GNU/Linux

• Video ☛ Arch Linux Is A Great Distro But You Shouldn’t Use It – Invidious

  I’ve been using Arch for a few years and it’s a great distro however it’s not the distro for everyone regardless of what some people shilling the distro might say, so here’s the case against Arch Linux.

• Linux Links ☛ Linux Around The World: Saudi Arabia

• Linux Links ☛ Linux Around The World: Ireland

• Linux Format 290

  Unleash the open source hacking toolkit that’s just waiting for you to discover at the heart of every distro. From the basics of ping to the intricacies of nmap, we explore how you can hone your network hacking skills and take advantage of dedicated toolkits.

  PLUS: Fully feature CMS tested, Linux in space, build smart ESPhome devices, get started with Portainer and Docker, emulate the Commodore 16, get to grips with FreeCAD and more!

• Desktop/Laptop

  • ThinkPad T530

    I am using a ThinkPad T530 laptop, which I bought brand new. It was shipped with Windows 7, but from the first time, I installed Ubuntu. I’m using this OS from the beginning of Ubuntu distribution and my everyday GNU/Linux usage. There were two laptops before this Thinkpad. The last one is now ten years old, and it let me down almost two years ago. It shook the entire look on GNU/Linux of my own. Because after the last upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS it failed all the way.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • mintCast Pocast ☛ mintCast 386 – Microsoft’s Redemption Arc

    First up in the news, NTFS is orphaned, a hare-brained C alternative, and some new Pop!

    In security and privacy, Microsoft found it, and Musk open sources

    Then in our Wanderings, Jorge is steaming right along, Joe is destroying more stuff, Norbert had a little too much linux, Moss is redoing EVERYTHING, and Bill is pulling his hair out.

  • Video ☛ HP DEV ONE: is this Linux laptop a THINKPAD KILLER? – Invidious

  • Tux Digital ☛ Destination Linux 282: Linux on Smartphones & GNOME Shell on Mobile – TuxDigital

    This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to be talking about some amazing things happening with mobile on Linux. Then we will be discussing some enhancements to FWUPD for easy firmware updates. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

• Kernel Space

  • Free Desktop ☛ libinput 1.21.0

    libinput 1.21.0 is now available for download.
    
    This version includes a new configuration option that, similarly to its
    touchpad counterpart, allows disabling the trackpoint while typing.
    
    Compositors can take advantage of it thanks to four new APIs:
     - libinput_device_config_dwtp_is_available
     - libinput_device_config_dwtp_set_enabled
     - libinput_device_config_dwtp_get_enabled
     - libinput_device_config_dwtp_get_default_enabled
    
    Those who use the flat acceleration profile on their touchpad are in
    luck, it has been improved in this version.
    
    In addition to the changes already mentioned, new quirks have been
    added for multiple StarLabs laptops.
    
    Last but not least, several bugs have been fixed, so make sure to
    update!
    
    

• Applications

  • MenuLibre 2.3.0 Released

    Adding (or fixing) support for the MATE desktop environment proved to be a challenge. Due to some incompatibility been gnome-menus, xdg-desktop-menu, MATE, and probably something that MenuLibre is doing wrong with all three… MenuLibre was failing to read the MATE directories which resulted in an always-empty menu structure. Getting past that, I found that some updates such as renaming menu items would either fail to update the menu or add duplicate directories.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • ByteXD ☛ 12 Commands to Check Linux System & Hardware Information

    Whether you are a Linux beginner user who wants to learn new commands or a frequent user who only needs a quick reminder, this tutorial is for you.

    In this article we’ll explain 12 typical commands to check Linux system and hardware information.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Persepolis on Debian 11 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Persepolis on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Persepolis is a free, open-source download manager written in Python. It delivers an excellent download queuing and scheduling solution. Additionally, you can rely on it for multi-segment downloads from Dailymotion, Vimeo, and many more. Persepolis is available for Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD.

    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 the Persepolis download manager on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

  • Trend Oceans ☛ Missing Extensions option in Gnome Tweaks Tool – TREND OCEANS

    After using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for a long time, it’s time to move to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jelly Fish) to use the new features that have created a lot of hype.

    In particular, Gnome 42 has a considerable amount of features, which pushes me to update and try the latest version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

    Once I updated my system to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, I started to configure the desktop environment as per my preference.
    While making the change, I found that the gnome tweak tool does not have the extensions option. Because of that, I’m not able to tweak the default option of a particular extension.

  • TuMFatig ☛ TuM’Fatig – WindowMaker theme inspired by Windows 10

    Because I’m a terrible person, I themed my beloved WindowMaker to look like Windows 10. Because it’s fun and possible, somehow.

    To get more details on how to tune WindowMaker, refer to this theming article or to the official WindowMaker User Guide . This post only shows and references the minimal material.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Vitals – Display CPU Temperature, Fan Speed, Memory Usage in Ubuntu Panel

    Want to display your computer’s temperature, voltage, fan speed, memory usage, and other system resources usage in top panel? Vitals is a good choice for Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and other Linux with GNOME desktop.

  • Linuxiac ☛ How to Upgrade Ubuntu Server to 22.04 from 20.04 (Best Practices)

    This step-by-step guide shows best practices to upgrade your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server to 22.04 LTS using the command line.

    On April 21, 2022, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) was officially released. This is the most recent Ubuntu LTS release, with security fixes and updates available until April 2027.

    Suppose you still use the previous LTS version of Ubuntu Server, 20.04 (Focal Fossa). In that case, you should consider switching to the most recent LTS version to take advantage of its new features and updated software packages.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Blender on Debian 11

    Firstly, login to root user in our terminal, then we install flatpak, then we add the flathub repository to our system and lastly we install Blender. Then we reboot our computer and everything is done. Enjoy!

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Blender 3.2.0 on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install Blender 3.2.0 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.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Drupal on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Drupal on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Drupal is an open-source and one of the most popular PHP-based Content Management System (CMS) platforms for building personal blogs or big corporate websites. It has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. Flexibility and modularity are some of the core principles that set it apart from the rest.

    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 the Drupal content management systems on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

  • Embracing Vanilla Emacs as a Vim user

    In 2021 I started using Emacs and learning to use the vanilla
    keybindings.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Steam Deck: Software Updates, Official and Unofficial Docks News

    Here’s a quick round-up of what happened around the Steam Deck in the past 2 weeks.

  • Bryan Lunduke ☛ A new “Pokemon”-type game for the Command Line

    Someone has developed a Pokemon clone… that runs entirely from the command line: Pokete.

  • Linux Links ☛ 10 Free and Open Source Game Engines – LinuxLinks

    Game engines offer huge benefits to game developers. The main functionality they provide is the library of core functions used in a computer game. This often includes a realtime rendering engine for 2D or 3D graphics, physics engine with collision detection, a character animation system, scene graph, sound, artificial intelligence, threading, networking, input, streaming localization support, debugging tools, integration with languages, and the provision of performance monitoring and optimization tools.

    Game engines play a crucial role in the fast creation and development of computer games. As they offer a collection of visual development tools, and are often presented in an integrated development environment, they vastly accelerate the development of games. Game engines are referred to as “game middleware” because they provide a flexible and reusable software platform.

    Let’s explore the 10 game engines. For each engine we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screen shot of the program in action, together with links to relevant resources.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE Ships Frameworks 5.95.0

      KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.95.0.

      KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.

