07.03.22
Posted in News Roundup at 6:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup. We had a full week in the world of Linux releases with ArcoLinux 22.07.03, Nitrux OS 20220629, Pisi Linux 2.3, and Condres OS 1.0.
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Desktop/Laptop
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As Linux users, we’re often spoiled for choice when it comes to software. There are some basic programs that we keep coming back to that are so integrated into the stack that we forget they’re even there. However, when it comes to things like desktop environments, it can be hard to determine the best option for exactly what you’re going to use it for. We have reviewed different Linux Desktop Environments, and there’s a lot of overlap between use cases. Here we show you the best Linux Desktop Environments for your particular use case.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In the past week, I have put in many hours of work preparing for the next evolution of DTOS.
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There was once a time when Compiz was such a popular compositor but nowadays almost no one uses it so what happened and where did it go.
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In this video, we are looking at how to install Natron on Pop!_OS 22.04.
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Benchmarks
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What is the right metric to use when measuring a program’s performance? There are various possibilities, from memory usage to branch prediction hit rates, but I’m going to pick on two that I see widely used: CPU instructions executed (what modern CPUs call “instructions retired”) and wall-clock time (i.e. “how much time has elapsed in the real world?”). In this post, I’m going to try and compare both, showing why each has fundamental weaknesses, before explaining why I use each in different circumstances.
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Applications
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Mycorrhiza Wiki is an open-source wiki engine developed by Bouncepaw, who is assisted by other open-source contributors. Use Mycorrhiza for personal wikis, digital gardens and wikis for small teams or communities.
[...]
Mycorrhiza Wiki is released under the AGPL-3.0 License.
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GROWI is a new open-source Wiki engine for teams that supports real-time editing
It is built on top of Node.js and MongoDB. It also uses Redis, and ElasicSearch for full-text search functionality.
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Digital Media Server is a DLNA compatible UPnP AV Media Server. It is capable of sharing digital video, audio and image resources to UPnP AV and DLNA capable devices.
[...]
The project is released under the GPL-2.0 License.
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Aether is currently available as an LV2 plug-in for Linux. It’s open-source, so you can also compile it for macOS and Windows if you’re tech-savvy.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Knowing how to select all content in Vim or the Vi editor enables you to complete routines like copying and pasting in Linux quickly. The process can be tricky if you don’t understand how to use the editors properly or bind keys.
For instance, you can select all in Vim/Vi by combining the gg, V, and G keys.
ggVG
Before that, you must be in the normal mode and know what the groups of keys mean or do.
This article takes you through Vim/Vi modes, commands, and key bindings. You will find it simpler to select and use file contents with this knowledge.
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Restic is an open-source, secure, and cross-platform backup program. Using Restic we can store multiple versions of files and directories in an encrypted repository. Restic can be used to back up data to an external device or to cloud storage.
Restic encrypts data with the AES-256 in counter mode and then authenticates it using the Poly1305-AES cryptographic message authentication code. This way Restic guarantees confidentiality and data integrity by utilizing cryptography.
Restic does incremental backups which makes it easier and faster compared to some other backup programs. What this means is that it stores a base backup image and then for each subsequent backup, it stores the difference between that base image and the source machine. This leads to increased backup speed as only the modified data is backed up. It also consumes less backup space.
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Today we are looking at how to install PulseEffects 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.
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I worked with a FreeBSD client this morning who’d messed up the pf rules on their VM firewall, and wanted to know how to fix them.
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Discord is one of the sought-after social platform applications that provides voice, text and video chat services.
It is a digital community where users can create and join spaces called servers where the people communicate. The free application is available on heterogeneous platforms like Andriod, iOS, Windows, Mac and Linux.
This tutorial will demonstrate several methods to install Discord in Linux in Debian.
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Linux comes equipped with a plethora of networking utilities to choose from. tcpdump is one such powerful networking tool that can capture and analyze network traffic should you need to troubleshoot network errors on Linux.
Let’s get hands-on with the tcpdump command and explore how to use it to capture network traffic.
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htop is a process viewer that lets the user monitor and manage the processes running in Unix and Unix-based environments. It is an alternative to the program called top, but htop is better off regarding process viewing flexibility and with features of additional manipulation.
htop provides a cleaner and colorful interface with horizontal and vertical scrolling support.
This tutorial will guide you with the steps of installing htop in Linux with the following methods.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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This month saw quite a number of updates for OS 6.1 including some nice feature updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and more.
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New Releases
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Team Porteus is finally able to announce the immediate availability of Porteus-v5.0 final in EIGHT desktop flavours.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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RFID systems are common in our lives as they are widely used to secure access, monitor objects’ positions (IoT) and a lot of other applications. Their technology is so mature that they are today reliable components and easy to use. The RC522 module with Raspberry PI can bring to your hands this technology with a few steps and a cheap budget
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to connect and configure a Raspberry PI with an RFID RC522 module, using Python.
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Inspired by his time as a scorekeeper in elementary school, now-high schooler Collin Wentzien wanted to recreate this setup by building a DIY scoreboard several years ago. His idea involved making a bright display composed of several seven-segment displays that could all be controlled by an external device in order to set scores, start/stop the clock, and more.
The controller sits inside of a small custom box that contains a pair of button matrices, which either increment the score for the home/guest team or provides a keypad that can be used to enter numerical values and set the clock. Below its custom PCB is an Arduino Mega 2560 that handles all of the button inputs, along with a character LCD for showing what has been entered and an nRF24L01+ wireless transceiver for sending new data to the scoreboard.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Extensions coming to GNOME Web, some new Sailfish OS Community News, NOKIA causes a naming dispute and more!
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Content Management Systems (CMS)
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WordPress powers like 40% of the internet or something, so I don’t think it will be going anywhere anytime soon. But what if Matt and the team decide to go in a direction I don’t agree with, like Ghost have?
My knee-jerk reaction would be to go back to Jekyll – it’s light and I know it fairly well. But like I said, managing content is painful and Ruby can be a bit of pig to manage.
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Programming/Development
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Prominent statistician Frank Harrell has come out with a radically new R tutorial, rflow. The name is short for “R workflow,” but I call it “R in a box” –everything one needs for beginning serious usage of R, starting from little or no background.
By serious usage I mean real applications in which the user has a substantial computational need. This could be a grad student researcher, a person who needs to write data reports for her job, or simply a person who is doing personal analysis such as stock picking.
Like other tutorials/books, rflow covers data manipulation, generation of tables and graphics, etc. But UNLIKE many others, rflow empowers the user to handle general issues as they inevitably pop up, as opposed to just teaching a few basic, largely ungeneralizable operations. I’ve criticized the tidyverse in particular for that latter problem, but really no tutorial, including my own, has this key “R in a box” quality.
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Deep learning have made dramatic improvements over the last decades. Part of this is attributed to improved methods that allowed training wider and deeper neural networks. This can also be attributed to better hardware, as well as the development of techniques to use this hardware efficiently. All of this leads to neural networks that grow exponentially in size. But is continuing down this path the best avenue for success?
Deep learning models have gotten bigger and bigger. The figure below shows the accuracy of convolutional neural networks (left) and the size and number of parameters used for the Imagenet competition (right). While the accuracy is increasing and reaching impressive levels, the models get both bigger and use more and more resources. In Schwartz et al., 2020, as a result of rewarding more accuracy than efficiency, it is stated that the amount of compute have increased 300k-fold in 6 years which implies environmental costs as well as increasing the barrier to entry in the field.
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Mint is a refreshing programming language for the front-end web development. It is developed and maintained by a large community of experienced developers.
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Leftovers
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Actually… I’m sitting in my hotel room across the street right now, writing this post (which, despite how lame it might sound, sitting at a hotel desk at seven in the morning is turning out to be one of my favorite times to write).
For the first time, I decided to attend this convention alone instead of with a group of friends. I’m not entirely sure why, but getting away for a few days and experiencing something through only my eyes (instead of through the eyes of my companions) felt right.
I guess there’s just something centering about being alone with your thoughts sometimes (even if that “alone” means you are surrounded by a few thousand strangers).
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Ok, maybe I’m too strict with my way of thinking, because I try to ask myself why I do something before I do it. So, for me to feel good, I try to be distant (not isolated) from social networks.
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Science
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A new arXiv paper investigates which building blocks of random forests, especially causal forests and model-based forests, make them work for heterogeneous treatment effect estimation, both in randomized trials and observational studies.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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A study based on data from 749 cities estimates that compliance with WHO recommendations could prevent more than 3,600 deaths annually from ischaemic heart disease alone
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Security
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Four and a half years ago now, I rolled out version 2 of HIBP’s Pwned Passwords that implemented a really cool k-anonymity model courtesy of the brains at Cloudflare. Later in 2018, I did the same thing with the email address search feature used by Mozilla, 1Password and a handful of other paying subscribers. It works beautifully; it’s ridiculously fast, efficient and above all, anonymous.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Others are abandoning their current period trackers and turning to apps like Stardust instead as a result of the company’s strong statement issued in light of the decision to overturn Roe. Stardust said it would implement end-to-end encryption so it would “not be able to hand over any of your period tracking data” to the government, helping to draw in hundreds of thousands of downloads over this weekend ahead of the release of the new, encryption-featured app version slated for release on Wednesday.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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In one of his last moves as a senator, Rex Patrick has advanced his battle against the National Archives to release important documents relating to John Howard and Alexander Downer’s undermining of Timor-Leste in the early 2000s. Callum Foote reports on the latest efforts to end the persecution and secret trials of whistleblower Bernard Collaery.
Last month Senator Rex Patrick wrote to the new Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, asking him to overturn a decision made by the Australian Appeals Tribunal to hold part of the trial and discussion of certain documents, in secret.
The decision was made, according to Dreyfus, by former attorney-general Michaelia Cash, who formed the view that “disclosure of the confidential evidence would be contrary to the public interest because it would prejudice the security, defence or international relations of Australia”.
