distributions such as Debian 10 buster, Ubuntu, LinuxMint, and others.

How to install Java 17 in Ubuntu 20.04 – Citizix

In this guide we are going to explore how to install Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and the Java Developer Kit (JDK) in Ubuntu 20.04.

Java and the JVM (Java’s virtual machine) are required for many kinds of software, including Tomcat, Jetty, Glassfish, Cassandra and Jenkins.

Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. Java was developed by Sun Microsystems (which is now the subsidiary of Oracle) in the year 1995. James Gosling is known as the father of Java.

How to install ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors on Linux Mint

ONLYOFFICE desktop app is an open-source office suite pack that comprises editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Along with offline work, it’s possible to connect the application to the cloud (ONLYOFFICE, Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile) for online document collaboration. The source code of the suite is available on GitHub under the AGPL v.3.0 license.

How to install third-party modules on Webmin

Do you want to install third-party modules in your Webmin installation? Don’t know how to set them up? We can help! Follow along as we go over how to install Webmin third-party modules.

How to record your Linux desktop with Kooha

If you’ve ever wanted to record your Linux desktop but don’t like how the existing screen recorder apps on Linux are ugly and confusing to use, you’ll like Kooha. It is an elegant screen recorder app that is designed around user-friendliness and ease of use. Here’s how to use it to record your desktop on Linux.

How to stream Steam games to your Linux desktop

Valve has a stand-alone Steam Link game streaming client for Linux, Mac OS, Windows, and mobile. With it, you can stream games running on a gaming PC via Steam to the Steam Link app. It’s an excellent option for Linux gamers looking to play desktop PC games on their laptops. Here’s how to set it up.

Note: you must have a Linux gaming PC running Steam, along with another computer running the Steam Link application on Linux for remote play to work.

Install Ambiance (or Radiance) Theme on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – Linux Shout

Do you want to switch to the old Ambiance app theme on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa? Then via this article, we let you know how to do that in a very easy way.

Well, earlier in the old versions of Ubuntu we were getting Ambiance or Radiance as the default theme. However, this got changed with the release of Ubuntu 19.10 because since then we have had Yaru as the default one. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we cannot switch back to the old days (themes) on the newer versions of Ubuntu. After all, it is just a theme but may give some a familiar feeling.

And the best thing is the package to install the Ambiance theme is available in the default official repo of Ubuntu, hence just follow the given steps.

Install Sails.js Framework with Nginx on CentOS 8

Sails.js is a Javascript framework for Node.js. It is used for developing real-time applications very quickly. It allows you to resemble the MVC architecture from frameworks like Ruby on Rails. It comes with blueprints that help jumpstart your app’s backend without writing any code. It is compatible with other front-end including, Angular, React, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, custom hardware, or something else entirely.

In this post, we will show you how to install Sails.js with Nginx on CentOS 8

How to create a Security Group (SG) and Network Access Control List (NACL) in AWS

Security Groups (SGs) and Network Access Control Lists(NACLs) are the features that come with Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in Amazon Web Services(AWS).

SG acts as a firewall for our instance to control or restrict inbound and outbound traffic. When we launch an instance in a VPC, we can assign up to five security groups to the instance. Security groups act at the instance level and not the subnet level. If we don’t specify a particular group at launch time, the instance is automatically assigned to the default security group of the VPC.

We can add rules in the SG that control the inbound traffic to instances, and a separate set of rules that control the outbound traffic.

Jenkins: Create a freestyle job – Anto ./ Online

This guide will show you how to set up your first freestyle job in Jenkins. You will use Jenkins to download Java source code from GitHub, compile the code using Maven, and view the build output.

How to create MX Linux 21 bootable USB Drive – Linux Shout

If you already have MX Linux 21 ISO file, then here are the steps to create a bootable USB Drive using it, for its installation on a PC or laptop.

MX Linux 21 is the latest Linux operating system from its developer based on Debian 11 while writing this article. To boost speed and productivity, new features and customization have been done. Hence, users who have 32-bit or 64-bit PC or laptops can easily start with this.

How to change the MAC address on Ubuntu 20.04 using Macchanger – VITUX – TechStony

Macchanger is an amazing Linux utility that can be used to view as well as to change the MAC address of any desired networking device. This utility can be conveniently installed on any Linux distribution and then you can use it just the way you like. In this article, we will begin with the installation of this utility on a Ubuntu 20.04 or Linux Mint 20 system and then we will teach you how you can change the MAC address with the help of this utility.

How to Use Xpra to Run Linux Applications Remotely – ByteXD

Xpra (X Persistent Remote Applications) or commonly known as “Screen for X”, is a utility that allows users to run X11 programs on the remote hosts and direct their display on the local machine. Xpra enables you to connect and disconnect these programs on your device or another PC without losing the current state.

That is the main difference between Xpra and X-Forwarding. With the latter, when you disconnect from a particular program, you lose the current state.

Additionally, Xpra is rootless. That means any applications forwarded from the remote hosts to the local machine appear as normal windows managed by the window manager and not confined in a box.

To better understand the rootless feature, let’s look at how Xpra differs from other remote access/control applications.

How to Upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.23 from 5.22 [Easy Steps] – TechStony

The KDE team announced the stable release of KDE Plasma 5.23 with new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Here, in this quick guide, we give you the steps to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.23 from 5.22.

This release is the 25th-anniversary edition of KDE. Hence, it is a significant and emotional release for the team. Hence, you can expect several new features and updates. You get a brand new Breeze Ocean Theme, new wallpaper, desktop-wide tweaks, and productivity boost across KWin, Plasma desktop, Wayland improvements.

You can check out the feature highlights of KDE Plasma 5.22 here.

How to Upgrade Synology NAS from DSM 6 to DSM 7

DSM is also known as Disk Station Manager. It is a web-based management interface software for the Synology NAS devices. You can use the DSM software to manage your Synology NAS devices from a web browser.
Synology recently released DSM 7 – a new version of the Disk Station Manager software for the Synology NAS devices.

In this article, I am going to show you how to upgrade the DSM software of your Synology NAS from DSM 6 to DSM 7. So, let’s get started.

How to Install and Use croc to Securely Transfer Files on Linux

Transferring files between computers is a relatively straightforward act if you have the right tool. While most file transfer tools work the same and share a similar feature set, a few stand out with their distinctive features.

Croc is one such tool. It works via the command line and lets you transfer files and folders between computers quickly and securely.

Follow along as we discuss croc and list down the instructions to use it for transferring files between Linux and any other device.

How to Install Zirkula CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 – VITUX – TechStony

ZIkula means “plus” in Swahili language, so it translates as “more than” or “something more”. The name embodies what this project provides – an extension beyond common web technologies with tools like templates that help you create simple one-page websites all the way up to complex applications powered by Node JS modules & MVC architecture. You can create anything from basic one-page websites to sophisticated and powerful online apps with Zikula’s user-friendly interface. It is very simple to set up, so you will have no trouble making your vision come alive.

How to Install ZSH Shell and Oh-My-Zsh on Ubuntu 20.04 – VITUX

The Z shell is one of the most powerful shells ever developed, and it’s also one of the fastest. It includes features that you won’t find anywhere else like built-in spell checking, syntax highlighting for code, and more. You can even configure your prompt to show useful information about your system status without typing anything.

How to Install Virtualmin on Ubuntu 20.04 – VITUX – TechStony

Virtualmin is a web hosting control panel that allows you to manage your virtual private servers through an easy-to-use interface. You can use this software to create and delete websites, install and update server applications, and monitor resource usage.

Virtualmin features a number of scripts that can simplify the process of installing and maintaining software on your servers. It comes with a script installer for popular applications like Drupal, Joomla, bbPress, Django… and many others.
Virtualmin also provides an updater tool to help you update all aspects of your server software in a single operation. It even allows you to check for security updates and clone your entire Virtualmin installation with one click of a button.

Virtualmin provides extensive configuration options, which can be accessed through its web interface or by using command-line tools. For example, you can use this software to set up a blacklist that prevents certain websites from being accessed. You can also create an access control list and store it in your database as custom variables. Virtualmin offers support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and other databases through their respective command-line tools or web interfaces.

How to Install PostgreSQL and pgAdmin4 on Ubuntu 20.04 – VITUX – TechStony

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to install PostgreSQL and pgAdmin4 in Ubuntu 20.04, this post is for you! We’ll walk you through the whole process step-by-step, so it’s easy for anyone to do.