      This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

    • 9to5Linux ☛ KDE Frameworks 5.95 Released with More Than 180 Changes for Plasma and KDE Apps

      
      KDE Frameworks 5.95 is here with mostly bug fixes, but also various improvements. For example, it improves the generation of previews for various RAW image types, addresses a major memory leak in the Plasma Wayland session, and makes the animation for progress bars and sliders in QtQuick-based apps much smoother.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Use Authenticator to Generate Two-Factor Authentication Codes on Linux

      For a simple, straight-forward way to generate two factor authentication codes on Ubuntu and other Linux desktops try Authenticator.

      Created by developer Bilal Elmoussaoui, ‘Authenticator‘ is a GTK app you can use to get secure two-factor authentication codes to use with more than 200 providers, including GitHub, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Dropbox.

      And if you want to know if this apps supports a particular service before you install it search for it on the 2fa.directory. If a service listed on that website supports ‘software tokens’ then it will work with it.

      In this post I take a quick look at what two-factor authentication is, why it’s (highly) recommended, and how Authenticator makes using the codes it creates seriously simple.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• 9to5Linux ☛ Ventoy Now Supports More Than 900 ISOs, Enables Secure Boot by Default

  
  Ventoy 1.0.76 is the latest release of this powerful and beloved multiboot USB creator, which finally enables the Secure Boot support option by default when installing Ventoy on your USB flash drive. In addition, this release improves key enrolling for Secure Boot with Super UEFIinSecureBoot Disk 3-3.

  In addition, the new release adds support for the recently launched EasyOS 4.0 experimental GNU/Linux distribution based on various Puppy Linux technologies, along with support for resizing the EasyOS partition during the first boot.

• New Releases

  • MakuluLinux Shift 2022 Final – Released ! – MakuluLinux

    We are proud to announce the Final Build of MakuluLinux Shift 2022. Its been a long journey and putting together such a complex/unique distro has been very challenging. MakuluLinux Shift is a transformable Linux operating system that can transform between 16 desktops with a single click, and it takes just seconds for the process to complete. It transforms the whole Desktop including Panels, Docks, Menus, Wallpapers, Themes, Icon-sets, Extensions, Cursors Effects, Color schemes and even scripts that handle third party applications and menu entries, It is a truly Unique Distro, nothing like it exists anywhere.

• Debian Family

  • Bruce Perens & Debian public domain trademark promise

    The volunteer response to the Debian trademark case at WIPO (download PDF) contains some stunning revelations. We will serialize them over the next couple of weeks. One of the most fascinating revelations is that Debian went broke in 1998. Bruce Perens promised to put the trademark into the public domain, in other words, giving it to the real community. Who is the real community?

    Normally a dispute like this would be resolved by private discussions between grown ups and these emails would never see the light of day. Jonathan Carter has told us that he can just give a whole lot of money to a lawyer and get whatever he wants. Those are the words of a bully who doesn’t look volunteers in the eye, much like his predecessor Chris Lamb.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • v22.06 Release: The One Where We Started Using Release Titles

    As we learned last winter, taking six weeks for following up on Alpine’s November release isn’t ideal. While some free software hackers prefer to hack on their favorite projects during the holidays, others take their well deserved break far away from computers. We got it done regardless, and planned to cut the release schedule in half to have it easier next time. The v22.06 release right here was the trial run for the new schedule… and we made it. Here it is, only three weeks after Alpine Linux 3.16 dropped and still properly tested: the postmarketOS v22.06 release!

    v22.06, like previous releases, is geared mainly towards Linux enthusiasts; it may be a bit rough around the edges so expect some bugs. Help identifying and resolving issues is always greatly appreciated.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ postmarketOS 22.06 Brings Plasma Mobile 22.04 and Release Upgrades to Linux Phones

    
    Coming five and a half months after postmarketOS 21.12, which received no less than five service packs that brought minor improvements and bug fixes, the postmarketOS 22.06 is here to celebrate the project’s 5th anniversary as a major release with several new features, support for new devices, and updated UIs.

    The biggest new feature in the postmarketOS 22.06 release is the fact that upgrades from previous releases are now finally possible. That’s a huge change actually as you no longer have to reflash postmarketOS to get a new release.

  • Linux On Mobile ☛ LINMOB.net – Weekly #LinuxPhone Update (23/2022): Linux on Apple A7-A8X, flaws in U-Boot and the number 100

    A new Manjaro Phosh Beta, videos about Phosh on tablets and its upcoming gestures, and another Ubuntu Touch Q&A!

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 20 Best Android Card Games in 2022 to Enjoy on Your Leisure

  • SlashGear ☛ The Simple Android Screen Hack You Probably Didn’t Know Existed

  • SlashGear ☛ How To Use Your Phone As A Remote For Android TV

  • The PC and Console Shooters We’d Like to See on Android – Droid Gamers

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 20 Best Android Card Games in 2022 to Enjoy on Your Leisure

  • CNET ☛ These Android 12 Hidden Settings Will Change How You Use Your Phone – CNET

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • A script for making a blog index

    I decided to do a little bit of automation on my blogs. I now create “blog.gmi” using the following script…

  • New Gemini server

    A new, more secure, server has been set up to host my gemini account.

• Programming/Development

  • Tim Bray ☛ Making Code Faster

    I’ve enjoyed writing software for 40+ years now. Lots of activities fall into that “writing software” basket, and here’s my favorite: When you have a body of code with a decent unit-test suite and you need to make it go faster.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ If you can automate it in your life, try

    Years ago I remember reading that backups must be automatic to be useful. As soon as you rely on a manual process to perform tedious but necessary jobs, our squishy human brains will forget, and we will lose data. In the words of chief engineer Thomas Andrews as portrayed in James Cameron’s Titanic, it’s a mathematical certainty.

    (It’s funny that his quotes are all I remember from that movie, even after all these years. I assure you sir, she’s made of iron).

    I’m starting to see parallels to this everywhere. And I take it a step further: something not quite as good, efficient, or even affordable still beats the pants off something manual, especially if one has a life outside that particular thing.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Old VCR ☛ prior-art-dept.: ProleText, encoding HTML before Markdown (and a modern reimplementation)

    Steven P. Spackman allegedly once observed that “flat text is just never what you want.” Which, I guess, is true: half the historical advances in computing have come from figuring out ways to tart up plain text, whether embedding control codes or out-of-band styling or in-band markup. However, with the exception of out-of-band styling (I always liked the Macintosh text file formats that kept the text in the data fork and the styling in a resource), you still needed to parse the file or at best you’d get blocks of text separated by gobbledygook. Enhanced text formats like Markdown were thus designed to make cognitive sense to human eyes without further parsing — but also encoding sufficient metadata to facilitate improved ways of rendering the document.

    Markdown circa 2004 has displaced most of the others today, but it explicitly never claimed to be the first such human-readable format; indeed, AsciiDoc predates it by about two years, reStructuredText a year before that and MakeDoc about a year before that. For that matter, some of the concepts popularized in Markdown might not have existed at all were it not for earlier ancestors like 2002′s Textile.

    But a forgotten rich text language predates most of these, with the interesting property in that much of the markup is encoded using trailing whitespace, almost a fusion of in-band and out-of-band styling systems. If the whitespace is munged, it’s largely just a text document (like those particular Mac files if you pass along only the data fork); but if it passes through intact, an intelligent converter can use attributes encoded in the whitespace to style it into HTML. That system is ProleText.

Leftovers

• What happens to the Third World when the First World no longer needs it?