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Environment
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Energy
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June 26, 2022Some consumers may consider pressing the brakes on their road trips this summer as gas prices continue to skyrocket. In the United States, gas prices jumped nearly 50 percent year-over-year, driving up energy prices 34.6 percent. The war in Ukraine and supply chain effects have only exacerbated price pressures. These energy price increases, along with spikes in food prices and the shelter index, drove inflation to 8.6 percent in May. And while US inflation has quadrupled over the past two years, it’s risen considerably elsewhere, too, including Greece, Israel, Italy, and Spain. Check out these insights on the trends shaping the energy landscape and bookmark this special collection on inflation to stay up to speed.
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Finance
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As the death toll from the pandemic continued to mount, US corporations enjoyed the widest profit margins in more than 70 years during the second and third quarters of 2021.
US corporate profits before adjustments rose to a record high of $3.14 trillion at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in the third quarter of 2021. After tax and adjustments for inventory, profits rose to a record high $2.74 trillion, according to the most recent figures reported by the US Commerce Department.
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“The socialist left now, as during earlier centuries, advocates for an economic system that does not yet exist in any nation. However, the socialist left does so with the knowledge of what happened to those experiments in socialism that turned out to be and still are forms of state capitalism. Hopefully, 21st-century socialism will not need to repeat those experiments.”
Russia’s war on Ukraine both reflects and deepens a global split that should remind us of Karl Marx’s famous remark: “No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.” The United Kingdom already lost its particular social order—its empire—while the United States is now losing its. Despite differences, both of these social orders shared a mostly private form of capitalist relations of production (the organization of enterprises centered around private employers and employees). That social order has given way to a different, mostly public form of capitalist relations of production where state officials are major employers. The latter form of capitalism is developing most dramatically in China.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Although this is mostly a tech blog, from time to time I have used this platform to share my political opinion. I don’t know if any of my readers really care one way or another, but today I’m going to talk about politics a bit. So if you don’t want to hear it, cut loose now because this basically just a politically charged rant.
The basic jist of this post is this: I am done voting for the Democratic party. I swore off voting for the Republican party back in 2004 and since then I have been constantly and increasingly frustrated with the ineptness of the Democratic party. But the word ineptness doesn’t really do this situation justice because that’s not what the problem is.
No the problem is that the Democratic party is structured to operate purely as a foil to the cancerous regressive Republican party. Therefore every part of the platform, their campaigns and even their entire relationship with voters is basically predicated on the simple idea that they themselves are not Republicans.
So why not a third party? Well our first-past-the-post voting system pretty much makes having a viable third or fourth party impossible. Especially here in America where most of us seem to at least silently concur with the ole Ricky Bobby adage, “If you ain’t first, you’re last”. So ignoring for a moment that the Libertarian and the Green parties are both kind of balls to the wall insane, they don’t really have an actual snowball’s chance in hell anyway.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday on the eve of events to celebrate 25 years since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule and the inauguration of the city’s new leader John Lee.
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After 9 years of Coalition rule, a Liberal stampede out of Parliament House means political upheaval in the nation’s capital and a new guard
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The visit of Penny Wong to her home town in Malaysia was a beautiful thing. The affection with which Australia’s Foreign Minister is held by the people of Kota Kinabalu, in Sabah, was apparent.
We witnessed a heartwarming homecoming to match those pilgrimages some US presidents make to Ireland. But why, and especially, why now?
There are certainly issues that can be canvassed on a visit to ”Kota”. It’s on the island of Borneo, a rainforest-rich island that has captured the Western imagination since the orang-utan established the myth of ”the wild man of Borneo”. Three nations occupy this island: Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.
The biggest topic concerning in Borneo is the environment, an area where Australia is now proudly parading its credentials on the world stage. Deforestation on the world’s third biggest island is an environmental catastrophe. The logging contributes to the smoke haze that blankets south-east Asia with increasing regularity.
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An escalating dispute between national Republicans and technology giant Google threatens to bring political heat on the company and could spur significant changes in political email practices.
Driving the news: The Republican National Committee fired the latest shot on Wednesday, when chairwoman Ronna McDaniel claimed in a statement to Axios that Google has “systematically attacked” its digital program.
[...]
The details: The RNC shared internal data showing regular and dramatic increases in the number of its fundraising and voter-activation emails being sent to Gmail recipients’ spam folder.
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Many current college students have had social media accounts since they were young teens, regularly posting on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook without fear of repercussions.
But posts riddled with profanity or raucous party photos can come back to haunt them once they start looking for a job. According to a 2020 survey from the Harris Poll, a global market research and consulting firm, 71 percent of those who make hiring decisions in the U.S. agreed that looking at social media profiles is an effective way to screen job applicants. Among employers that use social media to vet candidates, 55 percent said they have found content that caused them to turn down an applicant.
Now a new company called Filtari is partnering with institutions to help students clean up their social media profiles before they start the job-search process. Filtari works by using artificial intelligence to scan and identify written posts and photos on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook that an employer might deem inappropriate or harmful.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Reports on Friday that Amazon had asked employees to delete TikTok from their phones spread like wildfire—TikTok’s security woes have been the viral story of the month. Amazon quickly retracted the news—an internal memo had been released in error—but the implication that TikTok, an app installed by hundreds of millions, might be tapping into emails had resonated. That’s where we now find ourselves.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The culture war raged most hotly from the ’70s to the next century’s ’20s. It polarized American society, dividing men from women, rural from urban, religious from secular, Anglo-Americans from more recent immigrant groups. At length, but only after a titanic constitutional struggle, the rural and religious side of the culture imposed its will on the urban and secular side. A decisive victory had been won, or so it seemed.
The culture war I’m talking about is the culture war over alcohol prohibition. From the end of Reconstruction to the First World War, probably more state and local elections turned on that one issue than on any other. The long struggle seemingly culminated in 1919, with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and enactment by Congress of the National Prohibition Act, or the Volstead Act (as it became known). The amendment and the act together outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States and all its subject territories. Many urban and secular Americans experienced those events with the same feeling of doom as pro-choice Americans may feel today after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
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Jackson has ascended to the court at a critical time, with both the institution and the country rife with division.
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Republicans in Ohio attempt to keep 10 year old girl pregnant with a fetus that was the result of rape, and possibly incest.
After the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision went into effect, Ohio’s 6 week abortion ban law went into effect, with no exceptions for rape and incest.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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On the Crapification of Literary Contracts
I don’t want to pretend that freelance writing contracts were ever great, but in the 34 years since I sold my first short story — at 17 — I’ve observed firsthand how manifestly unfair contractual terms have become standard, and worse, non-negotiable.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Technical
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The 68000 processor in the Amiga and ST is a hybrid 16/32 bit CISC processor; 32bit instruction set, on a 16bit bus. Unlike modern processors, it has no Floating-Point Unit [FPU], so processing numbers with fractional values is slow in comparison to integer based math.
3D graphics calculates a lot of angles/positions that rely on these fractional values, so we need a way to trade mathematical precision for processing speed. Fixed-Point is a decent compromise.
In fixed-point, numbers are stored in standard C types (ints, short and long, etc.) but the content of the variable differs from that of a normal int type. Fixed-point implies a position within the variable where the decimal point would be, and this is kinda arbitrary. For example, a signed 16bit integer normally has the range -32768 to 32767. If we create a fixed-point type of 8.8 – 8 bits for the integer part, 8bits for the fractional part – the integer range is reduced to -128, 127, but we’ve gained 8 bits of fractional precision.
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I noticed that web font-sizes on my Android phone often don’t look right. Plenty of sites are ok, but plain simple HTML doesn’t always work. After digging, mobile browsers have a feature called “Font Boosting” to prevent problems with either tiny fonts or zooming in and srolling left and right. There’s some logic in there that does (or doesn’t) increase the font size to make text readable without zooming.
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Science
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Australian scientists have created the world’s first-ever quantum computer circuit – one that contains all the essential components found on a classical computer chip but at the quantum scale.
The landmark discovery, published in Nature today, was nine years in the making.
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Imagine a more sustainable future, where cellphones, smartwatches, and other wearable devices don’t have to be shelved or discarded for a newer model. Instead, they could be upgraded with the latest sensors and processors that would snap onto a device’s internal chip — like LEGO bricks incorporated into an existing build. Such reconfigurable chipware could keep devices up to date while reducing our electronic waste.
Now MIT engineers have taken a step toward that modular vision with a LEGO-like design for a stackable, reconfigurable artificial intelligence chip.
The design comprises alternating layers of sensing and processing elements, along with light-emitting diodes (LED) that allow for the chip’s layers to communicate optically. Other modular chip designs employ conventional wiring to relay signals between layers. Such intricate connections are difficult if not impossible to sever and rewire, making such stackable designs not reconfigurable.
The MIT design uses light, rather than physical wires, to transmit information through the chip. The chip can therefore be reconfigured, with layers that can be swapped out or stacked on, for instance to add new sensors or updated processors.
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Quantum computing hardware specialists at UNSW have built a quantum processor in silicon to simulate an organic molecule with astounding precision.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Indiana is a state in the Midwestern United States. It is bordered by Lake Michigan to the northwest, Michigan to the north, Ohio to the east, the Ohio River and Kentucky to the south and southeast, and the Wabash River and Illinois to the west.
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Desktop/Laptop
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China’s efforts to end its reliance on Microsoft Windows got a boost with the launch of the openKylin project.
The initiative aims to accelerate development of the country’s home-grown Kylin Linux distro by opening the project up to a broader community of developers, colleges, and universities to contribute code.
Launched in 2001, Kylin was based on a FreeBSD kernel and was intended for use in government and military offices, where Chinese authorities have repeatedly attempted to eliminate foreign operating systems.