Postgres is an open-source, powerful relational database system that lets users create, edit, share, and store data quickly and flexibly. It supports all of SQL:2003 standards, which makes it great for storing any type of data. pgAdmin4 is a graphical user interface tool that allows users to manage their PostgreSQL databases from one place without having to use complicated command-line instructions or terminal commands like many other similar tools on the market offer.

How to Install GCC Compiler Collection on CentOS 8 and Rocky Linux 8 – VITUX – TechStony

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a compiler software package with a collection of compilers for several languages. It is free and open-source software, which means that everyone has the opportunity to contribute or modify the application according to their own needs. GCC supports various programming languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java and Ada. It also provides libraries such as libstdc++ for C++ and libgcj for Java.

GCC uses a technology called “Recursive Descent Parsing”, which is very effective at finding errors in the code. GCC also provides a rich set of warnings that can be used to spot possible problems or bugs that may not have been detectable by the compiler itself. GCC performs some optimizations on both the intermediate code and the final machine code, but it does not perform as many optimizations as a commercial compiler would.

This Extension Adds MacBook Style Notch in GNOME 40 in Ubuntu 21.10

Sounds ridiculous, but it’s true! GNOME now has an extension to add Apple iPhone & MacBook look like but USELESS notch in your screen.

I’m not an Apple fan and don’t know why to add an ugly notch on laptop screen. Though an extension “iNotch” is available to add it in GNOME 40. It does nothing buts add a blank area in top-center, with a camera lens icon as well as tally light.

As Apple’s hardware notch does, it however covers the clock and the cursor disappears when it enters the notch. Though, the drop down calendar menu still works when you click on the area in top-bar.

Haunted Chocolatier announced from Stardew Valley creator | GamingOnLinux

ConcernedApe’s Haunted Chocolatier is the brand new announcement from the creator of Stardew Valley and it looks quite familiar in style with a new setting.

After 10 years of working on Stardew Valley, it was clearly time for something new. In this game, you will play as a chocolatier living in a haunted castle. In order to thrive in your new role, you will have to gather rare ingredients, make delicious chocolates, and sell them in a chocolate shop. It’s a little more than that though, with a bit of a fantasy flavour being sprinkled on top.

DXVK-Native 1.9.2a Released For Direct3D-Over-Vulkan With Native Games – Phoronix

Valve continues embracing DXVK-Native for allowing more of their older games to target Vulkan by using this Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer for native games. DXVK-Native 1.9.2a is out with the latest fixes and improvements.

This summer DXVK-Native saw its first release for this adaptation of DXVK intended to be used by native Windows/Linux games for running their Direct3D renderer path over Vulkan.

DXVK Native 1.9.2a is out for translating Direct 3D 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan for Linux games | GamingOnLinux

DXVK Native is the fork of the original translation layer DXVK, the part of Proton that translates Direct 3D 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan but this is meant for Linux native builds and a new release is out now. Developed by Joshua Ashton who has been involved in DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, updating a few Valve games and more. Be sure to check out our previous interview!

Steam Continues Improving Its Shader Pre-Caching Support, Other Beta Improvements – Phoronix

A new Steam client beta is out with a few Linux enhancements worth noting.

For many months now Valve has been working to improve its shader (pre-)caching support to speed-up game load times and providing a smoother gaming experience for games otherwise compiling shaders on-demand. With the Steam Deck public release quickly approaching, they continue to better that Steam pre-caching support.

Steam Client Beta improves Steam Cloud syncing, Shader Pre-Caching | GamingOnLinux

Valve have a fresh Steam Client Beta with some pretty big back-end improvements, likely readying up as much as possible for the upcoming Steam Deck.

There’s a few general fixes for connections to the Steam servers, a rare black screen when loading Library pages and announcements plus an update of the embedded Chromium build. It gets a lot more interesting than that though.

Wildflower: From the Embers is a story-driven RPG about a young witch in a new town | GamingOnLinux

Ice Water Games (Tenderfoot Tactics) have announced Wildflower: From the Embers, a new story-driven RPG that focuses on a young witch and her life in a new town.

Sounds like quite a varied game too, taking elements from their previous games blended with something new. It has the magical combat from Tenderfoot Tactics with a bigger map and a focus on scale with some units being massive plus you’re dealing with emotional attributes and abilities, visibility and stealth. Then there’s also the gardening that builds off their earlier title Viridi and cooking inspired by Breath of the Wild.

[...]

The release is planned for 2022 with Linux native support. Once we get more details and a trailer we will post it up in a new article as we’ll be following this with great interest – it looks gorgeous.

Don’t Starve Together and Terraria are teasing a crossover, Hallowed Nights returns to DST | GamingOnLinux

Seems like something is brewing between the developers of Don’t Starve Together (Klei) and Terraria (Re-Logic) with some sort of cross-over planned for both games.

Developer of ENCODYA announces sci-fi mystery Soul Tolerance | GamingOnLinux

Soul Tolerance is the next game from ENCODYA developer Chaosmonger Studio, planned for once they’re finished with the upcoming Clunky Hero that releases in November.

JARS is a new take on Tower Defense with puzzles and a Gothic style | GamingOnLinux

The first PC release from Mousetrap Games is JARS, a blending of a Tower Defense game with puzzles to solve and a pretty great looking gothic style.

the Alpine release process

It’s almost Halloween, which means it’s almost time for an Alpine release, and all hands are on deck to make sure the process goes smoothly. But what goes into making an Alpine release? What are all the moving parts? Since we are in the process of cutting a new release series, I figured I would write about how it is actually done.

the beginning of the development cycle

The development cycle for an Alpine release is 6 months long: it begins immediately once the release is branched in aports.git: at that point, there is no longer a development freeze, and minor changes start flowing in.

Prior to the beginning of the development cycle, larger changes are proposed as system change proposals, an example of which being the change proposal introducing Rust to main for the Alpine 3.16 development cycle. The largest, most invasive proposals are coordinated by the Technical Steering Committee, while others may be coordinated by smaller teams, and individual maintainers. Anybody may create a system change proposal and drive it in Alpine, regardless of whether or not they have developer rights in the project.

As these system change proposals are accepted (possibly after a few rounds of revision), the underlying steps needed to implement the change are sequenced into the overall development schedule if needed. Otherwise, they are implemented at the discretion of the contributor driving the change proposal.

New Releases

• MX Linux 21 “Wildflower” is Here with UEFI Live Boot Menus

  The brand new release of MX Linux 21 codenamed “Wildflower“ has hit the download mirrors. Let’s check out what’s new!

  MX Linux has gained a lot of traction in the last few years. It is a distro based on Debian’s stable branch. And that is one of the cool things about MX Linux, because it’s not just another Ubuntu-based distro. They completely skip that step and go straight basing on Debian.

  Now MX Linux 21 finally becomes available, and it is based on Debian 11 “Bullseye”. The Linux kernel was updated to version 5.10.

• MX Linux 21 is uploaded to Debian 11 to offer its most refined version to date

  MX Linux 21 is the new major version of a small large distribution that has made a rebound hole, but also on its own merits among the most recommended for very different types of users, and is that not all those derived from Debian can boast of offering an alternative to your base with arguments to consider like this one does.

  Among these arguments, MX Linux 21 stands out for making the leap to Debian 11 with all the new features that this entails, including updates to the entire package arch that makes up the system within, but also outside of Debian’s own repositories. Thus, MX Linux 21 arrives with the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel , but not only.

  As part of the “advanced hardware support” introduced last year and available for upgrade once the system is installed, MX Linux 21 also offers its users more modern components including the Linux 5.14 kernel and one of the latest versions. from Mesa, with the Vulkan drivers installed by default.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• KDE Plasma, Gear, Frameworks Update in Tumbleweed

  The past week produced two openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots and both included a lot of updates for users of KDE.

  Plasma, Gear and Frameworks weren’t the only packages to update in the snapshots.