  Observation: Amazon’s sole advantage is that it ships stuff fast, but the quality of what you find and price of the stuff that you find isn’t that much cheaper than buying stuff second hand from a site such as Ebay, where you typically filter by location.

• Daniel Miessler ☛ Just Copy What Works – Daniel Miessler

  But here’s the thing, and this is why I think this idea is valuable: Let’s call out those obstacles as the actual obstacles.

  Let’s acknowledge that the primary way to succeed is to perfectly emulate those who are succeeding. Copy everything. We don’t know what works. Use the same damn toothbrush. Walk the same on the sidewalk. Copy what works. And if life prohibits us from doing that, then that’s what we need to change.

• Iustin Pop: Somewhat committing to a new sport

  So last week, after much deliberation, bought an inflatable board, paddle and various other accessories, and on Saturday went to try it out, on excellent weather (completely flat) and hot but not overly so. The board choosing in itself was something I like to do (research options), so for a bit I was concerned whether I’m more interested in the gear, or the actual paddling itself…

  [...]

  And hour later, and my initial shakiness went away, with the trainings slowly coming back to mind. Another half hour, and – for completely flat water – I felt quite confident. The view was awesome, the weather nice, the water cold enough to be refreshing… and the only question on my mind was – why didn’t I do this 2, 3 years ago? Well, Corona aside.

• Science

  • Rlang ☛ Anthropometric Birthday Cards

    We visualize children reference populations for height, weight and body mass index by plotting percentiles of the population as a function of age. Besides the epidemiological interest in these anthropometric curves, they have dual-use potential for reproducible birthday cards.

• Hardware

  • Best AC, worst remote control

    I installed a new Midea air-conditioner. It’s an amazing device, and any praise I give it is insufficient. It’s amazingly quiet, comes with great mounting hardware, looks fabulous, and works better than I could possibly imagine. It also comes with the worst remote control in the world.

    I am a grouch, so when you hear me praising something, you know it’s good.

    [...]

    First of all, why does every fan and lightbulb need its own remote? Are we so ****ing lazy that we can’t get off our butt twice a day and walk over to the window?

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • COVID-19 Finally Hits at Home

    After more than two years of successfully dodging it, COVID-19 finally hit my family the week. On Tuesday my wife woke up with a migraine, which isn’t unusual for her; on Wednesday morning, she woke up with a low (100.4°F fever) and we belatedly realized that she might be sick. She took an antigen test1 and the TEST line turned blue basically instantly.

    Shit.

    Quarantine ensued. Isaac (our son) has been home from school2 and we’ve all been cooped up on the property for the past few days.

    So far, Isaac and I have continued to be symptom-free and testing negative on antigen tests. I also got one PCR 3 (so far) which was negative. We’ve been trying to isolate as much as possible, but Eva and I both have full-time jobs, and Isaac can’t go back to day care until this nightmare is over, so there’s only so much we can do — we also have a relatively small house which doesn’t have any tightly-closing inside doors. Both of us adults have been wearing N95 masks whenever awake, and we have HEPA air purifiers4 running in whatever rooms we happen to be occupying.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Meta reportedly scales back plans for its upcoming AR glasses [Ed: Surveillance through wearables, spying on people in one's surroundings]

      Meta Platforms Inc. will not make its upcoming augmented reality glasses available to consumers as originally planned, according to two reports published on Thursday. Meta originally intended to make its AR glasses available to developers and early technology adopters.

• Defence/Aggression

  • JURIST ☛ US lawmakers hold first public hearing on January 6 Capitol attack

    A select committee of the US House of Representatives Thursday held its first public hearing regarding the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, releasing previously unseen footage from the attack.

    The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol broadcasted its proceedings on primetime television. The hearing included the testimonies of Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards and documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, who was filming the far-right Proud Boys leading up to and during the attack.

    The hearing opened with video of Trump campaign officials giving statements to committee investigators, testifying that Trump directed them to find evidence of fraud during the 2020 presidential election. Some officials, including former Attorney General William Barr, told Trump that they could not find any evidence of fraud or that any fraud that may have occurred would not have changed the outcome of the election.

• Finance

  • Security Week ☛ Billion-Dollar Valuations Can’t Halt Layoffs at OneTrust, Cybereason

    Two cybersecurity vendors that recently boasted of raising hundreds of millions of dollars at unicorn valuations have confirmed staff cuts as the turmoil in the capital markets start to wreak havoc on late-stage startups.

    The two vendors — OneTrust and Cybereason — banked a combined $575 million since 2020 and have deliberately boasted about billion-dollar valuations in an expanding cybersecurity market. Now, with macro economic headwinds on the front-burner, the layoffs and pre-emptive belt-tightening at these two well capitalized startups suggest the industry could be in for a long economic slog.

  • Reason ☛ Has Inflation Peaked?

    The Consumer Price Index (CPI) went up again in May. Over the last year, prices across the economy increased an average of 8.6 percent, up from 8.5 percent in April’s year-over-year reading. And yet, inflation might be starting to go down.

    The reason for the paradox is that CPI, which tracks price changes in a hypothetical basket of goods, can’t tell the difference between price increases due to monetary inflation and price increases due to other causes, such as supply shocks, regulations, or changes in supply and demand. Inflation is what happens when the money supply grows faster than real economic output. The rule of thumb is that if it isn’t monetary, it isn’t inflation.

    May’s CPI increase was driven by large increases in energy (34.6 percent), food (10.1 percent), and vehicles (12.6 percent for new ones, 16.1 percent for used cars and trucks). Much of those price increases have little to do with inflation.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ On Josh Schulte’s Continued Attempts to Hack the Judicial System

    The last reason — the claim published by Yahoo but never matched by another outlet that Pompeo responded to the initial Vault 7 release by asking about the possibility of assassinating Julian Assange — is a more dubious argument still.

• Monopolies

  • Silicon Angle ☛ UK antitrust regulator to investigate Apple and Google over mobile app practices

    The U.K.’s antitrust regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, today announced plans to investigate Apple Inc. and Google LLC over their business practices in the mobile app ecosystem.

    The CMA is launching multiple investigations focused on three different areas. Officials plan to scrutinize the market power that Apple and Google possess in the mobile browser market. Additionally, the CMA will investigate Apple’s business practices in the cloud gaming market, as well as the restrictions that Google imposes on in-app payments.

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Tux Digital ☛ 201: openSUSE Leap 15.4, Tails 5.1, Blender 3.2, PeerTube, Atom Discontinued and more Linux news! – This Week in Linux – TuxDigital

    On this episode of This Week in Linux: SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4, openSUSE Leap 15.4, Tails OS 5.1, Blender 3.2, GIMP To Get CMYK Support, Regolith Desktop 2.0, EasyOS 4.0, PeerTube 4.2, Vivaldi Email Client, System76 to Open European Distribution Hub, Atom Text Editor Has Been Discontinued, Humble Bundles and the GOG Summer Sale is Live. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

  • Tux Digital ☛ Sudo Show: Multicloud Revisited [Ed: Well, multiclown is when not one but two (or more) acts of outsourcing are embraced in tandem to burn your money even faster and leak out data to more corporations]

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ 12 Best Free and Open Source Email Servers

    
    Email remains the killer information and communications technology. Email volume shows no sign of diminishing, despite the increasing popularity of collaborative messaging tools. There were over 330 billion emails sent in 2021.