In 2010, the operating system made the switch to the Linux kernel, and in 2014 an Ubuntu-based version of the OS was introduced after Canonical reached an agreement with Chinese authorities to develop the software.
The openKylin project appears to be the latest phase of that project, and is focused on version planning, platform development, and establishing a community charter. To date, the project has garnered support from nearly two dozen Chinese firms and institutions, including China’s Advanced Operating System Innovation Center.
These industry partners will contribute to several special interest groups to improve various aspects of the operating system over time. Examples include optimizations for the latest generation of Intel and AMD processors, where available; support for emerging RISC-V CPUs; development of an x86-to-RISC-V translation layer; and improvements to the Ubuntu Kylin User Interface (UKUI) window manager for tablet and convertible devices.
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Kernel Space
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I built a home NAS two years ago, that was the first COVID summer and I finally had the time. It’s running Proxmox, which is running TrueNAS (then Core, now Scale) as a VM. An HBA card is passed directly to the TrueNAS VM. The HBA card is a Dell PERC H310, but I’ve crossflashed it so that now it shows up as an LSI SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2. The system originally had five ST4000VN008 disks (4 TB) in a RAIDZ2.
Pretty much from the beginning I noticed the system was spewing out storage related error messages when booting up. ZFS also noticed, but after the TrueNAS VM was completely up, there were no more errors and I quite rarely rebooted or shut down the system, so I wasn’t too worried. The few read errors I got each boot I cleared with zpool clear, which probably was not the best idea.
Last summer we had very cheap electricity here in Finland, something like 1-3 c/kWh plus transfer and taxes. Well, this summer it can be even 60 c/kWh during the worst times. I started shutting down my NAS when I knew we would not need it for a while. This made the disk issues worse.
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Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the System Boot and Security Microconference
In the fourth year in a row, System Boot and Security microconference is are going to bring together people interested in the firmware, bootloaders, system boot, security, etc., and discuss all these topics. This year we would particularly like to focus on better communication and closer cooperation between different Free Software and Open Source projects. In the past we have seen that the lack of cooperation’s between projects very often delays introduction of very interesting and important features with TrenchBoot being very prominent example.
The System Boot and Security MC is very important to improve such communication and cooperation, but it is not limited to this kind of problems. We would like to encourage all stakeholders to bring and discuss issues that they encounter in the broad sense of system boot and security.
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Intel’s development team has done a fantastic job updating each kernel cycle to future-proof all versions. We have seen plenty of Intel DG2, and Arc Alchemist code merged into the i915 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver, including the most recent Linux 5.19 kernel. This particular version of Linux has seen compute user-space ABI support that will be available for the DG2 architecture, as well as several PCI IDs included in DG2 that appear to be utilized for the company’s notebook Arc graphics. Lastly, there have also been new features and hardware fixes for various issues since first working on the project.
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Applications
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Darktable, free open-source photography app and raw developer, now is at the new major 4.0 release! See what’s new and how to install it in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04 & Ubuntu 18.04.
Darktable 4.0 features Filmic v6 which introduced new color science. The change removes the mandatory desaturation close to medium white and black and replaces it with a true gamut mapping against the output (or export) color space. For those still prefer the “desaturated highlights” look, you can still do this by disabling chroma preservation.
The release also include a new feature in the “exposure” and “color calibration” modules, allows to define and save a target color/exposure for the color pickers, in order to match any source object in the image against an arbitrary target color.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this tutorial, we will walk you through the process of upgrading Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 22.04.
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MAC address is a unique address that is used to identify the device over the network. When we change the mac address it will help for anonymity over the network.
It also helps to bypass the MAC filter in the network by using another device’s mac address.
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Tutorial to install Robot 3T or Studio 3T free on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish using the command line to get a Graphical user interfaces for managing your Mongo DB server instance.
Robo 3T offer MongoDB a GUI interface tool that is maintained and provided by the developers of MongoDB client Studio 3T (paid one with 30 days trial). Formerly, Robo 3T is known as Robomongo, and now Studio 3T Free. It is also a cross-platform MongoDB GUI management tool available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. On one hand, the Studio 3T is a paid tool, whereas the Studio 3T Free is a free version with users can build queries using drag and drop functionality, generate driver code in seven languages, break down aggregation queries, plus more.
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SSH is a widely-used protocol used for accessing Linux servers securely. Most users use SSH connections with default settings to connect to a remote server. However, the unsecured default configurations also pose various security risks.
The root account of a server with open SSH access may be at risk. And especially if you are using a public IP address, it is much easier to hack the root password. Therefore, it is necessary to have knowledge about SSH security.
Here’s how you can secure your SSH server connections on Linux.
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This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install wine 7.12 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04, and Linux Mint 20.3.
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Raspberry Pi Trading announced the Raspberry Pi Pico W board basically based on the same design as the original Raspberry Pi Pico board with RP2040 dual-core Cortex-M0+ microcontroller but adding a wireless module with WiFi 4 and Bluetooth LE 5.2, although the latter is not enabled on the board at this time.
The company sent me a sample for review/evaluation, and I’ll focus on the WiFi part since the Raspberry Pi Pico W supports the same MicroPython and C/C++ SDKs as for the Raspberry Pi Pico board plus additional APIs for wireless connectivity.
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Games
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The gaming aspects of the Linux platform are evolving slowly but steadily. Still, people are very skeptical when it comes to gaming on this platform. But, from my personal experience, I see very little difference between Linux and Windows in terms of gaming.
Linux OS is fully optimized for gaming which really makes optimum use of your system rig. With that in mind, many game developers are producing games with the Linux platform in mind.
In this article, we have compiled a list of the best Linux games out there in the gaming arena.
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Roguelike is a subgenre of role-playing video games characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement, and permanent death of the player character.
Most roguelikes are based on a high fantasy narrative, reflecting their influence from tabletop role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons.
There is an eligibility criteria that needs to be met to be included in this round up (see below).
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With July 4th coming up for American readers, and a regular weekend for everyone else, I figured I’d spotlight something a bit “fun” for folks to get up to over it.
Yes, I’m writing about a game.
Now, I don’t tend to cover gaming too often because a) my buddy Liam does it so much better over on Gaming on Linux, and b) I’m more of a console gamer than a PC gamer (I know, I’m the worst).
But a new version of open source first-person shooter Xonotic is out. It’s a very substantive update for this totally-FOSS game (licensed under GPL3), as the team note in their release announcement. So, I figured I’d make an exception and mention it.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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EasyOS
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Limine has undergone a very rapid pace of development. Compiling yet again. The recipe has become simpler…
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It is not a PET, it is builtin to EasyOS, script /usr/sbin/pup-advert-blocker
I have overhauled it and bumped the version to 0.6
The creator, sc0ttman, hasn’t posted to the forum for a long time, so I sent him an email a couple of days ago. I will send another one, letting him know that I have worked on the script.
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Just a quick report. I have done some work on Easy Version Control (in the “Filesystem” menu category).
This includes snapshots, and container rollback and erase. This work has been required due to the new top-level-zram.
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Debian Family
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This month I accepted 305 and rejected 59 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 310.
From time to time I am also looking at the list of packages to be removed. If you would like to make life easier for the people who remove packages, please make sure that the resulting dak command really makes sense. If this command consists of garbage, please adapt the Subject: of your bug report accordingly.
Also it does not make sense to file bugs to remove packages from NEW. Please don’t hesitate to close such bugs again …
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Given news that ISC’s DHCP suite is getting deprecated by upstream and seeing how dhclient has never worked properly for DHCPv6, I decided to look into alternatives. ISC itself recommends Roy Maple’s dhcpcd as a migration path. Sadly, Debian’s package had been left unattended for a good 2 years. After refactoring the packaging, updating to the latest upstream and performing one NMU, I decided to adopt the package.
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Sparky oldoldstable 4 “Tyche” reached its end-of-life on July 1, 2022, as well as Debian 9 “Stretch” LTS. Sparky 4 is based on Debian 9 so support for Sparky 4 has been finished.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Clement Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, has posted his usual monthly update with the latest developments of the operating system. He said that Linux Mint 21 is almost ready to be beta-tested (due next week) with quality assurance beginning this weekend. Interestingly, the systemd-oom package that kills tasks in low memory environments, will not be included in Linux Mint 21 after the team got negative feedback.
Some other things that were highlighted about the upcoming release were that home direction encryption will remain available in the installer, the os-prober package will be enabled by default to better detect dual-boot systems, webp support has been added to xviewer and thumbnails, and Blueman 2.3 is replacing Blueberry (Bluetooth package).
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Linux Mint 21 will not feature the controversial systemd-oomd, and other expected new features which is arriving soon.
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Linux Mint 21 won’t use the controversial memory management feature currently affecting users of Ubuntu’s latest LTS release.
Although Linux Mint 21 will still be based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS it eschews systemd-oom, despite on-going efforts by Ubuntu developers to “tame” the bolshy behaviour of the daemon.
To recap, systemd-oom is a user-space “killer” that force-quits apps with high memory usage if/when overall system memory is getting low. The feature is designed to intervene early to prevent the infamous system lockups that occur on Linux when memory is maxed out.
However, some Ubuntu users have found the daemon is killing critical applications despite their overall system responsiveness not being affected by memory-related pressures.
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Ubuntu Studio is the official Ubuntu flavour dedicated to the creators who mainly work with photographs, audio and video. This official distribution brings almost all popular open-source creative software pre-loaded in its ISO image to give you a ready and stable system to kick start your professional work.
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This article lists the top 10 necessary Ubuntu apps for your daily workflow.
We often forget that thousands of free and open-source applications can compete with other commercial counterparts in their category. Moreover, if you are a Windows user and thinking about getting rid of Windows completely, you should also be aware of such apps beforehand.
Hence, in this article series of “necessary Ubuntu apps”, we are featuring ten apps for much-needed awareness among Linux users.