  Snapshot 20211019 offered quite a bit of updated packages. Remote access package remmina 1.4.21 provided updates for the GNOME 40 runtime and made some backward compatibility with WebKit versions under 2.32.0. The refreshable braille display package brltty updated to version 6.4 and made sysusers.d a new package while also removing some old SUSE RPM constructs. The PDF rendering library poppler 21.10.0 fixed the rendering of some odd splash patterns and added support for setting custom stamp annotations. Mesa 21.2.4 had several fixes and rolled out patches for both PowerPC and LLVM i386 compiling. A package to get a major update in the snapshot was rdma-core 37.1, which focuses on userspace components for the Linux Kernel’s drivers/infiniband subsystem; this new major version fixed cmake flags to correct paths for pkg-config. KDE’s 5.87.0 Frameworks version had an enormous amount of updated packages in the snapshot. Among the updates was the removal of defunct Python and Ruby script engines with Plasma Framework. The 5.87.0 Breeze Icons package added 22px variants of the preferences icons and the same version of the UI framework package Kirigami fixed Breadcrumb Control on mobile when using layers.

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/42

  This week has been overshadowed a lot with Snapshots that did not pass openQA – in total, we have had 6 snapshots in QA – of which only 2 made it through and have been published. Of course, all the issues identified have resulted in relevant bug reports which the maintainers will be working on, fixing, resubmitting the packages that needed to be reverted, and then we move forward. After all, openQA does exactly what we want it to do: it protects you, the users, from getting broken snapshots.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Ubuntu 21.10 Release Brings GNOME 40, Latest Kernel + More

  Following the trend, Ubuntu 21.10 is code named “impish indri” as we are at “I” based names. The “Indri” refers to “babakoto, is one of the largest living lemurs, with a head-and-body length of about 64–72 cm and a weight of between 6 to 9.5 kg. It has a black and white coat and maintains an upright posture when climbing or clinging” (from Wikipedia).

  This release brings a new GNOME 40 desktop experience, the latest Linux Kernel, improved desktop and new applications. Here’s a summary of what’s new.

• Ubuntu 21.10 & Flavours Released: See What’s New! – Front Page Linux

  Ubuntu 21.10 “Impish Indri” is finally here. Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and all flavours have been released on October 14.

  The list of improvements is extensive. Users of both Ubuntu and any of the official flavours will have some nice surprises, such as Kernel 5.13 , updated versions of LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, and more. Let’s have a look at what’s new.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Esper and Lenovo Collaborate on Android Device Deployment in Enterprises | Business Wire

• Google will make it easier to separate your work and personal life on Android – The Verge

• Google Chrome trending search suggestions issue on Android & desktop

• Android devs: Google will take less of your cash — here are the details

• Matter Gets Native Android Support Via Google Play Services

• Realme UI 3.0 based on Android 12: Here’s everything new in the update!

• When is Android 12 coming to Samsung phones?

• Asus announces Android 12 release schedule for ROG Phone and Zenfone series – GSMArena.com news

• iQOO puts out Android 12 beta rollout schedule – GSMArena.com news

• Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Classic Review: The Best Android Smartwatch? | NDTV Gadgets 360

• Nacon MG-X Review: The Essential Controller for Android Gaming

• The Best Android Games on Sale This Week – MO: Astray, Root, Hyperspace Delivery Service and More – Droid Gamers

Web Browsers

• Chromium

  • Chrome 95.0.4638.54 SFS created

    Whatever you might think about Google’s data mining, the official Google Chrome browser sure does run nice. So much so, that I might make it my regular daily browser.
    I have created an SFS for EasyOS 3.x. This can be installed in a container or on the main desktop. In the latter case, it runs as user ‘chrome’, with home folder /home/chrome — and in there you will see /home/chrome/Downloads, which is the default path for downloading.
    Chrome can be run from the menu, in category “Internet”, or click on /home/chrome/chrome, or even run “chrome” in a terminal.
    To run on the main desktop requires EasyOS version 3.0 or later. I have tested on the pre-release of 3.1, and it runs real great.
    Chrome can also be installed in a container, and that also works great, except that it runs with “–no-sandbox” commandline option, which causes a warning message to popup at startup. That is just an annoyance.
    In theory, Chrome can run in a container in any version of EasyOS, as it will download it’s dependency ‘easy-3.*.sfs’ from the Internet and use that in a layered filesystem.

  • Brave Browser Kicks Out Google as the Default Search Engine in Favor of its Own

    Brave is one of the best web browsers available for Linux. The browser uses Google as the default search engine for most of the regions.

    However, that is about to change with the recent announcement of Brave abandoning Google to favor its privacy-respecting search engine Brave Search.

• Mozilla

  • This Week in Glean: The Three Roles of Data Engagements [Ed: Is "Data Engagements" the latest crypto-jargon Mozilla uses for surveillance or spying on Firefox users?]

    I’ve just recently started my sixth year working at Mozilla on data and data-adjacent things. In those years I’ve started to notice some patterns in how data is approached, so I thought I’d set them down in a TWiG because Glean’s got a role to play in them.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Optimizing LibreOffice for a larger number of users

  Have you ever edited a document in LibreOffice in more than one window? Right, neither have I. Who’d think about LibreOffice and more than one user at the same time, right? Except … somebody did and that’s how collaborative editing based on LibreOffice works. For whatever strange reason, somewhen in the past somebody thought that implementing multiple views for one document in OpenOffice (StarOffice?) was a good idea. Just select Window->New Window in the menu and you can edit your favourite document in 50 views that each show a different part of the document and update in real time. And that, in fact, is how collaborative editing such as with Collabora Online works – open a document, create a new view for every user, and there you go.

  But, given that this has never really been used that much, how well did the original relevant code perform and scale for more users? Well, not much, it turns out. Not a big surprise, considering that presumably back when that code was written nobody thought the same document could be edited by numerous users at the same time. But I’ve been looking exactly into this recently as part of optimizing Collabora Online performance, and boy, are there were gems in there. You thought that showing the same document in more views would just mean more painting also in those views? Nah, think again, this is OpenOffice code, the land of programming wonders.

FSF

• Licensing/Legal

  • TRUTH Social may not respect GPL licenses

    It doesn’t start out too well TRUTH Social, the new social network of Donald trump, still in the development phase and that, as we already told you yesterday, leaked after its official announcement, allowing some people to access the service (whose first beta phase is scheduled for November), creating parodic accounts. However, the joke did not last long (calling it a hacking, as I have seen in other media, seems like an excess to me), since its managers blocked the accounts created by said users and disabled access through the web address that had been leaked.

    However, and although what has captured the headlines has been precisely that, the accounts created impersonating the users that the network is expected to have once operational, the most interesting thing about the provisional access url being filtered is that as many users were able to dedicate themselves to analyzing TRUTH Social in depth. And when I say in-depth, I mean to go beyond checking its enormous resemblance to Twitter, only with fewer features.

Eager to know more about Einride pods

While I am at this, I also have to say that the idea of one driver simultaneously falling asleep “at the wheel” of multiple trucks simultaneously, or being overruled by cybercriminals, does not make me sleep well. I also hope that anyone paid to drive e.g. four trucks simultaneously will be paid four times more than a drivers of single trucks. Of course, none of these issues is specific of Einride. They affect any kind of remotely driven vehicle, or even really autonomous ones.

Quick Reaction Saves ESA Space Telescope | Hackaday

Once launched, most spacecraft are out of reach of any upgrades or repairs. Mission critical problems must be solved with whatever’s still working on board, and sometimes there’s very little time. Recently ESA’s INTEGRAL team was confronted with a ruthlessly ticking three hour deadline to save the mission.

European Space Agency INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory is one of many space telescopes currently in orbit. Launched in 2002, it has long surpassed its original designed lifespan of two or three years, but nothing lasts forever. A failed reaction wheel caused the spacecraft to tumble out of control and its automatic emergency recovery procedures didn’t work. Later it was determined those procedures were dependent on the thrusters, which themselves failed in the summer of 2020. (Another mission-saving hack which the team had shared earlier.)

Proprietary

• Security

  • Security updates for Friday

    Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (apache, chromium, nodejs, nodejs-lts-erbium, nodejs-lts-fermium, and virtualbox), Fedora (vsftpd and watchdog), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, and redis:6), and Ubuntu (libcaca, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-azure-5.8, and mailman).

  • This Week In Security: Argentina, MysterySnail, And L0phtcrack | Hackaday

    The government of Argentina has a national ID card system, and as a result maintains a database containing data on every citizen in the country. What could possibly go wrong? Predictably, an attacker has managed to gain access to the database, and is offering the entire dataset for sale. The Argentinian government has claimed that this wasn’t a mass breach, and only a handful of credentials were accessed. This seems to be incorrect, as the seller was able to provide the details of an arbitrary citizen to the journalists investigating the story.