    Messages are exchanged between hosts using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol with software programs called mail transfer agents, and delivered to a mail store by programs called mail delivery agents, frequently referred to as email clients.

    Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent, or mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using SMTP. The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host are also used in some contexts.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • LinuxTechi ☛ How to Configure Static IP Address on Fedora Linux

    Hi techies, as we know Fedora is one of popular open source Linux based operating system. Fedora Linux can be used as workstation, Server, and CoreOS.

    In this guide, we learn how to manually configure static ip address on Fedora Linux (Fedora 36 Workstation). A static IP address is an IP address that stays the same over time and remain persistent across the reboot. There are two different ways to configure static IP.

  • Write HTML Right

    I hope I’ve persuaded you to write good HTML from now on. Failing that, I hope I’ve at least expressed myself well enough to get you thinking about it. You can view the source of this document to see how these principles play out (or don’t!) in practice.

  • uni Toronto ☛ Text consoles and framebuffer consoles in Linux

    For a long time, the Linux kernel text console on x86 hardware used VGA text mode (also). The important thing about VGA text mode is that what the kernel wrote into display memory in order to show things was not pixels but characters (okay, 8-bit codepoints). The actual text buffer used two bytes in order to add colour and attributes, but that’s only a small change. The important thing is that manipulating an 80×25 buffer of 16-bit objects is quite fast. Completely repainting the entire screen requires writing only 4,000 bytes.

  • Rohan Kumar ☛ Best practices for inclusive CLIs

    This began as a reply to another article by Lucas F. Costa; it lists practices to improve user-experience (UX) of command-line interfaces (CLIs). It comes from a good place, and has some good advice: I particularly like its advice on input-validation and understandable errors. Unfortunately, a number of its suggestions are problematic, particularly from an accessibility perspective.

  • Yarmo Machenbach ☛ Matrix Synapse: migrating from Cloudron to ansible

    Maybe, like me, you tried to selfhost a Matrix Synapse server, miserably failed because it’s just not quite that easy and then settled for Cloudron’s Synapse app because it just works. Pay a bit more, worry a little less.

    Sure, it works but you still introduced a middle man in your pristine homelab setup and the itch never goes away to get rid of it.

    Time for round 2.

  • HowTo Geek ☛ How to Get Started Using the Docker Engine API

    Docker Engine exposes a REST API which you can use to control your containers without the docker CLI. The API exposes equivalent functionality using HTTP network calls. You can script common Docker operations using your favorite programming language or remotely control one of your hosts. The CLI internally relies on the same API to provide its built-in commands.

  • ByteXD ☛ 11 Ways To Create a File in Linux – ByteXD

    Learning to create a file in Linux using many ways is a recommendable step toward speeding up the use of the operating system.

  • Jelmer Vernooij ☛ [Old] Personal Streaming Audio Server

    For a while now, I’ve been looking for a good way to stream music from my home music collection on my phone.

    There are quite a few options for music servers that support streaming. However, Android apps that can stream music from one of those servers tend to be unmaintained, clunky or slow (or more than one of those).

    It is possible to use something that runs in a web server, but that means no offline caching – which can be quite convenient in spots without connectivity, such as the Underground or other random bits of London with poor cell coverage.

  • Didier Stevens ☛ PoC: Cobalt Strike mitm Attack

    I made a small Proof-of-Concept: cs-mitm.py is a mitmproxy script that intercepts Cobalt Strike traffic, decrypts it and injects its own commands.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Linux DD Command – 18 Examples with All Options

    The Linux dd command is one of the most powerful utilities for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It can be used in a variety of ways.

    In this tutorial, we learn about dd command in Linux with practical examples.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ How to change MySQL port in Ubuntu Linux

    
    There might be a situation where you need to change MySQL default port 3306 to something else to hide the port number for security purposes, or MySQL port 3306 is already being used by another application.

    No matter what your reason for changing ports is, in this article, you will find the steps to change the default MySQL port from 3306 to 3360 or something else.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ How To Find Large Files on Linux | Tom’s Hardware

    We’ve all got to that point on a given system where we start to run out of storage space. Do we buy more storage, perhaps one of the best SSDs, or do we search and find the largest files quickly? In this how to we will look at a few simple approaches to help us maintain and manage our filesystems.

    All the commands in this article will work on most Linux machines. We’ve used a Ubuntu 20.04 install but you could run this how-to on a Raspberry Pi. All of the how-to is performed via the Terminal. If you’re not already at the command line, you can open a terminal window on most Linux machines by pressing ctrl, alt and t.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ How To Mount and Unmount Drives on Linux | Tom’s Hardware

    In a Linux GUI, we usually take it for granted that when we insert a USB flash drive, hard drive or even a DVD disk, they just appear ready for use. But under the hood there is a process where the device is mounted (made ready for use) and assigned a mountpoint. When using a server or a remote connection, it is not certain that a device will automatically be made available, so how can we mount our own devices?

    In this how-to we’ll look at various ways of mounting and unmounting disks and disk images. We will use a variety of approaches and tools including both terminal emulator commands and GUI tools.

    All the commands in this how-to will work on most Linux machines. We’ve used a Ubuntu 20.04 install but you could run this how-to on a Raspberry Pi. All of the how-to is performed via the Terminal. You can open a terminal window on most Linux machines by pressing ctrl, alt and t.

  • H2S Media ☛ Install Pale Moon Browser on Debian 11 Bullseye – Linux Shout

    Let’s discuss the steps to install the Pale Moon browser on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux using the command terminal.

    The Web browser Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox. The program initiated and maintained by Moonchild Productions, like the original program, is licensed under the MPL license. However, special rules apply to the distribution of the binary version: Redistributing Pale Moon. In addition to Linux, it is also available for Windows and Mac (unofficially), and the Android version has been discontinued.

  • H2S Media ☛ How to install lighttpd web server on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy – Linux Shout

    Simple steps to install Lighttpd web server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish using the commands given in this article.

    lighttpd (lighty) is a web server that requires far fewer resources than Apache, for example, and is therefore particularly suitable for very large loads or very weak systems. It was developed by Jan Kneschke and can be expanded with modules. FastCGI, for example, enables PHP code to be executed. SCGI supplements lighty with Ruby or Python.

  • H2S Media ☛ How to install ownCloud on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy – Linux Shout

    Tutorials to learn the steps for installing OwnCloud on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish for setting up your own storage cloud server.

    Cloud storage services such as Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive are convenient for accessing files and information on the go, as well as enabling data sharing with others, improving productivity. However, your files are stored on servers of third parties, which prevents all-encompassing control. A version of the private cloud such as ownCloud provides a remedy.

  • DebugPoint ☛ How to Install Latest LibreOffice in Ubuntu and other Linux

    Here’s a quick guide on how to install the latest LibreOffice version in Ubuntu and other Linux.

    The free and open-source office suite LibreOffice comes with two versions. The Community and Enterprise version. The “community” version is for early adopters who want the latest bleeding-edge software tech. And the “enterprise” version is more stable, and it may not include all the latest features but is ideal for the production environment and serious work.

  • Techtown ☛ How to Install Sky Checkers on Linux Mint 20 – Atechtown

    Sky Checkers is a multiplayer action based game. Knock off your enemies and be the last one standing! This game is based on an old N64 Kirby mini-game.

    With Sky Checkers, you can expect many hours of fun because you can invite your friends to play online via client—server connections. From a more technical perspective you are in the presence of an open-source application (GPLv3) created, mainly, in C language, so you can expect a fast, light and well done game.