This is part 3 of this Ubuntu Apps series. If you missed the earlier parts, you can read them here, Or navigate from the Menu above.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Our new Hot-Air Rework Station is here along with a new LED Project Kit, RPi Picos, and Third-Hand Kit!
Hello, everyone! We’re back this week with more new products! If you stopped by yesterday, you probably already know about the new Raspberry Pi announcement with the addition of wireless capabilities and headers on two unique Pico boards. On top of that, we have a brand new version of our popular Hot-Air Rework Station with a new set of features that modernizes the instrument for todays standards. Following that, we have have a new LED Project Kit that is ideal for developing minds to start in electronics, as well as a new third hand kit! Alright, let’s jump in and take a closer look!
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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openWorkout is a free open-source android app for athletes or anyone who want to organize their workout and exercise routines.
It puts your privacy first, as it does not share any of your private data or even collect them.
[...]
openWorkout is an open-source project that is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.
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Can I Drive is a free open-source Android application allows you to track your recent alcohol consumption, to assess if you can drive or not.
The app does not collect, share, or send your data to any third-party, it also does not include any external scripts that may harm the user’s privacy.
[...]
The project is released as an open-source under the Apache 2.0 License.
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LibreHealth Essential Care For Babies is a free open-source Android application to provide clinical decision-support for nurses and doctors delivering essential newborn care interventions during the first day of life.
[...]
The project is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 102 is out, not an earth shattering release but with some welcome privacy improvements. It builds out of the box on this Talos II using the PGO-LTO patch from Firefox 101 and the .mozconfigs from Firefox 95.
Firefox 102 is also the basis for the next Extended Support Release, with support for 91ESR (the current version) due to end on September 20 with the release of Firefox 105. Due to a family emergency, I’ve been out of the country for a bit and haven’t been doing much with any projects, let alone the POWER9 JIT (this is why we need more people working on it!). Now that I’ve been back for a few days and more or less in the swing of things again, it’s time to dust it off and forward port the current version to 102 so people doing ESR JIT builds for Fx91 can continue to do so with Fx102. I’ll make an announcement and post a patch set when it’s ready.
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Tor Browser 11.5a13 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
Tor Browser 11.5a13 updates Firefox on Windows, macOS, and Linux to 91.10.0esr.
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Tor Browser 11.0.15 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
We use the opportunity as well to update various other components of Tor Browser…
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Programming/Development
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What is happening here is that internally, gospy uses packages from its own repository (module) and one of them, github.com/monsterxx03/gospy/pkg/term, in turn uses github.com/gizak/termui/v3. However, the github.com/monsterxx03/gospy module has a replace directive for this termui module that changes it to github.com/monsterxx03/termui/v3.
If you clone the repository and run ‘go install’ inside it, everything works and you wind up with a gospy binary in your $HOME/go/bin. However, as we see here ‘go install …@latest’ works differently enough that the replace directive causes this error. To fix the problem (ie, to build gospy or any program like it), you must clone the repository and run ‘go install’ in the right place inside the repository.
(Alternately you can file bugs with the upstream to get them to fix this, for example by dropping the replace directive and directly using the replacement in their code. But if the upstream is neglected, this may not work very well.)
Unsurprisingly, there is a long standing but closed Go issue on this ‘go install’ behavior, cmd/go: go install cmd@version errors out when module with main package has replace directive #44840.
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Computer programs organize bits and bytes into “data structures”. In software of any import, the data structures are usually more interesting than the code around them. This part of the Quamina Diary takes a close look at a very simple data structure that I have greatly enjoyed using to build finite automata, and which I think has lessons to teach; it’s called smallTable.
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Prefix notation is the notation in which operators are placed before the corresponding operands in the expression.
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Limited dependent variables, or continuous variables with lower and upper bounds, are quite common in the social sciences but do not fit easily with existing statistical models. In this Rmarkdown document, I show why these issues are important to consider when modeling your data, discuss existing R packages useful for fitting these models, and also present ordbetareg, an R package with a new variant of Beta regression that builds on and simplifies existing approaches (see paper here that is forthcoming in Political Analysis). In essence, ordbetareg offers a drop-in replacement for OLS that respects the bounds of a dependent variable.
I will be presenting this post as part of Leanne Powner’s Methods Cafe workshops via Zoom on Friday, July 1st, at 12 pm EST. You can find more info on the workshop along with Zoom links here. You can also get a copy of the Rmarkdown document here if you want to run the file yourself.
Although I argue that ordbetareg is as useful or more useful than existing packages, I provide a broad overview in this document so that the reader can gain an appreciation for the range of work on this topic, as well as the pros and cons of existing models.
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One hundred seventy-nine new packages made it to CRAN in May. Here are my “Top 40” picks in twelve categories: Computational Methods, Data, Ecology, Epidemiology, Finance, Machine Learning, Networks, Science, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, and Visualization.
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How to Find Unmatched Records in R?, To retrieve all rows in one data frame that do not have matching values in another data frame, use R’s anti_join() function from the dplyr package.
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R Consortium talks to Mickaël Canouil about the idea of reproducible teaching tools, cross-platform support, and the use of package building in his community. Mickaël says one of the most important things we can do to ensure that a language stays relevant is to ensure that we have new people using the language.
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Tips for Rearranging Columns in R, you might frequently want to reorder the columns in a data frame.
The select() function from the dplyr package, fortunately, makes this simple to accomplish.
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Quarto is the up-and-coming “next generation version of R Markdown” being developed by RStudio. It’s more or less a superset of R Markdown/knitr that’s suited to programming languages besides R. Quarto’s heading towards a 0.1, and I’ve started experimenting for a few client projects.
So far I like the system a lot, and at this point I really think Quarto’s worth a try; especially since it’s available with the recent versions of RStudio.
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The theoretical study of algorithms and data structures has been bolstered by worst-case analysis, where we prove bounds on the running time, space, approximation ratio, competitive ratio, or other measure that holds even in the worst case. Worst-case analysis has proven invaluable for understanding aspects of both the complexity and practicality of algorithms, providing useful features like the ability to use algorithms as building blocks and subroutines with a clear picture of the worst-case performance. More and more, however, the limitations of worst-case analysis become apparent and create new challenges. In practice, we often do not face worst-case scenarios, and the question arises of how we can tune our algorithms to work even better on the kinds of instances we are likely to see, while ideally keeping a rigorous formal framework similar to what we have developed through worst-case analysis.
A key issue is how we can define the subset of “instances we are likely to see.” Here we look at a recent trend in research that draws on machine learning to answer this question. Machine learning is fundamentally about generalizing and predicting from small sets of examples, and so we model additional information about our algorithm’s input as a “prediction” about our problem instance to guide and hopefully improve our algorithm. Of course, while ML performance has made tremendous strides in a short amount of time, ML predictions can be error-prone, with unexpected results, so we must take care in how much our algorithms trust their predictors. Also, while we suggest ML-based predictors, predictions really can come from anywhere, and simple predictors may not need sophisticated machine learning techniques. For example, just as yesterday’s weather may be a good predictor of today’s weather, if we are given a sequence of similar problems to solve, the solution from the last instance may be a good guide for the next.
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Make Use Of ☛ The 7 Best Linux Text Editors and Gedit Alternatives [Ed: Truly terrible list. promotes Microsoft's proprietary software (spyware even), Microsoft's soon-to-be-dead editor that's bloat, and a bunch of non-free stuff before getting to good options]
Gedit, the default text editor for Ubuntu and the GNOME desktop environment, is a nifty little app that’s pretty handy indeed. However, it’s not the only text editor available to Linux users.
If you’ve been using Gedit for all these years, and want a text editor that’s better suited to your needs, you should really consider switching to one of the other Linux editing apps. They’re far more powerful and will make you twice, even thrice, as productive as before.
So, let’s explore some of the best Linux text editors that are great Gedit alternatives.
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Perl / Raku
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My first contribution to CPAN was Test::Excel. It was initiated as we had requirement for such at work at that time.
It has gone through many changes, thanks to all for reporting issues and providing patches..
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Leftovers
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[David], DL1DN, is an Amateur Radio enthusiast with a penchant for low-power (QRP) portable operations. Recently he was out and about, and found that 10 m propagation was wide open. Not discouraged by having forgotten his antenna, he kludges up a makeshift one using a 20 cm length of aluminum foil (see video demonstration below the break). [David] wasn’t completely unprepared, as he did have the loading coil for his portable 20 m antenna, but was missing the telescoping whip. He calculated the whip length should be around 20 cm for 10 m operation, and crinkles up a sheet of foil the approximate length. He tunes it to length by rolling the tip to shorten the “whip” until he gets an SWR minimum.
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Reference mics are vital tools for audio work. They’re prized for their flat frequency response, and are often used for characterizing the audio response of a room or space. OpenRefMic aims to be an open source design for producing reference mics without paying exorbitant retail prices.
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Not nearly enough Americans are aware that much of what the country considers our most patriotic music was created by artists and writers of decidedly left-wing sympathies. In that spirit, here is my highly debatable list of Top 15 Fourth of July Songs, presented in random order. These songs, taken together, make clear what’s special about the US while highlighting the enormous amount of work that still needs to be done.
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Setting up a wireless sensor network over a wide area can quickly become costly, and making everything communicate smoothly can be a massive headache, especially when you’re combining short range Wi-Fi with long range LoRa. To simplify this, [Timm Bogner] created Farm Data Relay System which simplifies the process of combining LoRa, 2.4Ghz modules and serial communications in various topologies over wide areas.
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A reasonable reaction to the week’s Supreme Court rulings, which culminated in Thursday’s gutting of the Clean Air Act, would be: we are so screwed.
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A lot of things in computing are explained with bathtub curves, such as hard drive reliability. What starts as unreliable at first becomes reliable with time, then unreliability ticks up as they approach the end of their usable lives.