  • Nation-State Attacker of Telecommunications Networks

    LightBasin (aka UNC1945) is an activity cluster that has been consistently targeting the telecommunications sector at a global scale since at least 2016, leveraging custom tools and an in-depth knowledge of telecommunications network architectures.

  • Eswatini Government’s gov.sz website is running a cryptojacker | Netcraft News

    The Government of Eswatini’s website, www.gov.sz, is running a cryptojacker. Cryptojackers use website visitors’ CPU power to mine cryptocurrency, most often without their knowledge or permission. Data from archive.org suggests the JavaScript snippet was added to the site’s HTML source between 28th September and 6th October.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • How SmarterEveryDay’s 4privacy can, and cannot, meet its goals

      I don’t particularly find myself to be a fan of the SmarterEveryDay YouTube channel, simply for being outside of Destin’s target audience most of the time. I understand that Destin, the channel’s host, is a friendly person and a great asset to his peers, and that he generally strives to do good. When I saw that he was involved in a Kickstarter to develop a privacy product, it piqued my interest. As a privacy advocate and jaded software engineer, I set out to find out what it’s all about.

      You can watch the YouTube video here, and a short follow-up here.

      There are several things to praise here. I honestly thought that Destin’s coverage of the topic of privacy for the layman was really well presented, and took some notes to use the next time I’m explaining privacy issues to my friends. The coverage of the history of wiretapping and the pivotal role played by 9/11, complete with an empathetic view of the mindset of American adults contemporary to it that many find hard to express, along with great drone shots of Big Tech’s mysterious datacenters, this is all great stuff. For the right project, Destin is a valuable asset with a large audience and a lot of experience in making complex issues digestible for the every-person, and 4privacy is lucky to have access to him.

      A lot of the buzzwords and things found on their technology page are promising as well. The focus on end-to-end encryption and zero-knowledge principles, and the commitment to open source, are absolutely necessary and are great to see here. A lot of the tech described, although briefly, seems like it’s on the right track. The ability to use your own service provider, and the focus on decentralization and federation, is very good.

Naming Climate Villains as the World Burns

A United Nations Climate Change Conference is scheduled for October 31 to November 12 in Glasgow, Scotland.

If it seems like nobody at the T-Mobile store wants to help you, it’s not just you. Here’s why.

We have to go to the T-Mobile store today to return the modem that died on me after five minutes that I blogged about yesterday.

The T-Mobile store employees are incompetent to the highest order and they basically don’t give a damn about anything other than selling you a phone every time you’re in there. Once they realize that you’re not there to buy a phone, they hem and haw and make up excuses about why you need to go elsewhere.

So I’m already cringing.

Former T-Mobile employees have said they aren’t customer service people and nobody wants to open your account unless they’re selling a phone because it counts as doing something else, they don’t get their commission money, and then you can rate them and it may be a low rating and they are taking a risk for nothing from their perspective. Meanwhile, someone else may get the money for signing up another victim. It’s like Mary Kay cosmetics or Amway.

Copyrights

• *Zanzibar Tales* (1901) – The Public Domain Review

  Ten folktales, translated from Swahili by George W. Bateman, showcasing the rich tradition of storytelling in Zanzibar.

Are We Ever Completely Free From Microsoft Windows? – Invidious

OK. So you installed a “free as in freedom” operating system like GNU/Linux, but are we ever completely free from Microsoft Windows?

Linux from Scratch First Impressions: Waste Of Time? – Invidious

I’ve been wanting to go through Linux from Scratch for quite a while and we recently started doing so on stream and I’ve got to say the experience has certainly been interesting.

When you have to use Microsoft…but you love Linux. – Invidious

IBM Proposing A CPU Namespace For The Linux Kernel

IBM engineer Pratik Sampat published an early prototype of a CPU namespace interface for the Linux kernel. This CPU namespace was devised to address coherency issues with current means of viewing available CPU resources as well as addressing possible security issues stemming from understanding resource access/positioning on the system.

Inspect the capabilities of ELF binaries with this open source tool

Capa is an open source project from Mandiant (a cybersecurity company). In the project’s own words, capa detects capabilities in executable files. Although the primary target of Capa is unknown and possibly malicious executables, the examples in this article run Capa on day-to-day Linux utilities to see how the tool works.

Given that most malware is Windows-based, earlier Capa versions only supported the PE file format, a dominant Windows executable format. However, starting with v3.0.0, support for ELF files has been added (thanks to Intezer).

What you need to know about Kubernetes NetworkPolicy | Opensource.com

With a growing number of cloud-native applications going to production through Kubernetes adoption, security is an important checkpoint that you must consider early in the process. When designing a cloud-native application, it is very important to embed a security strategy up front. Failure to do so leads to lingering security issues that can cause project delays and ultimately cost you unnecessary stress and money.

For years, people left security at the end—until their deployment was about to go into production. That practice causes delays on deliverables because each organization has security standards to adhere to, which are either bypassed or not followed with a lot of accepted risks to make the deliverables.

Understanding Kubernetes NetworkPolicy can be daunting for people just starting to learn the ins and outs of Kubernetes implementation. But this is one of the fundamental requirements that you must learn before deploying an application to your Kubernetes cluster. When learning Kubernetes and cloud-native application patterns, make your slogan “Don’t leave security behind!”

3 tips for printing with Linux

I have a confession to make. This may be an unpopular opinion. I actually enjoy reading documents on a piece of paper as opposed to digitally. When I want to try a new recipe, I print it out to follow it so I don’t have to continually swipe my mobile device to keep up with the steps. I store all my favorite recipes in sheet protectors in a binder. I also like to print out coloring pages or activity sheets for my kids. There are a ton of options online or we create our own!

Though I have a fond appreciation for printed documents, I have also had my fair share of printing nightmares. Paper jams, low ink, printer not found, the list of frustrating errors goes on and on.

Thankfully, it is possible to print frustration-free on Linux. Below are three tutorials you need to get started printing on Linux. The first article walks through how to connect your printer to your Linux computer. Then, learn how to print from anywhere in your house using your home network. The last article teaches you how to print from your Linux terminal so you can live out all your productivity dreams. If you are in the market for a new printer, check out this article about choosing a printer for Linux.

3 basic Linux user management commands every sysadmin should know [Ed: But those have nothing to do with Linux… they’re part of shadow-utils.]

I like logical commands; commands that are simple, straightforward, and just make sense. When I delivered Linux sysadmin training, I found Linux user management commands to be easy to explain.

Strange Apache Reload Issue « etbe – Russell Coker

I recently had to renew the SSL certificate for my web server, nothing exciting about that but Certbot created a new directory for the key because I had removed some domains (moved to a different web server). This normally isn’t a big deal, change the Apache configuration to the new file names and run the “reload” command. My monitoring system initially said that the SSL certificate wasn’t going to expire in the near future so it looked fine. Then an hour later my monitoring system told me that the certificate was about to expire, apparently the old certificate came back!

I viewed my site with my web browser and the new certificate was being used, it seemed strange. Then I did more tests with gnutls-cli which revealed that exactly half the connections got the new certificate and half got the old one. Because my web server isn’t doing anything particularly demanding the mpm_event configuration only starts 2 servers, and even that may be excessive for what it does. So it seems that the Apache reload command had reloaded the configuration on one mpm_event server but not the other!

Featured Unixcop Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) on CentOS 8 Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) on CentOS 8

Data Integration ensures that information is timely, accurate, and consistent across complex systems. Although it is still frequently referred as Extract-Transform-Load (ETL), data integration was initially considered as the architecture used for loading Enterprise Data Warehouse systems.

Data integration now includes data movement, data synchronization, data quality, data management, and data services.
Oracle Data Integrator s built on several components all working together around a centralized metadata repository.

Also these components – graphical modules, runtime agents and web based interfaces – in conjunction with other advanced features make ODI a lightweight, state of the art data integration platform.

With its superior performance and flexible architecture, Oracle Data Integrator can_be used in various types of projects such as Data Warehousing, SOA, Business Intelligence or Application Integration.

Oracle Weblogic 14c on CentOS 8 – Unixcop

Modern business environment demands Web and e-commerce applications that accelerate your entry into new markets like a boom ! help you find new ways to reach and retain customers, and allow you to introduce new products and services quickly. To build and deploy these new solutions, you need a proven, reliable e-commerce platform that can connect and empower all types of users while integrating your corporate data.