    The video game can be installed on many platforms such as Windows, Linux, and macOS. With native support as the author intended.

  • Integrate Portainer with OpenLDAP for Authentication – kifarunix.com

    Follow through this guide to learn how to integrate Portainer with OpenLDAP for authentication. By default, Portainer ships with its own internal authentication mechanism. But if you are using OpenLDAP in your environment, you can easily integrate Portainer with it to make the management of user accounts and access to various container environments easy.

• Games

  • gaming on void (and a thinkpad)

    my mate made a post about how good void is for older hardware and helped me installing it on my newest laptop: a thinkpad t430. the machine is really good, and void is actually really nice too. it’s really light due to the fact that it uses runit instead of systemd. in terms of installation, it’s similar to arch. i kept an eye on void ever since i found out about it, but it didn’t have gamemode at the time. now gamemode is an official package in the xbps queries so i went like “sure, why not? i can still play some games there.”

    the thinkpad t430 is a really nice machine. i nicknamed it the dinkypad. i really like this thinkpad. the specs are an intel i7-3632QM as the cpu and an nvidia nvs 5400m as the gpu. now here are the issues i had and how i fixed them.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • MJ Fransen ☛ Ratpoison window manager on GalliumOS

    Ratpoison is a wonderful and light weight tiling window manager. It is largely modeled after GNU Screen. Ratpoison is like the mother of all tiling window managers, it was one of the first, and I have been using it very long.

    Windows in Ratpoison are borderless and open full screen, unless you tile multiple windows next to each other. So you actually use every pixel of the display.

    Ratpoison is completely keyboard driven. Which makes it extremely fast. Adoption is smooth, because the Ratpoison key bindings mimic the key bindings of GNU Screen. Most people use Tmux now, as a replacement for GNU Screen, but the key bindings of Tmux are compatible with those of GNU Screen.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Hackaday ☛ Homebrew An OS From Scratch? Snowdrop Shows How It’s Done

  
  Ever wondered what it would take to roll your own OS? [Sebastian]’s Snowdrop OS might just provide you with some insight into that process, and maybe even some inspiration.

  [Sebastian] created Snowdrop completely from scratch, using only x86 assembly language. It’s more than just bare-bones, and boasts a number of useful utilities and programs including a BASIC interpreter and linker (for creating standalone BASIC executables.) That’s not even touching on the useful essentials, like multitasking and a GUI framework. There are even a number of resources specifically for making game development easier. Because as [Sebastian] puts it, what’s a operating system without games?

• Barry Kauler ☛ The return of SeaMonkey and a fundamental rethink

  Right now, running EasyOS 4.0.1. Have taken out Gimp, Samba and HexChat, and brought back SeaMonkey. ‘easy.sfs’ is 748MiB.

  I have posted about the easy*.img file having a 767MiB boot-partition, and running into a problem as now using lz4-hc squashfs compression, easy.sfs has suddenly become too big.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD ☛ Foundation Elects New Officers, Interviews Outgoing Board Members | FreeBSD Foundation

    On May 31, 2022 The FreeBSD Foundation held its Annual Board Meeting. An important part of the meeting includes electing Board Officers and Directors for the following 12 month period. We’re pleased to announce the FreeBSD Foundation 2022-2023 Board includes:

    President, Treasurer, and Founder: Justin T. Gibbs

    Vice President: Andrew Wafaa

    Secretary: Kevin Bowling

    Director: Cat Allman

    Director: Hiroki Sato

    Director: Robert N.M. Watson

    Assistant Secretary: Deb Goodkin

  • Tevano Announces Availability of BSDCan Presentation with Antranik Wartanian, CEO of Tevano Subsidiary Illuria, Inc

    BSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa, Canada, quickly established itself as the technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. This year the conference was held online.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ AAEON PICO-V2K4 runs Linux/Win10 on the Ryzen V2000 Embedded processor

    Early this month, AAEON launched the PICO-V2K4 which accommodates the Ryzen V2000 embedded processor and it’s available in an ITX form factor. The PICO-V2K4 measures about 100mm x 72mm and it supports Windows 10 and Linux. 

    The PICO-V2K4 uses AMD’s 7nm processing technology and accommodates the AMD Ryzen V2718 or the V2516 variant. The V2718 features 8-cores/16-threads and it has a processor speed that ranges from 1.7GHz to 4.15GHz. The V2516 features 6-cores/12-threads and its processor speed ranges from 2.1GHz to 3.95GHz. 

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackster ☛ The Just Bananas Method for Generating True Random Numbers

    Instead, Nappi’s project relies on the much more exotic-sounding method of radioactive decay. The BRNG takes advantage of the potassium found in bananas, which is slightly radioactive.

    The core of the circuit board is an STS-5 Geiger-Müller tube. These tubes need a high voltage source. So, a 555-based step-up converter generates the required 400V. For control, Nappi implemented the Microchip ATmega328P 8-bit microcontroller. This processor is the same as the chip found on Arduino Uno and Nano boards.

  • Generating true random numbers from bananas

    The possible way using bananas is that of radioactive decay. Bananas in fact are known to contain a lot of potassium, and a small but significant percentage of the potassium present in nature is radioactive. Specifically we are talking about the 40K isotope, which makes up 0.01% of potassium in nature. Plus they’re delicious with lemon and sugar, which alone would be a great reason to always have one on hand.

  • Banana random number generator part 2: chi-squared, ent, timers, interrupts

    Let’s start by understanding what the chi-square (also referred to as \chi^2) is and how it works. This is a value used in statistics to test the fit of a set of values to a theoretically predicted distribution. Let’s address the traditional use in statistics first, then we’ll turn our gaze to the use of \chi^2 for this application.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Zuul, Popular Open Source Project Gating Software, Celebrates 10th Anniversary

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • The Next Platform ☛ Can MongoDB Build A Humongous, And Profitable, Database Business?

    When you want to build a software business in the 21st century successfully, you have to borrow some ideas from the 20th century. There are basically two ways. And document database maker MongoDB has employed both methods and is growing fast because it has maintained the first tactic with key accounts while using the second tactic to build a huge pyramid of customers out on the cloud, some of whom will turn into key accounts.

    The first strategy, epitomized by the IBM System/360 mainframe, the Oracle database, the Sun Microsystems Sparc server and its Unix and then Java platform, is to go after a core set of advanced IT customers who have some pressing needs and address them like crazy. Eventually, if all goes well and the engineering and manufacturing costs allow it, there is some trickle down to smaller, but still reasonably large, customers who have similar if less complex or highly scaled problems, thus allowing market expansion.

    The other strategy, best illustrated, is to build a vast base of the pyramid on less sophisticated technology suitable for a large number of customers with modest needs, and then build more and more sophisticated and scalable platforms and build up to having something that is suitable for large enterprises in a decade or two. Microsoft’s Windows Server and Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux – and indeed, the idea of any Linux in the enterprise – fall into this camp.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • DebugPoint ☛ LibreOffice 7.4: Top New Features and Release Details

    A list of new features in the LibreOffice 7.4 edition, including the highlights of enhancements across Calc, Impress, Writer and more.

• Programming/Development

  • Medevel ☛ 22 Open-source WYSIWYG editors for 2022

    The “WYSIWYG” acronym stands for (What You See Is What You Get), is often used to describe a text and document editor features tools and libraries. As an example Microsoft Word and Google Document are the right examples for WYSIWYG editors.