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Hardware
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Recently I needed a dual voltage power supply to test a newly-arrived PCB, but my usual beast of a lab power supply was temporarily at a client’s site. I had a FNIRSI programmable power supply which would have been perfect, but alas, I had only one. While digging around in my junk box I found several USB-C power-delivery “trigger” boards which I bought for an upcoming project. These seemed almost too small for the task at hand, but after a little research I realized they would work quite well.
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Anodizing aluminium, the process of electrolytic build up of the metal’s the oxide layer in the presence of dyes to create colored effects, is such a well-established process that we probably all have anodized items within sight. It’s usually an industrial mass-production process that creates a uniform result, but there’s an anodizing machine from a Dutch design studio which promises to place anodized aluminium in a new light. Studio Loop Loop’s Magic Color Machine enacts a small-scale automated anodizing process driven by a microcontroller, and is capable of effects such as gradated colors.
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In the last post, I covered the goals behind more flexible I/O support in the moteus brushless controller. This time, I’ll start to cover the configuration model that I implemented to make that support work. It is broken up into 3 distinct phases, auxiliary ports, sources, and sinks.
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Recently I grumbled in an aside about how disk drive vendors use decimal (‘SI’) numbers instead of IEC ‘binary’ numbers, which I and various other people consider more natural. You might wonder what makes binary sizes more natural for disk drives, especially since vendors have been using decimal sizes for a long time. My answer is that it comes down to sector size.
Almost all disks have had 512 byte sectors for decades, and disks have a user usable capacity that is an integer number of sectors. Most systems have then used sectors (or some power of two multiple of them) as the minimum filesystem allocation unit, and correspondingly the unit of used and free space. This makes it power of two units up and down the stack (although there’s no reason for disks to have a power of two number of sectors).
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Assume Billy admits to using recreational drugs, and might even be excited about the prospect, speaking at length, with vigor, about their latest shroom trip or ketamine binge.
What do you do about this?
I expect that the answers to this question, for the demographic reading this blog, might vary from “I start hanging out with them less, I don’t like drug users” to “I ask them to hook me up”. Now think about your group of friends and relatives, assume that the same person speaks with them, I’d wager you’d expect reactions on a similar spectrum.
Maybe the most unfavorable reaction would be “I try to direct them towards a mental health clinic for help” or “I inform their friends and family to intervene”, though even that I’d expect from only the most extremely conservative of folk.
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Proprietary
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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In April, Apple began requiring apps to request user tracking permissions. Now, tech giants and small businesses alike say they’re losing money due to the new privacy policy. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday explains why those costs could be passed to consumers. Illustration: Rafael Garcia
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Yesterday, members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) had an informal meeting with representatives of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. During the meeting, the new US “International Biometric Information Sharing (IBIS)” programme was presented. Threatening to reintroduce visa requirements, the USA wants to force EU Member States to grant access to biometric databases. Three EU member states and the United Kingdom are said to have already signed on to the programme. A representative of the EU Commission expressed criticism the USA was deliberately undermining European treaties through direct agreements with EU member states.
When asked exactly what data the US wants to tap into, the answer was: as much as possible. When asked what would happen at US borders if a traveller was known to the police in the EU, it was said that this would be decided by the US immigration officer on a case-by-case basis.
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For those second-guessing their period-tracking app, Ford says there’s a risk vs. convenience calculation that’s different for each user. It depends in large part on where you live and what the laws are.
“If I lived in a state where abortion was actively being criminalized, I would not use a period tracker — that’s for sure,” she says.
But for those who choose to log their data online, there might be some options that aren’t as risky. Ford says that apps built with a nonprofit model could offer more privacy. Hong says paid apps could be better because they’re less likely to track users, since they don’t need to collect advertising data. Hong also advised users to read Apple’s privacy nutrition labels, which are designed to show users how their data is used in simpler terms.
Apps that store data locally are also preferable, Greer explained, because when data is stored locally, the user owns it — not the company.
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Defence/Aggression
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Jimmy Dore offers an alternative narrative to the accusations alleged by Cassidy Hutchinson in her “bombshell” testimony before Jan. 6 panel.
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Environment
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Later in the show we’re joined by Jimmy Dunson, co-founder of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief to discuss the importance of community preparedness for extreme weather driven by climate chaos, as well as relational infrastructure. We also discuss his upcoming book Building Power while the lights are out – about mutual aid, disasters and dual power published by Rebel Hearts Publishing.
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This term, alongside a number of cases with the potential for seismic implications, the Supreme Court also took up West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. Though the case caught fewer headlines, it, too, threatened Earth-shifting implications all its own by thrusting into question a critical EPA lever for addressing climate change.
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To date, solar-powered electric vehicles (EVs) have often been considered as niche projects or with small vehicle rooftop panels that can slightly extend the electric driving range. This article proposes a large-scale solar EV concept with low-cost, flexible, and thin-film solar cells integrated onto the steel of all upward-facing vehicle body panels as a viable solution to help mitigate EV charging and range concerns and the high cost and solar power intermittency of individual residential rooftop solar installations. Only by considering the full range of benefits, namely to the grid, driver, and environment, the value of solar-charged EVs can truly be appreciated. This article models the effect of panel tilt and partial shading on the solar energy capture of 150 drivers to analyze grid, driver, and environmental benefits in Los Angeles (LA) and Detroit over the course of a full year. The simulations predict net annual vehicle energy use reductions of 21.5% in LA and 17.5% in Detroit for average cloud conditions, compared to a nonsolar EV.
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Energy
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With hundreds of millions of people across the world suffering from the fallout of higher energy prices and a cost-of-living crisis caused by Russia’s deadly war on Ukraine, this week’s G7 summit was the perfect opportunity for the world’s most powerful politicians to show clear, compelling leadership.
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Late Friday, just before the start of the July 4 holiday weekend, the Biden administration published a draft proposal that could allow new oil and gas drilling in federal waters off the coast of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico, a move that environmentalists warned would further endanger marine life and exacerbate the climate crisis.
If implemented, the plan released by the Interior Department would permit up to 11 new oil lease sales over a five-year period, adding to the significant lease sales that have already taken place under the Biden administration despite the president’s campaign promise to ban all “new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.”
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Finance
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Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar argued Friday that free school meal waivers enacted early in the pandemic to forestall a surge in child hunger should be made permanent, a policy change that she characterized as a political, economic, and moral no-brainer.
“We have an opportunity to prove that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people can still deliver big things,” said Omar (D-Minn.), the whip for the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “And we can feed tens of millions of hungry kids while we do it. What’s there to even discuss?”
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After struggling to find staff during the pandemic, businesses in Singapore have increasingly turned to deploying robots to help carry out a range of tasks, from surveying construction sites to scanning library bookshelves.
The city-state relies on foreign workers, but their number fell by 235,700 between December 2019 and September 2021, according to the manpower ministry, which notes how COVID-19 curbs have sped up “the pace of technology adoption and automation” by companies.
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These companies eventually expanded past their initial markets — Facebook spends billions on manufacturing VR Headsets, Microsoft opened up retail stores, and Amazon sells its own products.
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Married couples may be trying to compensate for deviating from the entrenched gender norm of ‘male breadwinner’
[...]
While new mothers frequently take on a greater share of housework than their spouses, this effect is even more pronounced in mothers who earn more than fathers, new research from the University of Bath shows.
Rational economic theory suggests parenthood and the resulting income and time pressure should lead to a more efficient sharing of household chores. However, the study of more than 6,000 heterosexual North American married households revealed this is not the case.
“Of course, we understand why specialized division of labour exists, but there is no reason for this specialization to be gender-specific. Traditional division has been conventionally explained by men earning more and working longer hours and has a certain logical appeal,” said Dr Joanna Syrda of the University’s School of Management.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The attack on abortion rights is part of a bigger campaign against democracy. The late John Lewis offers a model to overcome it.
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The NATO summit in Madrid has expanded the alliance’s footprint — a result of the U.S. and European role in the Ukraine war, and a big win for Western imperialism. Workers must use our power to fig…
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All of this is fueling what I’ve called “the great divergence” now under way between red and blue states. This divergence itself creates enormous strain on the country’s cohesion, but more and more even that looks like only a way station. What’s becoming clearer over time is that the Trump-era GOP is hoping to use its electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation — with or without majority public support. As measured on fronts including the January 6 insurrection, the procession of Republican 2020 election deniers running for offices that would provide them with control over the 2024 electoral machinery, and the systematic advance of a Republican agenda by the Supreme Court, the underlying political question of the 2020s remains whether majority rule — and democracy as we’ve known it — can survive this offensive.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Dragnet warrants violate the constitutional protections for privacy and freedom of speech and protection.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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“If Julian Assange is not free, neither are we,” said a protester at a Friday demonstration against the WikiLeaks founder’s impending transfer. “None of us is free.”
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Assange, his team and his supporters have described the extradition as an attack on freedom of speech and a threat to journalists globally.
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Freedom of expression has declined around the world and has, in part, facilitated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to free speech campaigners.
Those were among the findings of the 2022 Global Expression Report by UK-based human rights organisation Article 19.
In Russia the long-standing environment of propaganda and criminalisation of reporting of news unfavourable towards the Kremlin has helped create an environment where those against the Ukraine war have been unable to express their opposition. Article 19 has downgraded the country’s freedom of expression score from 30 points to 15 over the last decade. The score tracks freedom of expression across 25 indicators, scoring countries out of 100.
Quinn McKew, Article 19’s executive director, said: “Undoubtedly, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the biggest concern from a global political, security, economic, humanitarian and human rights point of view. This does not concern only Ukraine, albeit the impact of the war is most severe there, but is a stark reminder what happens when the international community fails to address the erosion of rights and rising authoritarianism.”
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WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange has appealed to the High Court in London to block his extradition to the United States to face criminal charges, his brother said on Friday, the latest step in his legal battle that has dragged on for more than a decade.