Oracle WebLogic Server is a unified and extensible platform for developing, deploying and running enterprise applications, such as Java, for on-premises and in the cloud.

Hi Guys ! Today, we will discuss about Oracle WebLogic server. We have got through some intro & now will have a glimpse of some architectural overview of this Oracle Middle ware product, Then we will go the how to’s. Don’t get bored till then !

WebLogic Server operates in the middle tier of a multi tier (or n-tier) architecture. A multi tier architecture determines where the software components that make up a computing system are executed in relation to each other and to the hardware, network, and users. Choosing the best location for each software component lets you develop applications faster; eases deployment and administration; and provides greater control over performance, utilization, security, scalability, and reliability.

Store Passwords Securely with Hashicorp Vault on Ubuntu 20.04 – VITUX

It is always not possible to remember all the secret keys, passphrases, and tokens. Sometimes managing and maintaining secrets might be challenging tasks. We may need to store such secrets somewhere which we can use when needed. Hashicorp Vault is a solution that can be used to store secrets. It protects all the secrets stored on it and keeps secured. In this article, we will learn how to install Hashicorp vault on ubuntu 20.04.

How To Install Netdata on Debian 11 – idroot

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Netdata on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Netdata is an open-source tool designed for the real-time system performance monitoring solution. It monitors processes such as memory, CPU utilization, disk input/output, network bandwidth, system applications, MySQL database among other system real-time metrics. The metrics are visualized on stunning interactive dashboards in form of graphical charts.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Netdata Monitoring tool on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

How To Install OpenVPN Server on Debian 11

In Linux, we can do many things and one of them is to create our own VPN. To do this, we will use well-known tools like OpenVPN and our beloved Debian 11. So, in this post, you will learn how to install OpenVPN Server on Debian 11.

How To Install Tasksel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Tasksel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Tasksel is a Ubuntu tool that allows you to install multiple related packages as coordinated “tasks” onto your server. So instead of installing packages one by one, say for a LAMP stack, you can install a LAMP stack on one go as Tasksel groups packages together.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Tasksel on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

How to Install Apache Maven on Ubuntu – Anto ./ Online

This guide will show you how to install Apache Maven on Ubuntu. You will also see how to verify the install and set up a basic project for testing purposes.

How to Install Apache Tomcat 10 on Ubuntu 21 – Unixcop

Apache Tomcat is an open-source Java servlet and Java Server Page container. Developers build and deploy dynamic java-based applications using Apache Tomcat. Java servlets are small java programs defining how a server handles requests and responses. Developers write the servlets while Tomcat handles all the backend and routing. As it is an opensource tool, Apache Tomcat is contributed by developers all over the world.

Apache Tomcat is an open-source Java HTTP web server developed by the Apache Software Foundation. Tomcat helps to deploy the Java Servlet and the JavaServer Pages and serves them like an HTTP web server.

How to Install Pigz to Compress Files Faster in Linux

File compression and decompression is an important milestone for any Linux user. It saves you some significant storage space when dealing with sizable data. Also, we cannot overlook the data security implementations successfully contributed by reputable file compression tools.

Compressed files are safer from data corruption and compromise than uncompressed files. The success of file compression and decompression depends on the tool you use for the task.

How to Install & Configure Git on AlmaLinux 8

Git is a mature, actively maintained open source project initially developed in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the famous Linux operating system kernel creator. Git is designed for developers that need a pretty straightforward version control system. Most software is collaborative efforts and sometimes can have hundreds of people with commits working on software development projects. It is essential to track these commits customarily done in branches in most projects before being merged into the master for release. It is easy to review and track down any incorrect commits and revert, leading to a much easier development if anything goes wrong.

How to Install or Upgrade Nvidia Drivers on Ubuntu 21.10 Impish Indri

Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Ubuntu come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.

Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s, which lacks the latest graphics card hardware’s latest features, software technology, and support. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.

In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Nvidia Graphic Drivers from the Nvidia Proprietary Repository, a PPA repository, or manually using the beta drivers for an example, thus giving you the latest in software available.

How to Install themes on Xubuntu and Other Distros Using Xfce Desktop Environment

Installing themes on Xubuntu is similar to Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution. You put the theme files in the ~/.themes folder and then use a tool to change it.

However, some options or the user interface will look different considering Xubuntu uses the Xfce desktop environment. This is why I created this specific tutorial to show the steps with proper screenshots.

How to create a virtual CAN interface on Linux – PragmaticLinux

A virtual CAN interface is the perfect solution when developing CAN nodes, without needing an actual physical CAN bus. Think of a virtual CAN interface as a software CAN adapter, through which you can access an emulated CAN bus. The SocketCAN subsystem of the Linux kernel comes with build-in support for virtual CAN interfaces. This tutorial explains in detail how to create and use a virtual CAN interface on your Linux system.

How to install Java 17 in Debian 11 – Citizix

Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. Java was developed by Sun Microsystems (which is now the subsidiary of Oracle) in the year 1995. James Gosling is known as the father of Java.

Java and the JVM (Java’s virtual machine) are required for many kinds of software, including Tomcat, Jetty, Glassfish, Cassandra and Jenkins.

In this guide we are going to explore how to install Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and the Java Developer Kit (JDK) in Debian 11.

How to install Tiled Map Editor on a Chromebook

Today we are looking at how to install Tiled Map Editor on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

How to install Vivaldi on Linux Lite 5.4 – Invidious

In this video, we are looking at how to install Vivaldi on Linux Lite 5.4.

How to set up Samba shares in Ubuntu Server the easy way

Webmin is an administration web UI for managing UNIX-like operating systems. For example, if you have an Ubuntu server and want an easier way to create Samba shares on your system, Webmin is an excellent tool.

With Webmin, you can create Samba shares on Ubuntu Server through your web browser, easily manage permissions, etc. In this guide, we’ll show you how to use Webmin to configure Samba shares in Ubuntu Server the easy way.

How to set up an FTP server on Ubuntu with Webmin

Do you want to set up an FTP server on your Ubuntu Server system but don’t want to deal with configuration files? If so, Webmin is for you! Webmin is an excellent tool that allows users to manage UNIX-like servers with an easy-to-use web interface. Here’s how to use Webmin to set up an FTP server on Ubuntu.

How to set up an NFS share in Webmin on Ubuntu Server

NFS (AKA Network File System) is a handy networking tool that makes transferring files on Linux super fast. However, setting it up is tedious if you do not know what you are doing.

That’s where Webmin comes in. It’s a web UI manager for UNIX-like operating systems that makes setting up complex things like NFS easy. In this guide, we’ll show you how you can set up an NFS share with it.

Installing Mods for Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl (NASB) on Linux – Boiling Steam

It’s been a few weeks since the release of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl (NASB). While some media outlets have criticized the game for lacking voice-overs, extra character skins, having a generic soundtrack, and a “cheap budget” feeling, a lot of these issues can be mitigated, thanks to the modding community. Players don’t have to wait for an official update to come out to enjoy quality-of-life upgrades to the game. If you want to make Nigel Thornberry look like Wario, you can do that. If you desire Reptar to look like Bowser or Yoshi, you can do that. If you hunger for more life to the game by adding voice-overs for the characters, you can do that. If you crave victory themes, you can do that. If you’re tired of the bland soundtrack for a particular stage and yearn for something better, you can do that. If you desire PlayStation-style buttons, you can do that.

Jenkins: How to create a node agent – Anto ./ Online

A Jenkins node agent is essentially a worker node that performs operations requested by Jenkins. Jenkins will manage the node agent as well as the required tools. This guide will show you how to create an agent node in Jenkins.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• PSA: Plasma Browser Integration Currently Unavailable

  A fix is being worked on, but might take a bit, sorry about that.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Federico Mena-Quintero: Text in librsvg starts to get better

  Up to now, text support in librsvg has been fairly limited. The text chapter in the SVG spec is pretty big and it contains features that are very much outside of my experience (right-to-left languages, vertical text). But now I think I have a plan for how to improve the text features.

  [...]

  All those fixes will appear in librsvg 2.52.3, due in a few days.

  I want to add more tests for right-to-left and bidi text; they can be affected by many properties for which there are no tests right now.

  After bidi text works reasonably well, I want to add support for positioning individual glyphs with the x/y/dx/dy properties. People from Wikimedia Commons really want this, to be able to lay out equations and such.