    The WYSIWYG editors are commonly used in blogging and web publishing, email editing, email list creation, and book writing.

    In this article, we will list the best open-source WYSIWYG JavaScript libraries that developers can use to add rich document editing functionalities in their projects.

  • EMQ Announces Official Sponsorship of the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation (EEF)

    The Erlang Ecosystem Foundation is a non-profit organization for driving the further development and adoption of Erlang, Elixir, LFE, and other technologies based on the BEAM virtual machine.

  • The New Stack ☛ Why We’re Sticking with Ruby on Rails at GitLab – The New Stack

    When David Heinemeier Hansson created Ruby on Rails (interview), he was guided by his experience with both PHP and Java. On the one hand, he didn’t like the way the verbosity and rigidness of Java made Java web frameworks complex and difficult to use, but he appreciated their structural integrity. On the other hand, he loved the initial approachability of PHP but was less fond of the quagmires that such projects tended to turn into.

  • Python

    • Python 3.11 vs Python 3.10: Why Developers Love the Latest Version More?

• Standards/Consortia

  • Math in Gemtext. LaTeX in Unicode

    This is a great solution for people who are writing their own gemtext and wanting to include math. However it requires a fair amount of manual work to make it look right, and a good know of the unicode characters you have available. Unfortunately for me, I’m dealing with arbitrary math formulas Wikipedia content. I think it would be really difficult to write code that could do this conversion automatically.

    Luckily for me, most of these math formaula’s a defined using LaTeX, which is exactly made for this, and Wikipedia gets me access to PNG with beautifully rendered LaTeX

  • OGC and OSGeo, the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, sign new Memorandum of Understanding

    The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) have renewed their Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

    Open Software and Open Standards are complementary pieces of the geospatial ecosystem to which OGC and OSGeo are both committed.

Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Glass: Classic, But Mysterious

  For a large part of human history, people made things from what they could find. Some stones make arrowheads. Others make sparks. Trees can turn into lumber. But the real power is when you can take those same materials and make them into something with very different properties. For example, plant fibers turning into cloth, or rocks giving up the metals inside. One of the oldest engineered materials is glass. You’d think as old as glass is (dating back at least 4,500 years), we’d understand all there is to know about it by now. According to an interesting post by [Jon Cartwright] writing in Physics World, we don’t. Not by a long shot.

• Hackaday ☛ Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: Using A Commodore Light Pen On A Modern(ish) Computer

  If you worked with computers back in the 1970s, there’s a good chance you used a light pen at some point: a simple input device that you’d point at the CRT screen to highlight text, choose menu options or manipulate graphic objects. Although ubiquitous in those days, the light pen lost the battle for ergonomics to the humble mouse and was all but extinct by the late 1980s. Touchscreen styluses implement a similar function today, but touching the screen somehow doesn’t feel the same as simply pointing at it.

• Hackaday ☛ Inside An EBay Marking Laser

  When it comes to trolling eBay for cool stuff, some people have all the luck. Whereas all we ever seem to come across is counterfeit chips and obviously broken gear listed as, “good condition, powers on”, [Les Wright] actually managed to get more than he bargained for with one of his recent eBay purchases.

• Matt Rickard ☛ Web3′s Usenet Moment

  Usenet used UUCP – Unix-to-Unix Copy – a (roughly)1 peer-to-peer (p2p) protocol that let users transfer files, email, and text between computers.

  Threaded articles posted to Usenet were organized into different newsgroups, e.g., comp.software, misc.education, talk.politics which users could subscribe to. Articles would be pushed and propagated to all subscribers. Think Reddit’s subreddit concept in Google Groups form.

  Moderators curtailed spam in the most popular newsgroups. Otherwise, in the first decade of Usenet, the small community of early computer enthusiasts established and followed online norms quickly.

• Hedonism

  Hedonism should not be endorsed by any means. Long term gratification is much more worth it for the individual than short term fleeting pleasures, because it demonstrates one’s ability of self control, resulting in more wise decisions. Hedonism proliferates in 21st century culture, being promoted in pop culture, lifestyle magazines, and almost everywhere you look. Pleasure is being promoted as the definitive good in life, while pain is to be feared. These are fallacies that we’ve grown accustomed to believe. Pain and pleasure are not inherently good or evil, but they can become if our perception of them is so.

• Science

  • TechXplore ☛ Technique significantly boosts the speeds of programs that run in the Unix shell

    Researchers have pioneered a technique that can dramatically accelerate certain types of computer programs automatically, while ensuring program results remain accurate.

    Their system boosts the speeds of programs that run in the Unix shell, a ubiquitous programming environment created 50 years ago that is still widely used today. Their method parallelizes these programs, which means that it splits program components into pieces that can be run simultaneously on multiple computer processors.

    This enables programs to execute tasks like web indexing, natural language processing, or analyzing data in a fraction of their original runtime.

  • BC Computer Science Prof receives ACM Software System Award

    Jean-Baptiste Tristan, an associate professor in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Computer Science Department, is among seven co-recipients of the 2021 Association for Computing Machinery Software System Award for contributions to groundbreaking research and practical applications that impact everyday users of technology.

    Tristan shared the award with French and German colleagues for the development of CompCert, the first practically useful software that was developed not by writing its code but by extracting the set of instructions from the software’s mathematical proof of existence, resulting in an error-free construction.

  • Nature ☛ Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) gaze is conspicuous at ecologically-relevant distances

    Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) sclera appear much darker than the white sclera of human eyes, to such a degree that the direction of chimpanzee gaze may be concealed from conspecifics. Recent debate surrounding this topic has produced mixed results, with some evidence suggesting that (1) primate gaze is indeed concealed from their conspecifics, and (2) gaze colouration is among the suite of traits that distinguish uniquely social and cooperative humans from other primates (the cooperative eye hypothesis). Using a visual modelling approach that properly accounts for specific-specific vision, we reexamined this topic to estimate the extent to which chimpanzee eye coloration is discriminable. We photographed the faces of captive chimpanzees and quantified the discriminability of their pupil, iris, sclera, and surrounding skin. We considered biases of cameras, lighting conditions, and commercial photography software along with primate visual acuity, colour sensitivity, and discrimination ability. Our visual modeling of chimpanzee eye coloration suggests that chimpanzee gaze is visible to conspecifics at a range of distances (within approximately 10 m) appropriate for many species-typical behaviours. We also found that chimpanzee gaze is discriminable to the visual system of primates that chimpanzees prey upon, Colobus monkeys. Chimpanzee sclera colour does not effectively conceal gaze, and we discuss this result with regard to the cooperative eye hypothesis, the evolution of primate eye colouration, and methodological best practices for future primate visual ecology research.

  • Voronoi tessellation to measure tree spatial distribution

    Voronoi diagrams partition multi-dimensional space into regions, where all positions within a given region are closest to the same known point in the multi-dimensional space. Voronoi diagrams are named after Georgy Voronoy, but can also be called a Dirichlet tessellation (Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet), or Thiessen polygons (Alfred H. Thiessen), as the same thing was implemented in different fields independently.

  • Feldstein’s Method

    OK, so reading up a bit on Al Feldstein’s process; he would start on page one and hand write in pencil directly on the bristol board, writing the text and indicating narration plates and speech bubbles, but no art. As in, he was writing it in one go.

• Education

  • Scheerpost ☛ What Does It Mean that Women Now Dominate Higher Education?