Assange, 50, is wanted by U.S. authorities on 18 counts, including a spying charge, relating to WikiLeaks’ release of vast troves of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables which Washington said had put lives in danger.
Last month, Home Secretary Priti Patel approved his extradition, with her office saying British courts had concluded his extradition would not be incompatible with his human rights, and that he would be treated appropriately.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has appealed the British’s government decision last month to order his extradition to the U.S.
The appeal was filed Friday at the High Court, the latest twist in a decade-long legal saga sparked by his website’s publication of classified U.S. documents. No further details about the appeal were immediately available.
Assange’s supporters staged protests before his 51st birthday this weekend, with his wife, Stella Assange, among those who gathered outside the British Home Office in London on Friday to call for his release from prison.
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The WikiLeaks founder’s appeal will likely delay a possible trial in the US, where he’ll contest his espionage charges.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is appealing against the British government’s decision to order his extradition to the US.
The appeal was filed on Friday (London time) at the High Court, the latest twist in a decade-long legal saga sparked by his website’s publication of classified US documents. No further details about the appeal were immediately available.
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Assange met the deadline to appeal the decision issued by the Minister of the Interior, Priti Patel, while. At the same time, the court in London communicated that it had formally received the notification of the accused.
Assange’s wife, Stella Assange, referred to the dire consequences of the case for journalism and human rights in general. “We will fight until justice is done,” she said.
The Australian journalist has been detained in Belmarsh high-security prison since April 2019, where he awaits the outcome of the legal process.
[...]
This Friday, multiple activists gathered in mobilization in front of the Home Office headquarters, after touring several points in London, to demand the revocation of the extradition order.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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In light of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a number of readers have written asking whether I thought the Missouri state legislature and other similar state legislatures will consider enacting legislation that would ban sexual intercourse in their states. The question is not as frivolous as it would at first appear and in light of the steps the Missouri legislature took during the 2021 session, it is a sensible question. It would instantly put to rest further discussion about abortions in those states. Pregnancy would become a thing of the past.
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This is not just another setback.
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The conservative-dominated Texas Supreme Court late Friday allowed a nearly century-old abortion ban to take effect, blocking a lower court order that had temporarily allowed the state’s clinics to continue offering the procedure without the threat of legal retribution and financial penalties.
As the Texas Tribune reports, the 1925 law “made performing an abortion, by any method, punishable by two to 10 years in prison.” The Texas Supreme Court’s order Friday, which rolled back an injunction secured just days earlier by the ACLU, only allows for civil enforcement of the law as litigation continues. A hearing in the case is scheduled for July 12.
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Positive Money staff team recently took a guided tour of The Bank of England Museum “Slavery & the Bank” exhibition, which explored how the Bank, its Governors and Directors, the City of London, and Britain as a whole was linked to, and benefited from, the slave trade. Despite recognising its historical responsibility for racial inequality, the Bank continues to resist creating a racially just future.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Whenever you need to know something, you just look it up on the Internet, right? Using the search engine of your choice, you type in a couple keywords, hit enter, and you’re set. Any datasheet, any protocol specification, any obscure runtime error, any time. Heck, you can most often find some sample code implementing whatever it is you’re looking for. In a minute or so.
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Researchers at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan have demonstrated data transmission of more than one petabit per second using a standard 0.125 mm diameter multi-core fiber (MCF), TechXplore reported.
With the world becoming more connected and the need for information being more urgent than ever, there is a massive push to make our devices faster and support them with an unprecedented data transmission backbone. Earlier this year, we reported how 10Gbps internet connections are nearing reality, and now researchers at the Network Research Institute at NICT have demonstrated petabit data transmission.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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FACT Administration LLP, a partnership behind a piracy settlement scheme in the UK, appeared in Britain’s oldest newspaper this week. The group demands at least hundreds of pounds from internet users for downloading a single movie but according to The Gazette, the partnership could be just weeks away from being forcibly dissolved. The number of businesses that face disruption is rather large, to say the least.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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I get so curious about what’s on the back copy of novels, I usually hold off on reading it until I’m well into the novel because it’s usally so spoilerific (which I think is a bad idea, why the heck print spoilers on the literal cover?).
I just finished the Swedish Pan 1969 print of Boris Vian’s 1956 L’Automne à Péking (this isn’t a review of the book itself. If you’re looking for book recos, I have many I like better, like 4x Edelfeldt which is a treasure chest of a book).
When I was like four fifths through, I glanced at the back cover, and I was struck by a huge spoiler. Grumpily, I went back to the book and read on. When I had only a couple of pages left, I decided to look again, and I saw that it revealed the entire ending. I got so mad! I really had to pull teeth to make myself finish the book.
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Yesterday went to neccessary errands, like shopping, cleaning a car we
borrowed the last couple of weeks, making some firewood for the next
winter and cleaning up the garage and making space for our new car.
With the gas prizes skyrocketing, we decided to go all-electric, so our
main car is now an VW ID.4. Our electricity bills are quite high as well,
so I really regret that I did not put my solar-roof-plans into
practice. Anyway, the new car seems great so far. If everything goes as
planned, we’ll be on a road trip though Denmark and Germany for two
weeks soon.
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My happiness seems proportional to the inverse of number of thoughts. Inverse squared, even. Maybe.
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I am living in a semi-detached house. Due to several reasons, like problems with my mental health (and increasingly physical health, too), plain laziness, or being a friend of nature and insects, I started to mow my lawn much more infrequent a couple of years back. This year I decided to quit mowing the lawn altogether. And why shouldn’t I, as for me it has only downsides: It is a chore each and every time; I don’t like the noise and the smell of that damn combustor; It pollutes the environment and gets more expensive every time as the prices for gasoline are skyrocketing; It destroys most of the flowering plants in my garden (and the little ant hills, too); I don’t actually need, nor want, a nicely trimmed lawn, because I don’t have any use for it, nor do I find it aesthetically pleasing.
[...]
My neighbors don’t share my decision and how I think about it. They are pretty pissed off actually and called me to mow my lawn a couple of times now. At first I used to give in, excuse myself and then actually do it the next weekend. Not anymore, and not so the last time he called me: No, I won’t mow my lawn. If my lawn offends you, that is totally your problem, and not mine. That’s what I said to him.
And his problem it is, or so he says, at least. He is annoyed by all those pesky weeds that the wind blows over from my property to his one, and thus disfigures his lawn and provides him with excess work for weeding. Well… sorry. I don’t do this on purpose just to bugger you. It’s just nature, after all.
In Dubai you will get fined for a dirty car, as it is an offense for aesthetics and safety reasons.
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Technical
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The Software Freedom Conservancy has gathered some attention around their “Give up Github” campaign recently. In addition to some news articles, it’s been thoroughly discussed on the fediverse and seems to be gathering at least some momentum among individual developers.
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Science
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Does hot water freeze faster than cold water? On its face this idea seems like it should be ridiculously simple to test, and even easier to intuit, but this question has in fact had physicists arguing for decades.
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UT Southwestern researcher’s decades-long quest to understand synaptic transmission gets help from fastest U.S. academic supercomputer
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Back in 1981, Cameron Gordon introduced a new way to relate two knots — mathematical constructs modeled after the knots that appear in a single thread or string. In his paper, he conjectured that this new relationship could be used to arrange groups of knots according to how complicated they are.
This winter, Ian Agol, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, posted a six-page paper that proved Gordon’s conjecture, giving mathematicians a new way to order knots by complexity. “What was really surprising about this paper is, one, that it’s super short,” said Arunima Ray, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics. “And secondly, that it’s using some tools that are, let’s say, unusual to this particular question.”
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Internet/Gemini
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Despite not being secure, despite its quirkiness, who the *beep* chose tabs to format links?, despite not being too popular, Gopher, I chose you.
Why? I don’t know, it’s kinda cute, maybe it’s the love for the underdog, of the furry thing that lives in burrows. I suppose it’s kind of fast… or perhaps it is the lack of expectations.
Yes, that has to be it. Even in Gemini there is some promise of a community. And there is, but more in the shape of places like these than in hosting your own server.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 8:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The rapid decrease of Windows “market share” over the past year is fascinating
Summary: The situation of Windows’ “share” (however subjective any measure would be) is grim; despite a "new" release of Windows, as recently as several months ago, “market share” decreases fast
THINGS don’t go Microsoft’s way and the “common carrier” (Windows) may be going the way of the dodo.
Windows share in Belarus declined by 5% since the Ukraine invasion (from 87% to 82% this month on desktops/laptops), just like in Russia (also a 5% decrease) and GNU/Linux is emergent in the developing world, not just Nordic countries like Finland and Norway (high engineer-per-capita ratio). China plans to move to GNU/Linux (the conflicts will only accelerate this ambition), but its neighbours too are quick to adopt GNU/Linux, e.g. 3-4% of the laptop/desktop market in Nepal and similar numbers in Taiwan.
It’s a game of patience. Even Valve has just reported record highs for GNU/Linux.
“It’s a game of patience.”Somalia shot up to 5% this month and Canada too is in these territories (not even counting ChromeOS, as that would add up to nearly 10%).
Indonesia is not far behind at 2.7% for GNU/Linux, whereas Nigeria at over 4% (4.62% this month).
Nigeria and Indonesia are two of the world’s biggest populations. GNU/Linux is measured at 4.36% in India this month (vast population) and in Turkey Windows is about to fall below 10%. It has gotten worse since last month. █
Windows down to single digit by month’s end? Turkey would be the first.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF at 7:17 am by Guest Editorial Team
A letter from Madrid, posted a few days ago, reproduced below (the English version):
I met Richard Stallman in person more than twenty years ago, when he came to Madrid to give one of his interesting and lively talks. We attended the event because my husband was already collaborating with the GNU Project and we were very excited to meet Richard, the promoter and founder of free software. We approached him to say hello at the end of the talk. Since then, we have had several opportunites to attend his talks every time he comes to Madrid.