  Once individual glyphs can be positioned independently, maybe textPath support, which cartographers really like for curved labels.

• Felix Häcker: #14 Well-Rounded

  Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 08 to October 15.

New Releases

• MX Linux 21 Stable Release is Finally Here Introducing a Fluxbox Edition

  MX Linux is a Debian-based Linux/GNU distribution aiming at elegance, stability, and performance.

  We previously covered its new Fluxbox edition in the beta phase, but now the stable release is out. Let us explore what’s new with MX Linux 21 “Wildflower”.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• MontaVista Announces Multiple Tier1 Customers Adopting MVShield for Commercial Support of CentOS and Rocky Linux

  MontaVista® Software, LLC, a leader in commercial Embedded Linux® products and services, today announced that several Tier1 customers across the enterprise markets serviced by MontaVista, have selected MVShield because of its capabilities to offer Long-Term Support for CentOS with telecom grade features such as redundancy, high availability and high throughput with low latency.

• Red Hat Bolsters Cloud-Native and Edge Portfolio

  Red Hat today at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America conference unfurled a bevy of updates that promise to both make it easier to build and deploy applications on fleets of clusters based on its distribution of Kubernetes and manage the overall environment.

• Software’s Big Skill-Up, Learning The Way To Cloud-Native

  In this regard, Red Hat is providing ways for cloud-native deployments to be executed more quickly and accurately. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.4 provides ‘policy templating’ (a policy being the prescripted way data is managed in any given system) and zero-touch provisioning. Of particular use in edge i.e. Internet of Things (IoT) computing environments, Red Hat also here combines what the company calls ‘validated patterns for edge’ to reduce deployment complexity, save time and improve the accuracy of the cloud-native systems being developed.

• Automotive transformation to software-defined vehicles: Red Hat point of view and synergies with state-of-the-art IT

  Building a dream car doesn’t just revolve around factors like horsepower and interior finishes anymore. The automotive industry is going through some big changes as the electric vehicle market revs up and edge computing extends new capabilities for vehicle connectivity.

  At Red Hat, we are working to enable a number of edge use cases—from telecommunications use cases with core network infrastructure for radio access networks to distributed computing for retail environments and manufacturing environments.

  During the “Automotive transformation to software-defined vehicles” Ask the Expert session at Red Hat Summit this year, we discussed the car as the ultimate edge server and the role of Red Hat and other open source contributors in this fast-evolving industry. This post will cover some of the highlights from the session.

• Remote and hybrid work: 4 tips to ease onboarding

  Onboarding new team members has been a struggle for many companies that rapidly switched to remote work or hybrid work. As an IT leader, you know that business success depends on having reliable and talented colleagues working together, whether virtually or in person. So how do you overcome the remote onboarding challenge?

  Answering this question can be particularly difficult if yours is a “traditional” industry with a baked-in corporate culture. A company that’s been in the financial services industry for 100 years, for instance, is likely to have a tougher time revamping its onboarding processes than, say, a start-up that specializes in cloud services.

  That’s not corporate ageism; it’s a trend that’s been seen time and time again – and it will, unfortunately, inhibit your ability to onboard talented developers and other technologists with a diversity of backgrounds and experience.

  The good news? Any organization, in any industry, can successfully “virtualize” its onboarding practices. In doing so, they invigorate their IT teams and add collaborative, innovative people.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• 5 Things to Check Out in Ubuntu Impish Indri

  Last week, we celebrated the Ubuntu 21.10 release on the Ubuntu On Air channel, where a wide range of guests discussed their Impish Indri highlights as well as some thoughts for the future. Today we thought we would share ours!

  For Linux desktop users, Impish Indri contains a number of new features plus a preview or two for you to try out ahead of our LTS release next year with 22.04.

  So here are our top 5 must try for Ubuntu Desktop 21.10…

• [Older] This is how you can add five more years of life to your Ubuntu LTS install

  In September, Canonical announced that it would be extending the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) of both Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS by a further two years so that their total life reaches 10 years instead of eight. Canonical touts ESM as a paid product which it relies on for revenues, however, it’s actually possible to use ESM on three personal computers for free. Additionally, if you enable it, you get Livepatch on your system so you don’t have to restart for kernel updates.

The Chip Shortage Is so Bad Raspberry Pi Prices Have Gone Up

Eben Upton posted on the official Raspberry Pi blog regarding the price increase, and while it’s rather unfortunate for buyers, it sounds necessary. The post cited, “the upsurge of demand for electronic products for home working and entertainment during the pandemic has descended into panic buying, as companies try to secure the components that they need to build their products.”

The company says it’s “expecting our supply chain challenges to continue through much of 2022.” Because of this, the price of some Raspberry Pi models is going to increase. Specifically, the older ones built on 40nm silicon will see a price increase.

The 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 will move to $45, which Raspberry Pi says happened because “cost increases caused by the current shortage mean that this product is not currently economically viable at this reduced price point. We are therefore moving it back to $45 on a temporary basis.”

Kontron takes Raspberry Pi into Industry 4.0 with Codesys

“The integrated development environment Codesys for programmable logic controllers according to the IEC 61131-3 standards is hardware-independent software for application development in industrial automation,” according to Kontron. “Thanks to its open interfaces and security features, Codesys has distinguished itself as an industry 4.0 platform and facilitates data exchange between IIoT networks.”

Prior to this, Codesys has been available for Kontron’s PiXtend – a similar product that takes a standard Pi rather than a Compute Module.

Of this, the company said: Codesys V3 lets you memory-program controls. An integrated web visualisation tool is available for displaying your control elements, diagrams and graphics on your smartphone, tablet or PC.”

Open Hardware/Modding

• M5Stamp C3 RISC-V board supports WiFI 4, Bluetooth 5.0 Long Range and 2 Mbps bitrate – CNX Software

  It was only last month that M5Stack launched the M5Stamp Pico module based on an ESP32-PICO-D4 SiP and heat-resistant plastic shell, but M5Stamp C3 board is already out with most of the same specifications and features but an ESP32-C3 RISC-V SoC replaces the ESP32 dual-core Xtensa processor.

  M5Stamp C3 offers WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 with high bitrate and long-range connectivity and comes with the same heat-resistant plastic shell, but the company also highlights the RSA-3072-based secure boot and the AES-128-XTS-based flash encryption as a more secure way to address Bluetooth security concerns.

• Alibaba open sources four RISC-V cores: XuanTie E902, E906, C906 and C910 – CNX Software

  Alibaba introduces a range of RISC-V processors in the last few years with the Xuantie family ranging from the E902 micro-controller class core to the C910 core for servers in data centers. This also includes the XuanTie C906 core found in the Allwinner D1 single-core RISC-V processor.

  While RISC-V is an open standard and there’s a fair share of open-source RISC-V cores available, many commercial RISC-V cores are closed source, but Zhang Jianfeng, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence speaking at the 2021 Apsara Conference, announced that T-Head had open-sourced four RISC-V-based Xuantie series processor cores, namely Xuantie E902, E906, C906, and C910, as well as related software and tools.

• SiFive Has A New RISC-V Core To Improve Performance By 50%, Outperform Cortex-A78 – Phoronix

  SiFive just shared word that at today’s Linley Conference they teased their Performance P550 successor that will “set a new standard for the highest efficiency RISC-V processor available.”

• This tinyML device counts your squats while you focus on your form | Arduino Blog

  Getting in your daily exercise is vital to living a healthy life and having proper form when squatting can go a long way towards achieving that goal without causing joint pain from doing them incorrectly. The Squats Counter is a device worn around the thigh that utilizes machine learning and TensorFlow Lite to automatically track the user’s form and count how many squats have been performed.

  Creator Manas Pange started his project by flashing the tf4micro-moition-kit code to a Nano 33 BLE Sense, which features an onboard three-axis accelerometer. From there, he opened the Tiny Motion Trainer Experiment by Google that connects to the Arduino over Bluetooth and captures many successive samples of motion. After gathering enough proper and improper form samples, Manas trained, tested, and deployed the resulting model to the board.

Turn any device with a browser into a secondary screen with Deskreen!

Deskreen in action (src. Deskreen) Many computer users require extending their workspace with other monitors, like developers, software engineers, news reporters, and business analysts.

[...]

The project is a community-based product, which was released under the AGPL-3.0 License and maintained by a team of professionals.