    Rebecca Gordon explores why the women who now make up the majority of college students may be missing their moment through no fault of their own.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ The Tools That Lovingly Tore Apart A Vintage Computer Game

    The structure of computer game assets can be a bit of a mystery, even more so the older a game is, and some amount of reverse-engineering can be expected when pulling apart a game like 1995’s Night Light.

  • Hackaday ☛ Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: A MacroPad With A Handy Layout Screen

    The idea of a macro keypad is a great one, a set of keys programmable with frequent but complex tasks. But once programmed, how can the user keep track of which key does what? To save the world from grubby, hand-written sticky labels, here’s [Andreas Känner] with the Badger 2040 keypad — a macro pad with a display to show keymap info that’s fully programmable using CircuitPython.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Portable digital audio players still exist

    DAP manufacturers have (largely) conceded the general portable music market to the almighty smartphone, just as music stores are starting to with streaming services. I’ve said this was inevitable, though I don’t have to like it.

    I was worried that the market solution would be mass-produced knockoffs, which admittedly has happened (just look at eBay). But manufacturers like Sony have continued to remain viable and even increase their install bases for music players by moving upmarket, and innovating with features even phones don’t have.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Immigration Bureaucracy Threatens 11-Year-Old’s Spot on Transplant Lists

    Nicolas Espinosa’s hopes for his 11-year-old daughter, Julia, are basic and profound: He wants her to stay alive and perhaps be able to eat normally someday.

    And she might, if she can get three organs transplanted — and if the U.S. immigration system doesn’t get in the way.

  • JURIST ☛ Canada health authority proposes warning labels on individual cigarettes

    Health Canada Friday proposed a regulation mandating warning labels on individual cigarettes and cigars. The proposed regulations would place “health-related messages that are memorable, noticeable and impactful” on each cigarette, covering at least 75 percent of the surface area. If enacted, Canada will be the first country to have such regulations.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft confirms HoloLens boss Alex Kipman to be reorganized out the door [Ed: They must be downplaying this. He must have committed some serious crime if he was seen as that much of a liability, even by Microsoft's standards.]

    Microsoft has sought to clarify the reasoning behind the imminent departure of HoloLens boss Alex Kipman.

    Kipman was very much the face of Microsoft’s mixed reality play over the years. He also had a hand in the company’s Xbox add-on, the Kinect.

    A cloud has hovered over the HoloLens division for some time, as reports of issues within the team circulated and a hoped-for follow-up to the increasingly long-in-the-tooth HoloLens 2 conspicuously failed to make an appearance during Microsoft’s Build event in May.

  • Mark Dominus ☛ [Repost] The Universe of Discourse : Disabling the awful Macbook screen lock key

    My new job wants me to do my work on a Macbook Pro, which in most ways is only a little more terrible than the Linux laptops I am used to. I don’t love anything about it, and one of the things I love the least is the Mystery Key.

  • [Old] Screw You, Microsoft Edge

    A further insult is the implication that I make buying decisions based solely on price. There might be numerous reasons why I choose one retailer over another for my book purchases. I might prefer a retailer that focuses solely on books, or a retailer that is not a large chain. More generally, I might make a decision based on the company’s carbon footprint, or perhaps their reputation in paying fair wages, or what political candidates and movements they support, or whether the CEO uses his wealth to launch himself into space.

• Security

  • Tech Central ☛ Kali Linux team announces free cyber security training delivered live on Twitch

    The company behind digital forensics and penetration testing Kali Linux platform has announced that it will be livestreaming a free 25-week course for those looking to build offensive cyber security skills.

    Offensive Security, which maintains the Debian-based Kali Linux distro, launched its remote learning course, OffSec Academy, during the pandemic when live training became unworkable.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Graham Cluley ☛ You can be tracked via your Bluetooth signal, researchers claim

      Researchers discovered that the Bluetooth signals emitted by mobile phones carry a unique fingerprint, caused by small imperfections accidentally created during the manufacturing process.

      The results of their real-world experiment around the UC San Diego campus are impressive: [...]

    • Evaluating Physical-Layer BLE Location Tracking Attacks on Mobile Devices [PDF]

      Mobile devices increasingly function as wireless tracking beacons. Using the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol, mobile devices such as smartphones and smartwatches continuously transmit beacons to inform passive listeners about device locations for applications such as digital contact tracing for COVID-19, and even finding lost devices. These applications use cryptographic anonymity that limit an adversary’s ability to use these beacons to stalk a user. However, attackers can bypass these defenses by fingerprinting the unique physical-layer imperfections in the transmissions of specific devices.

      We empirically demonstrate that there are several key challenges that can limit an attacker’s ability to find a stable physical layer identifier to uniquely identify mobile devices using BLE, including variations in the hardware design of BLE chipsets, transmission power levels, differences in thermal conditions, and limitations of inexpensive radios that can be widely deployed to capture raw physical-layer signals. We evaluated how much each of these factors limits accurate fingerprinting in a large-scale field study of hundreds of uncontrolled BLE devices, revealing that physical-layer identification is a viable, although sometimes unreliable, way for an attacker to track mobile devices.

    • New York Times ☛ ‘A Mass Invasion of Privacy’ but No Penalties for Tim Hortons

      Despite being foreign owned since 2014, Tim Hortons still waves the Canadian flag as vigorously as it can. But last week, a scathing report by the federal privacy commissioner and three of his provincial counterparts laid out in great detail how Tim Hortons ignored a wide array of laws to spy on Canadians, creating “a mass invasion of Canadians’ privacy.”

      “As a society, we would not accept it if the government wanted to track our movements every few minutes of every day,” the federal privacy commissioner, Daniel Therrien, said in his last official news conference. “It is equally unacceptable that private companies think so little of our privacy and freedom that they can initiate these activities without giving it more than a moment’s thought.”

    • India Times ☛ Oracle developing national health records database: Larry Ellison

      Oracle developing national health records database: Larry EllisonSan Francisco, Cloud major Oracle, which just completed its $28.4 billion acquisition of electronic health records company Cerner, is developing a national health records database.

      Oracle’s board chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison said that patient data would be anonymous until individuals give consent to share their information, reports medcitynews.com.

    • How to secure your digital life

      Most of our communication nowadays happens via messaging apps, first and foremost WhatsApp (WA). These apps offer different level of security.

      WhatsApp secures content data (i.e., the message itself), but shares meta data with other Facebook companies to enhance their services (limited in EU by GDPR).

      A good alternative is Signal. Signal is owned by the non-profit Signal Foundation, which is heavily backed by WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton. Alongside E2EE, Signal implements the zero-knowledge encryption (ZKE), reducing meta data to the bare minimum.

    • CNX Software ☛ Is your Smart Home product being shutdown? Just buy the company!

      With Smart Home products connecting to the cloud, if a company decides to end support for a product or is required to close due to final troubles, there are few courses of action. The easiest one is to give up, and switch to another brand, or promise yourself you’ll never use one of those “Internet of Shit” products. The second one is quite more time-consuming and you’d have to work with the community to reverse-engineering the product and give it a second life, but obviously, this does not solve the supply issue since the product will not be manufactured anymore. Today, I learn about a third one: simply gather a small group of users, and buy the company!

• Defence/Aggression

  • TruthOut ☛ We Don’t Need More Evidence That Police Can’t Be Trusted. We Need Real Safety.