We hosted him in our home during one of those visits and I can say that, despite his peculiarities, he is one of the most honest and intelligent people I know, and he has a good heart.
What people have done to him is unfair and cruel, accuse him… of what? Of making rational, inquisitive comments? Even if someone didn’t like them, it is within his rights to make them. Or is there no more freedom of expression?
The free software community owes a lot to Stallman. He has dedicated and continues to dedicate his life to disseminating the idea that users’ freedom is the most important thing. It is not fair that people who, for whatever reason, do not like him, try to discredit and denigrate him. Cruelest of all, people who wish to separate him from the movement that he has created, from the whole purpose of his life. █
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Posted in Protocol, Standard at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum ace0bf161d61d4a68229d414bdb27b0d
The Decline of the Web
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The Web, which is over 30 years old, peaked quite a few years ago; it’s increasingly just a conduit of traffic unrelated to actual pages (articles, blogs) and just a vehicle for “apps”, which are in turn centralised or closely guarded by few companies and very few governments (public communication is not their goal, manipulation and social control are the principal objectives)
INTERNET protocols are a lot more than the World Wide Web (not everyone uses “Webmail” and many still use IRC). For exchange of pages/articles more and more people turn to alternative protocols, one of which is Gemini.
How does relative growth stack up? Consider it visually:
The Web in decline. More in the video above, based on Netcraft’s Web Server Survey.
Gemini capsules count as of July 3rd, 2022. Based on Lupa’s data and charted by Botond.
The images above show how the Web stopped growing, whereas Gemini continues to grow. In our Daily Links we increasingly post Gemini links because news articles on the Web have become scarcer. This is affirmed by the latest news [1,2] (links at the bottom from today's Daily Links). We moved or extended ourselves into Gemini almost 1.5 years ago because we don’t envision a bright future for the Web. It’s a source of misinformation (for “engagement” or “monetisation”), it’s increasingly just “webapps” (not actual pages), it’s bloated, and definitely a growing security liability (too much proprietary code executed — without explicit authorisation! — on the client side/machine).
In terms of content, the Web has less to offer these days than it did a decade ago. Social control media is worse than worthless [1, 2]. As an associate explains, “many of the “local” papers in the US are shells held by a national company specializing not in gathering local news but in pumping out an agenda into the local market instead [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. News deserts are a thing in the US.” █
____________
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Despite a growing recognition of the problem, the United States continues to see newspapers die at the rate of two per week, according to a report issued Wednesday on the state of local news.
Areas of the country that find themselves without a reliable source of local news tend to be poorer, older and less educated than those covered well, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications said.
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Nevertheless, the current economic downturn isn’t the only factor to blame for the recent flurry of layoffs in the media industry. Just a week ago, streaming giant Netflix laid off 3% of its workforce, or about 300 employees, in its second round of layoffs following its disastrous first-quarter results. But Netflix’s woes have little to do with the broader macroeconomic picture and more to do with the streaming landscape and management’s shortcomings.
Big media mergers and acquisitions have also resulted in layoffs associated with restructuring and rebalancing. Earlier this week, it was reported that CAA and ICM’s merger would result in roughly 105 layoffs. And around 1,000 employees at Warner Bros. Discovery are also getting axed, according to reports. At the time of the merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery, management said it would be looking to create $3 billion in cost savings. Though layoffs are always difficult, post-M&A layoffs are often par for the course.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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We cover events and user groups that are running in the US state of Georgia. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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On this episode of This Week in Linux: Accessibility in Linux, Vim 9.0, EndeavourOS 22.6, Thunderbird 102 Email Client, Software Freedom Conservancy Says Give Up GitHub, GNOME Web 43 Gets WebExtension Support, Potential RISC-V Laptops, Shotcut 22.06 Video Editor, all that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
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Welcome to Hardware Addicts, a proud member of the TuxDigital Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world.
In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the ethics of AI…what do we do when the robots we create become sentient? How close have are we getting to true sentient AI in robotics? Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will discuss back button focus.
So Sit back, Relax, and Plug In because Hardware Addicts Starts Now!
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Instructionals/Technical
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Tech people have always had a certain attraction to building their own blogs instead of using a canned platform. Not every tech person, by any means (there are plenty of people who use readily available platforms because they have better things to spend time and energy on), but there’s generally been enough tech people that there have been tendencies and trends. Back when I started Wandering Thoughts, the in thing to do was to build a dynamic blog engine. DWiki, the engine behind Wandering Thoughts was such a dynamic engine, and it was somewhat modeled on others that I saw at the time.
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With rsync up and running, it’s time to take a peek under the hood of rsync to better understand how it works.
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Now that we know what to use rsync for, how can we best integrate rsync into monitoring and alerting, and on which operating systems does it work?
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Mozilla Firefox is one of the best browsers available that combines strong privacy protection features, good security, active development, and regular updates. A solid alternative to Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Vivaldi.
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The “df” command is a staple in the UNIX and Linux world for checking the amount of free space on your local drives.
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I found the reason. At line 369, it tries to perform an operation on script ‘grub4dosconfig’, to fix a syntax error in that script. However, Easy no longer has the ‘grub4dos’ package, and that causes the ‘momanager’ script to hang at line 375.
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In this guide, we will learn how to setup secure private docker registry on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy jellyfish) using self-sign SSL certificate and htpasswd.
Private docker registry is the repository for container images and it supports both uploading and downloading operations. It is strongly recommended one should always secure private registry to mitigate security risks.
Once we setup secure registry then we can use it in our deployments on Kubernetes cluster or may be in RedHat Openshift Cluster.
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WINE or Emulation
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Another two weeks have gone by so the Wine hackers have put out their latest development work with Wine 7.12 now available.
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Games
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The latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out for June 2022, putting the Linux user share at one of its highest ever points and likely thanks to the rise of the Steam Deck and SteamOS. As shown on our dedicated Steam Tracker, it’s been trending upwards for quite a while but this latest figure is a pretty good showing.
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Now on to how to describe. This is something I’ve had to learn in the last two years, since we started playing most of our sessions over video, since before that I relied heavily on the actual room we were in. Before video, I would do a very larpy style, show in the room how things were connected etc, make short or long hand gestures. When things were extra tricky, I’d have them leave their chairs and walk with me in the room. I wanted to convey a sense of space. We were playing in basically a ten by ten room so as far as larps go, it was pretty darn semi (as in, relying on the life changing magic of imagination).
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Now I could reboot and choose XWayland from the login screen instead.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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A brand new beta release of Icaros — a distribution of AROS (an open source operating system that is API-compatible with Amiga) — has just been released.
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Devices/Embedded
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MYIR has released a System On Module (SOM) built around the Allwinner T507-H industrial processor along with a compatible carrier board. The MYC-YT507H module is AEC-Q100 certified which is convenient for automotive electronics, industrial controls, IoT applications, etc. The SOM starts at ~$34.90 while its carrier board costs around ~$119.
The processor system integrated on the MYC-YT507H SOM is the Allwinner T507-H which combines a four-core Arm Cortex-A53. In addition, there is an Arm Mali-G31 MP2 GPU enabled to support OpenGL ES 3.2/2.0/1.0, Vulkan 1.1 and OpenCL 2.0.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Phoronix is reporting the first production RISC-V laptop, (code?) named ROMA, with “a quad-core RISC-V CPU (although clock frequencies are not noted), a GPU/NPU accelerator [and reportedly other features], up to 16GB of LPDDR4/LPDDR4X RAM [and] up to 256GB of storage.” This sounds great, except that I was seriously underwhelmed by the Allwinner D1 in the DevTerm R-01, so the lack of CPU specs is not encouraging. There are also two distinct process nodes for the System-on-Module, 12nm for Pro and 28nm for Normal, so there may be a wide gulf between configurations. On the other hand, it does prominently claim to be upgradable, possibly by swapping out the modules. Strangely, it advertises itself with an ARM SC300 secure enclave, which seems a bit odd as well.
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This new challenge will embrace the old time of RTC modems with a monthly time budget. Back in these days, in France at least, people had to subscribe to an ISP for a given price, but you would be able to connect only for 10, 20, 30, 40… hours a month depending on your subscription. Any extra hour was very expensive. We used the Internet the most efficiently possible because it was time limited (and very slow, 4 kB/s at best). Little story, phone lines were not available while a modem was connected, and we had to be careful not to forget to manually disconnect the modem after use, otherwise it would stay connected and wasting the precious Internet time! (and making expensive bills)
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Licensing / Legal
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Historically, dual licensing models were almost always implemented with GPL2 as the open source choice; most other licenses lack the conditions to drive private businesses to the proprietary licensing choice. Once GPL3 and AGPL3 were released, those licenses took their place as part of the dual licensing model, because they imposed more conditions on the exercise of the license than GPL2.
But that is not the only limitation of the dual licensing model. If the software is intended for uses (such as supporting SaaS, monitoring or development tools, or software intended for end use) that would not normally require distribution, then GPL would not drive anyone to take a proprietary license. So, the dual licensing model waned in popularity over time. AGPL was potentially more effective in such cases, but again, only for pieces of programs, not whole ones. Today, pure dual licensing models are not so common, and have given ground to the “upsell” model described below.
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GitHub is enabling copyleft violation ✨at scale✨ with Copilot. GitHub Copilot encourages people to make derivative works of source code without complying with the original code’s license. This facilitates the creation of permissively-licensed or proprietary derivatives of copyleft code.
Unfortunately, challenging Microsoft (GitHub’s parent company) in court is a bad idea: their legal budget probably ensures their victory, and they likely already have a comprehensive defense planned. How can we determine Copilot’s legality on a level playing field? We can create legal precedent that they haven’t had a chance to study yet!
A chat with Matt Campbell about a speech synthesizer gave me a horrible idea. I think I know a way to find out if GitHub Copilot is legal: we could use its legal justification against another software project with a smaller legal budget. Specifically, against a speech synthesizer. The outcome of our actions could set a legal precedent to determine the legality of Copilot.