You Can Now Directly Read Data Logs From Tesla Vehicles (Jalopnik) [LWN.net]

The Jalopnik automotive site has posted an article on a (relatively) new set of open-source tools that can extract log data from Tesla cars.

You Can Now Directly Read Data Logs From Tesla Vehicles

The Netherlands Forensic Institute has reverse-engineered Tesla’s file format and released the tools to interpret data…

Web Browsers

• Chromium

  • Chromium Blog: Sunsetting the “basic-card” payment method in the Payment Request API

    The Payment Request API is a soon-to-be-recommended web standard that aims to make building low-friction and secure payment flows easier for developers. The browser facilitates the flow between a merchant website and “payment handlers”. A payment handler can be built-in to the browser, a native app installed on user’s mobile device, or a Progressive Web App. Today, developers can use the Payment Request API to access several payment methods, including “basic-card” and Google Pay in Chrome on most platforms, Apple Pay in Safari, Digital Goods API on Google Play, and Secure Payment Confirmation in Chrome.

  • Chrome Releases: Stable Channel Update for Desktop

    The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 95 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

    Chrome 95.0.4638.54 contains a number of fixes and improvements — a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 95.

  • Chrome 95 Released With FTP Support Completely Removed, New Developer Additions – Phoronix

    Chrome 95 has rolled out as stable today as the latest version of Google’s web browser.

    With Chrome 95 the previously-deprecated FTP support has been completely removed. There are also many new developer features available in Chrome 95 along with a number of mobile-focused additions.

  • Chromium Blog: Chrome 96 Beta: Conditional Focus, Priority Hints, and More

    Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 96 is beta as of October 21, 2021.

  • Chrome 96 Beta Begins Preparing For Chrome 100, Adds Priority Hints Feature – Phoronix

    Following this week’s release of Chrome 95, Google has now promoted Chrome 96 to beta status.

    Next year Chrome will see version 100 and for ensuring a smooth transition, Chrome 96 Beta is adding a new flag to force the major version to already be advertised as version 100. The new developer-minded option will set the Chrome HTTP user-agent string to Chrome 100, for helping developers test their web sites / web applications against that three digit version number. As some particularly older scripts may be just checking for the two major digits, Google developers added this option early to help catch any areas that may not be correctly handling a three digit major version number.

  • Google-bye: Brave now uses its own search engine by default • The Register

    The Brave browser will now default to the company’s own search engine, claimed to preserve privacy, while a new Web Discovery Project aims to collect search data again with privacy protection.

    The Brave web browser is based on the Google-sponsored Chromium engine but with features designed to prevent tracking, as well as an unusual reward system using its own cryptocurrency, the Basic Attention Token (BAT). Brave search will now be the default on new installs for desktop, Android, and iOS. Existing Brave users will keep their current default unless they choose to change it.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox Nightly: These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 102

    Gecko profiler Rust marker API has landed. It’s possible to add a profiler marker from the Rust to annotate a part of the code now. See the gecko-profiler crate for more information. Documentation is also coming soon.

CMS

• Neos.io: the next generation open-source WordPress CMS alternative

  Neos.io is a free open-source modern CMS solution for developers and designers. It is the ideal solution for enterprise and developers.

  Neos.io is packed with dozens of features aiming to be easy to use for content creators and editors, effortlessly customized by designers, and extensible for developers.

  Developers can easily build custom themes, custom content models, plugins to add new features and functions and integrate 3rd party services and solutions.

  Neos.io offers long-term support for its releases, which means every production release goes through extensive testing and quality check before production.

FSF

• GNU Projects

  • GIMP 2.99.8 is here but what’s happened to 3.0? If only stuff would not break all the time

    The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a full-featured bitmap image editor with a long history, the first public release being January 1996. Version 1.0 came in June 1998.

    It is appreciated for its extensive features (and free price) but development is slow. The current production version is 2.10, the first version of which came out in April 2010, built using Gtk 2.x. That said, GIMP 2.10 is regularly updated, most recently with 2.10.28 last month, featuring many bug fixes especially on Windows.

• Licensing/Legal

  • Trump’s Social Media Platform and the Affero General Public License (of Mastodon)

    Trump’s Group has 30 days to remedy the violation, or their rights in the software are permanently terminated

    In 2002, we used phrases like “Web 2.0” and “AJAX” to describe the revolution that was happening in web technology for average consumers. This was just before names like Twitter and Facebook became famous worldwide. Web 2.0 was the groundwork infrastructure of the “social media” to come.

    As software policy folks, my colleagues and I knew that these technologies were catalysts for change. Software applications, traditionally purchased on media and installed explicitly, were now implicitly installed through web browsers — delivered automatically, or even sometimes run on the user’s behalf on someone else’s computer. As copyleft activists specifically, we knew that copyleft licensing would have to adjust, too.

Programming/Development

• Python

  • Package updates as a result from the switch to Python 3.10 in Slackware-current

    When Python3 was updated from 3.9 to 3.10 in Slackware-current two weeks ago, lots of 3rd-party packages (i.e. software packages that are not part of the Slackware distro itself) containing python modules were suddenly broken.

    To make things more complex, not all Python software is currently compatible with Python 3.10. Patrick Volkerding opened a poll on LinuxQuestions.org to get feedback from the community about this intrusive update after we already have a Slackware 15.0 Release Candidate since mid-august.
    After all, when you tag a Release Candidate, that usually sends a signal that the software set is frozen and only usability issues and software bugs will be addressed.

    After giving this some time to sink in and hoping that this update would be reverted because of its impact, I now think we are stuck with Python 3.10 in Slackware. Which means I had to start looking at which of my own packages are now broken.

• Rust

  • Announcing Rust 1.56.0 and Rust 2021 [LWN.net]

    The Rust language project has announced the release of stable version 1.56.0 and the Rust 2021 edition.

  • Announcing Rust 1.56.0 and Rust 2021

    The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.56.0. This stabilizes the 2021 edition as well. Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

Amlogic A311D2 octa-core Arm processor supports up to 16GB RAM – CNX Software

Amlogic A311D2 octa-core processor is the successor to Amlogic A311D hexa-core SoC with four Cortex-A73 cores, four Cortex-A53 cores, a more powerful Mali-G52 MP8 (8EE) GPU, support for eDP and LVDS video interface, 8Kp24 AV1 video decoding, and support for a whopping 16GB LPDDR4/X memory.

But it’s not all! The chip also includes supports for three HDMI 2.1 inputs up to 4Kp60, a 16MP ISP, 4K video encoding, and the more powerful GPU and higher memory bandwidth enable 4K user interfaces which were not feasible on most other Arm hardware barring the NVIDIA Shield.

Intel Celeron J6412 thin Mini-ITX motherboard offers four Ethernet ports – CNX Software

BCM Advanced Research is now sample MX6412J thin mini-ITX motherboard equipped with an Intel Celeron J6412 quad-core Elkhart Lake processor, up to 32 GB RAM via two SODIMM DDR4 memory slots, SATA and NVMe storage, as well as found Ethernet ports with namely two 2.5GbE and two Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports.

Designed for fanless operation with a large yet thin heatsink, the industrial motherboard also sports two HDMI 4K video outputs, nine USB 3.0/2.0 ports, variable 12-24 DC input, as well as several serial ports, and more.

Going Forward To The Land: Technology For Permaculture | Hackaday

t’s usual for a Hackaday scribe to read hundreds of web pages over a typical week as we traverse the world in search of the good stuff to bring you. Sometimes they’re obvious Hackaday stories but as you’ll all no doubt understand we often end up on wild tangents learning about stuff we never expected to be excited about. Thus it was last week that I happened upon a GQ piece charting the dwindling remains of the communes set up in rural California by hippies during the counterculture years.

With only a few ageing residents who truly embraced the back-to-the-land dream remaining, these adventurously-designed home-made houses are gently decaying into the forest. It’s a disappearing world, but it’s also close to home for me as someone who crew up on a self-sufficiency smallholding in the 1970s. My parents may not have been hippies in the way those of everyone else in that scene at the time seemed to be, but I learned all my curiosity and hacking skills in the many opportunities presented to a small child by an unruly combination of small farm and metalworking business. There’s part of me that would build a hippy home in a Californian forest in a heartbeat, and throw myself with gusto into subsistence vegetable growing to get me through each winter.