  • Common Dreams ☛ At March for Our Lives, A Call for a Nationwide Strike of Schools

    Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in over 450 protests across the country Saturday demanding lawmakers take action on gun control laws in the wake of recent mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York. March for Our Lives, the youth-led organization created by students who survived the mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, organized Saturday’s rallies.

    “Avoid attending school if your leaders fail to do the job and keep us safe from gun violence.”

  • CS Monitor ☛ ‘Democracy remains in danger’: House hearings on Jan. 6 begin

    With a never-before-seen 12-minute video of extremist groups leading the deadly siege and startling testimony from Mr. Trump’s most inner circle, the 1/6 committee provided gripping detail in contending that Mr. Trump’s repeated lies about election fraud and his public effort to stop President Joe Biden’s victory led to the attack and imperiled American democracy.

    “Democracy remains in danger,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the panel, during the hearing, timed for prime time to reach as many Americans as possible.

    “Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after Jan. 6, to overthrow the government,” Mr. Thompson said. “The violence was no accident.”

    The hearings may not change Americans’ views on the Capitol attack, but the panel’s investigation is intended to stand as its public record. Ahead of this fall’s midterm elections, and with Mr. Trump considering another White House run, the committee’s final report aims to account for the most violent attack on the Capitol since 1814, and to ensure such an attack never happens again.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Nation Is Bleeding From Gunshot Wounds

    Gun worship is transcendent in the United States, with 400 million guns in circulation—more guns than people—and only cursory controls on who can buy or access them. Firearms are fetishized, celebrated and brandished throughout our society, delivering a devastating daily death toll unknown anywhere else in the world. This idolatry reveres above all else the semiautomatic AR-15, dubbed “America’s rifle” by the NRA. In the wake of back to back massacres in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas, both committed by 18-year-old men with legally-purchased AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, victims and their advocates are pushing for genuine gun control. But the Senate—with so many of its members in thrall to and funded by the gun lobby—will only posture, pray, hold a moment or two of silence…and then do virtually nothing.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | How Long Will the US Sacrifice Kids for the Gun Lobby?

    Mass shootings are good for gun sales.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Even If Never Convicted, Donald J. Trump Will Live in Infamy

    What’s the use of the hearings by the House committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection—hearings that began last night and will run for the next several weeks—unless they lead to criminal prosecution of Donald Trump for his patently criminal actions?

• Environment

  • Renewable Energy World ☛ Agriculture and renewable energy development in a state of drought and climate change

    Drought, climate change, and new regulatory forces, like the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (“SGMA”), are bringing change to California’s land uses. Climate policies are spurring renewable energy development, while drought and new water restrictions may force the fallowing of agricultural land. These external factors bring significant challenges and stress to many industries and livelihoods, but there are strategic opportunities for renewable energy developers and agricultural interests to explore in responding to the state’s drought and climate change problems. This article explores a few of these water-related partnership opportunities wherein agricultural interests can mitigate increased water costs and decreased water supply and renewable energy developers can add value to their project development.

  • Energy

    • Puerto Ricans are powering their own rooftop solar boom

      A bright yellow building with bold green trim hums with activity in Caguas, a city sprawled across a mountain valley south of San Juan, Puerto Rico. In a spacious kitchen, volunteers chop vegetables and cook rice for community meals. Down the hall, visitors browse racks of free and discounted produce, canned beans and bottles of oil. Outside, beneath a large metal awning, retirees soak in calming music as they take part in a stress-relief workshop.

    • Puerto Ricans are powering their own rooftop solar boom

• Finance

  • The Nation ☛ A Pulse Memorial Museum and Profiteering From Pain

    It’s been six years since Jeff Xavier hid in a bathroom at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., after being wounded by gunfire during the second-deadliest mass shooting in American history.

    “Losing blood, love u all,” Xavier wrote in a post on social media letting his friends and family know that he might not survive.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Time for a Taxpayer Revolt: How Corporatist Politicians Make You Subsidize Big Corporations

    It is time for an unusual but long overdue revolt by the 150 million tax-with-held taxpayers. I’m not speaking of rates of taxation that the rich and corporations largely avoid because of the gigantic tax escapes, which they grease through Congress. Today I’m hoping to get your dander up by showing how corporatist politicians make you pay for big corporations to come to their corporate welfare-friendly state and make profits.

  • TruthOut ☛ Cancellation of Corinthian Loans Is Only the Beginning of Student Debt Abolition

  • Common Dreams ☛ Sanders and Gillibrand Call on Amazon to Recognize Historic Union Victory

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) Friday sent a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy urging him to drop the company’s objections to the historic union election on Staten Island before a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearing on Monday and finally recognize the Amazon Labor Union.

    “If Amazon can afford to spend $10 billion in stock buybacks to enrich its wealthy shareholders and executives—including the second richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos—it can afford a unionized workforce,” the senators wrote. “If Amazon can spend over $4 million in a single year on union-busting and $213 million on your compensation, it can afford a workforce that can collectively bargain for better wages, better benefits, safer working conditions, and reliable schedules…We strongly urge you to respect the will of Amazon workers by dropping your objections, recognizing the Amazon Labor Union and negotiating in good faith before the NLRB hearing on June 13th. It is time for Amazon to end its blatant disregard of labor law and treat workers with the respect and dignity they deserve.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Movement to Restore Ex-Felons’ Voting Rights is Now Focusing on the States

    In recent years, voting rights advocates and state lawmakers have made significant strides in restoring voting rights to U.S. citizens with felony convictions.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Research reveals how Hungarians see Putin and other world leaders

    The majority of Hungarians don’t want to get closer to Russia, the desire for belonging to the West is still much stronger in the country. Putin’s popularity has declined in the last 5 years. Závecz Research conducted a survey at the request of Telex at the end of May. The research looked at topics about which data was available in 2017 as well, which makes it possible to compare how much the situation has changed in the last few years.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Firstpost ☛ Dutch MP Geert Wilders gets death threats from Muslims for supporting Nupur Sharma over her Prophet Muhammad remarks

    In a tweet, the chairman of the Party for Freedom, said: “I receive many death threats now from Muslims who want to kill me for supporting Nupur Sharma who spoke the truth and nothing but the truth about Muhammad and Aisha.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ In One Week, Spanish Court Summoned Pompeo And UK Admitted It Spied On WikiLeaks Attorney

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • UI student facing hate-crime charges over rock thrown at Jewish students during protest march

    Captured on surveillance video, UI police identified Quraishi as the alleged rock thrower. He told them he was present to support the Palestinian group and that he felt the Jewish students were being disrespectful as the Palestinian speakers talked of women and children being killed. He said he threw the rock in the direction of the Jewish students knowing that it is a sign of protest where a rock is used as a weapon.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ ACE Shuts Down Pirate Site that Caused $0.50 in Damages, Per Visit

      Anti-piracy coalition ACE has booked another victory by shutting down We-Play, one of the largest piracy portals in Thailand. Local police carried out a raid in Bangkok and arrested the alleged operator of the site. We-Play reportedly ’caused’ $1.2 million in losses per month, which translates to $0.50 for every visit to the site.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Nintendo Nemesis Max Louarn: Hacker, Rebel, and Wanted by the FBI

      50-year-old Frenchman Max Louarn began his hacking career in the 80s and during the following decades built up quite a reputation. He earned millions of dollars and traveled the world, but also spent time in prison. Despite being wanted by the FBI for his alleged involvement with Nintendo hacking group Team Xecuter, Louarn doesn’t view himself as a criminal, but as a rebel instead.