Problems with Multifactor Authentication [Ed: Avoiding the linking to Microsoft]

The first time I heard of this issue was from a Midwest CEO. His organization had been hit by ransomware to the tune of $10M. Operationally, they were still recovering nearly a year later. And, embarrassingly, it was his most trusted VP who let the attackers in. It turns out that the VP had approved over 10 different push-based messages for logins that he was not involved in. When the VP was asked why he approved logins for logins he was not actually doing, his response was, “They (IT) told me that I needed to click on Approve when the message appeared!”

And there you have it in a nutshell. The VP did not understand the importance (“the WHY”) of why it was so important to ONLY approve logins that they were participating in. Perhaps they were told this. But there is a good chance that IT, when implementinthe new push-based MFA, instructed them as to what they needed to do to successfully log in, but failed to mention what they needed to do when they were not logging in if the same message arrived. Most likely, IT assumed that anyone would naturally understand that it also meant not approving unexpected, unexplained logins. Did the end user get trained as to what to do when an unexpected login arrived? Were they told to click on “Deny” and to contact IT Help Desk to report the active intrusion?

Or was the person told the correct instructions for both approving and denying and it just did not take? We all have busy lives. We all have too much to do. Perhaps the importance of the last part of the instructions just did not sink in. We can think we hear and not really hear. We can hear and still not care.

Proprietary

• Security

  • Sophisticated Spearphishing Campaign Targets Government Organizations, IGOs, and NGOs – blackMORE Ops

    The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are engaged in addressing a spearphishing campaign targeting government organizations, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). A sophisticated cyber threat actor leveraged a compromised end-user account from Constant Contact, a legitimate email marketing software company, to spoof a U.S.-based government organization and distribute links to malicious URLs.[1] CISA and FBI have not determined that any individual accounts have been specifically targeted by this campaign.

  • Malicious NPM Packages Caught Running Cryptominer On Windows, Linux, macOS Devices [Ed: Lousy anti-journalist sites try to blame the victims for having received malware from Microsoft itself]

    Three JavaScript libraries uploaded to the official NPM package repository have been unmasked as crypto-mining malware, once again demonstrating how open-source software package repositories are becoming a lucrative target for executing an array of attacks on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems.

  • GPS Daemon (GPSD) Rollover Bug

    Critical Infrastructure (CI) owners and operators, and other users who obtain Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) from Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, should be aware of a GPS Daemon (GPSD) bug in GPSD versions 3.20 (released December 31, 2019) through 3.22 (released January 8, 2021).

  • New Linux kernel memory corruption bug causes full system compromise [Ed: This is "local privilege escalation", i.e. vastly less severe than all those back doors in Windows, but so-called 'security' firms aren't meant to talk about state-mandated holes]

    Researchers dubbed it a “straightforward Linux kernel locking bug” that they exploited against Debian Buster’s 4.19.0.13-amd64 kernel.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • U.S. FTC report proves ISPs as bad as Facebook on privacy – Access Now

      Today, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a damning report on internet service providers’ (ISP) invasive data practices that violate the right to privacy and nondiscrimination. The companies analyzed include AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Charter, Comcast, Google Fiber, and T-Mobile.

    • UNGA76 Side event: The digital surveillance crisis and threats to human rights defenders – Invidious

      This event will discuss how states, facilitated by private companies, are unlawfully deploying targeted surveillance technologies against civil society around the world. The biennial General Assembly resolution on human rights defenders that will be considered at its 76th session offers is an opportunity to discuss the effects of digital surveillance on the activities and safety of human rights defenders and their rights to privacy and freedom of expression, and to adopt measures that would allow defenders to continue exercise their human rights unhindered.

    • British Licence Plate Camera Fooled By Clothing | Hackaday

      It’s a story that has caused consternation and mirth in equal measure amongst Brits, that the owners of a car in Surrey received a fine for driving in a bus lane miles away in Bath, when in fact the camera had been confused by the text on a sweater worn by a pedestrian. It seems the word “knitter” had been interpreted by the reader as “KN19 TER”, which as Brits will tell you follows the standard format for modern UK licence plate.

Armed robodogs are just like smart rifles [Ed: For all those Utopians who insist that more technology will necessarily make life better]

If it is controlled, everything that a human can control remotely with digital technology, another human can hack, sooner or later. Before selling this to SWAT teams, please make sure they would be happy if their opponents got control of the robodogs remotes.

After Facebook Exposé: Does India need to update its IT Act?

The Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act) is the cornerstone of India’s policy framework for regulating the internet. However, in the two decades since the IT Act was originally enacted, significant technological, policy, and legal developments have taken place that subsequent amendments have not been able to completely account for. Digitisation has grown tremendously and, today, integrates strongly with a wide range of individual and social behaviours across demographics in India. For context, only 0.5% of the population (around 55 lakh people at that time) actually used the internet in 2000. BSNL was also incorporated 4 months after the passing of the Act.

As a result, amending the IT Act is an issue that has come up multiple times over the last couple of years. In January this year, multiple media reports (see here and here) emerged stating that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) had begun a ‘revamp’ of the IT Act. These reports stated that discussions over updating the Act to better deal with modern technologies and challenges. These changes would also involve harmonising the Act with the provisions of the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019.

On February 3rd, 2021, an answer to a Lok Sabha question stated that “MeitY has initiated work on amendment to the Information Technology Act, 2000 which, inter alia, includes strengthening the provisions for intermediaries for making them more responsive and accountable to Indian users.” Furthermore, an RTI request we had filed received an answer on February 4th, 2021 that revealed that the Ministry had begun to interact with stakeholder ministries over potential amendments to the Act. In response to all these happenings, we had written to MEITY, pointing out the issues and lacunae with the IT Act and asking the Ministry to hold a full public consultation with regards to the proposed amendments.

Then, in July this year, before the Monsoon session of Parliament, we wrote to the Standing Committee on Information Technology, explaining how the IT Act’s original purpose was to govern e-commerce in India and how there was a need to update the Act in line with technological, policy, and legal developments. Recent media reports have once again indicated that MEITY is working on amendments. These reports suggest that MEITY is looking to introduce a more stringent intermediary liability regime that would subsume the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (IT Rules) and give the government more control over social media platforms. Some reports even indicate that a new Act may be introduced to deal specifically with intermediary liability. The reports also indicate that terms such as ‘online bullying and harassment’ may be defined under the IT Act, while technologies such as blockchain and bitcoin may also be regulated under the Act.

Lumen Researcher Interview Series: Professor Eugene Volokh, UCLA Law School

In the fourth part of the Lumen Researcher Interview Series, we spoke with Professor Eugene Volokh, professor of law at UCLA law school, who specializes in First Amendment law.

Prof. Volokh’s research has used the Lumen Database to identify and investigate fraudulent or falsified court orders and ‘anti-libelous’ overbroad injunctions that were being used to remove legitimate content on the Internet. Most recently, his article about the abuse of Google’s de-indexing policy through forgeries and fraudulent court orders, titled ‘Shenanigans (Internet Takedown Edition)’, was published in the Utah Law Revie

IVOW fights biases in artificial intelligence

But if you pass it to a popular image recognition app, blessed with “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), it will tell you the image is “more than 95% ice cream and a dessert”.

As you should already know if you follow me, that failure is basically due to the fact that the image collections used to “train” software like that “have been informed by mostly male developers from primarily western backgrounds”.

Algorithm bias, again. This time, in mortgages [Ed: How technology deepens inequality when put in the wrong hands]

But the problem is not algorithms, of course.

Bias and discrimination by algorithms is not new anymore, sadly. But it is always useful to find and share detailed evidence of where and how it happens. This time, I signal some more of such evidence, about Mortgage-Approval Algorithms.

Replacement T-Mobile Home Internet Nokia Trash Can modem arrives, dies five minutes after I turn it on, and I had to explain “reboot loop” to the tech support.

So today, my replacement Nokia Trash Can Modem arrived for my T-Mobile Home Internet, which has been getting increasingly unreliable.

I took it out of the box, made note of the fact that there was no power cord and no SIM card in it, and proceeded to put the SIM card from the old unit into the new one. The replacement Trash Can’s sticker says it is “hardware revision 2”, whereas the one that I have that was being replaced was “hardware revision 3”.

When I powered it on, it let me connect over WiFi for about 5 minutes and all seemed good until it dropped the WiFi connection and went into an endless reboot loop.

When I called to complain, T-Mobile’s Home Internet tech support didn’t know what a “boot loop” was, so I had to describe what I meant.