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Programming/Development
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On the 30th of April 2022, ****Anaconda, a company widely known for its data science products in Python and R programming languages, announced that it had just released a framework that would help users create python applications using HTML.
This publication will help you get started writing PyScript, a JSFiddle-like Python framework.
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Your ability to respond to change (not just technologically but organizationally) will be one of your primary competitive advantages. How fast can you synthesize customer feedback and incorporate changes back into your software? If setting up a project quickly is part of that — due to prototyping changes or the like — then fine, setup time is important. But don’t lose sight of why it’s important.
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Given an array arr[] of length N, The task is to find the maximum and the minimum number in the array.
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A Stack is a temporary memory address space that is used to hold arguments and automatic variables during the invocation of a subprogram or function reference. The size of this stack is called the stack size.
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Async execution and promises are not easy to understand in any language and JavaScript is no exception. In this post, we will dissect how JavaScript Promise.all function works visually and with a real-life code example, let’s get started!
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Leftovers
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Stanley Kubrick also employed him for ‘The Killing’ and ‘Paths of Glory,’ and he was unforgettable as the god-like Tyrell in ‘Blade Runner.’
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The S.E.C. investigation has focused on whether there were serious discussions between the leadership of Digital World and Trump Media before the special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, went public in September and, if so, why those talks were not disclosed in regulatory filings. SPACs, which raise money to go public in the hopes of finding a merger candidate, are not supposed to have an acquisition target in mind when they raise money from investors. Regulators have also requested information about trading activity in securities of Digital World before the merger announcement in October. A few weeks before the merger announcement, there was a big surge in trading of Digital World warrants — a type of security that gives the holder the right to buy shares at a specified price.
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Popular online discussion forum Reddit has announced that it is acquiring MeaningCloud, a natural language processing (NLP) company specialising in extracting meaning from unstructured content.
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Science
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According to the best measures we’ve got, a set of benchmarks called MLPerf, machine-learning systems can be trained nearly twice as quickly as they could last year. It’s a figure that outstrips Moore’s Law, but also one we’ve come to expect. Most of the gain is thanks to software and systems innovations, but this year also gave the first peek at what some new processors, notably from Graphcore and Intel subsidiary Habana Labs, can do.
The once-crippling time it took to train a neural network to do its task is the problem that launched startups like Cerebras and SambaNova and drove companies like Google to develop machine-learning accelerator chips in house. But the new MLPerf data shows that training time for standard neural networks has gotten a lot less taxing in a short period of time. And that speedup has come from much more than just the advance of Moore’s Law.
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Hardware
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The basic idea is that system builders are already able to integrate components like sensors into their products, so why not expose some higher-level information about the environment in the same form factor? For example, a person sensor might have a pin that goes high when someone is present, and then an I2C interface to supply more detailed information about their pose, activities, and identity. That would allow a TV manufacturer to wake up the display when someone sat down on the couch, and maybe even customize the UI to show recently-watched shows based on which family members are present. All of the complexity of the ML implementation would be taken care of by the sensor manufacturer and hidden inside the hardware module, which would have a microcontroller and a camera under the hood. The OEM would just need to respond to the actionable signals from the component.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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But “way less risky” is not “zero risk.” There’s still a chance of catching COVID even at an outdoor event — especially as the virus continues evolving to become more transmissible and to break through prior immunity from vaccination or earlier cases.
“With the more transmissible variants, it’s likely that shorter periods of close contact will result in transmission,” says Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious diseases physician and a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan.
That means activities that once seemed pretty safe are potentially riskier – and that includes outdoor activities.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Even me, a technical person, can’t avoid cesspits like Facebook and WhatsApp. Well, I could, but I don’t want to become a complete pariah.
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What we’re watching: In a letter to be sent as early as this week, Biden will say the FTC should not tolerate unfair or deceptive practices related to reporting, surveillance, sharing or sale of personal information — including sensitive health-related information — in any state, the official told Axios.
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McLaughlin’s message, which was posted on the day Politico reported the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion on Roe v. Wade in early May, has since been retweeted more than 59,000 times. The Supreme Court handed down its official decision on Roe v. Wade on June 24.
Abortion-rights advocates are ringing alarm bells not just about the use of menstruation-tracking apps, but the potentially incriminating digital trail of geo-location data, online transactions and web-search histories.
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New York state passed a law on Friday banning guns from many public places, including Times Square, and requiring gun-license applicants to prove their shooting proficiency and submit their social media accounts for review by government officials.
The law, passed in an emergency legislative session, was forced by a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week that struck down New York’s restrictive gun-license laws. The court’s conservative majority ruled for the first time that the U.S. Constitution grants an individual the right to carry weapons in public for self-defense. read more
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A lot of people still share the expectation that cameras will be obvious, standalone components of a system. Even though phone cameras and webcams are smaller, they still have a noticeable physical presence, and often come with indicators like red lights that show when they’re recording. What is clear to me from my work is that these assumptions aren’t going to hold much longer. Soon imaging sensors will be so small, cheap, and energy efficient that they’ll be added to many more devices in our daily lives, and because they’re so tiny they won’t even be noticeable!
What am I basing this prediction on? The clearest indicator for me is that you can already buy devices like the Himax HM01B0 with an imaging sensor that’s less than 2mm by 2mm in size, low single-digit dollars in cost, and 2 milliwatts or less in power usage. Even more striking are the cameras that are emerging from research labs. At the TinyML Summit the University of Michigan presented a complete system that fits on the tip of a finger.
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Swedish Radio News’ reporters also built a program which, automatically, thousands of times a day, visited the made-up pharmacy, filled in e-mail addresses and telephone numbers, searched for symptoms and illnesses, but unlike the other pharmacies that Swedish Radio News had previously reported about, it also passed on information about prescription medicines.
After four days, 25 000 fake visits from customers had been registered with Facebook. But they had neither shut down nor warned the owners of the made-up pharmacy – Swedish Radio News’ reporters. When the reporters log into their account, they see that Facebook has stored the type of sensitive information that they say their filter is built to delete again and again.
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Defence/Aggression
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Many who escaped being killed, however, suffered severe injuries and are currently living with disabilities inflicted on them by the invaders, especially in the notorious attack of 2018 New Year’s eve.
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The Paris Court of Appeal (Cour d’Assises Spéciale) on Friday July 1 sentenced a 27-year-old former gendarme who had converted to Islam to 15 years in prison with a two-thirds security detention. He was charged with advocating armed jihad in Western countries. The former gendarme had been arrested in January 2018 “in view of the risk that a possible act of violence was imminent”.
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Environment
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I had challenged myself to purchase a week’s worth of food without bringing home any plastic in my grocery bag. That meant no jugs of juice, yogurt containers, cellophane windows in chip bags, plastic packages or even stickers on some produce.
Why did I do this? Because very few of the plastic packages and containers we use once get recycled. Because there’s growing concern about the harmful health effects. Some research suggests that ingesting microplastics could disrupt hormone production or be associated with problems like asthma and learning disorders.
Though scientists have not confirmed the link, I just don’t love the idea that I may consume a credit card’s worth of plastic in a week.
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Energy
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The government has admitted almost all rooftop solar energy in Australia may be double-counted – a massive emission reduction free ride for Australia’s largest corporations. Callum Foote reports.
In correspondence exchanged in January, senior officials within the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources admitted that almost all small-scale solar installations, the kind you put on your roof, are being double-counted by the government. This has happened through the misuse of the Clean Energy Regulators’ data on small-scale energy sold into the grid and the way that emissions are calculated by the Department.
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It’s part of its #ibike campaign to promote cycling culture in the Greater Copenhagen Region, a hotbed for leading biking solution brands and sustainable innovation, which is co-hosting the greatest race in the world, the Tour de France, for the first time in history.
But as the slogan reminds us, the race will leave these shores on the evening of July 3, but its imprint hopefully won’t: “Biking is not just a sport. It’s a lifestyle.”
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But Meta’s apparent need for truckloads of GPUs will likely serve as an affirmation to Nvidia and other chip companies that some of the world’s largest tech companies will continue to need more accelerator chips to fuel their most important businesses as the global economy cools down.
As detailed by The Verge earlier this month, Meta plans to use its discovery engine to create a version of the Facebook app that closely resembles TikTok’s addictive feed of videos. Not a big surprise given that copying competitors has long been Meta’s strong suit.
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Starting June 1, Germany’s new budget travel pass, available for €9 ($9.60), can be used around the country. We’ve compiled some information to help you understand how to use it.
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By making public transit cheaper, German leaders hope to limit car travel and help phase out Russian oil imports. Last year, Germany was the largest buyer of Russian oil in Europe, and it is now looking to make drastic reductions. On Monday, EU leaders agreed to an embargo that will “effectively cut around 90 percent of oil imports from Russia to the EU by the end of the year,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Homero Gómez was often called “the butterfly guardian” because of his work in Ocampo’s El Rosario butterfly sanctuary, and most agree that he was killed for was his conservation work there. The new series will also be named El Guardián in honor of his work.
A local from the Ocampo community, Gómez was a dedicated defender of the area’s migratory monarch butterfly population and their habitat, which spans almost 140,000 acres across Michoacán and México states and hosts over a billion butterflies each winter along their migratory journey back to the United States and Canada.
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Finance
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I’ve witnessed five US recessions and have studied them as a historical phenomenon as a hobby. Here’s what I think about Bitcoin.
If you look at the fake coins bloodbath and bankruptcy proceedings going on right now, that alone is another dotcom bubble, and Bitcoin and clones turned out to be Flooz 2.0.
Remember Flooz? If you’re much under 40, you probably don’t.
There was going to be an “Internet Currency” that you could exchange USD for because online merchants weren’t established to take credit cards and stuff yet.
I got some as part of a promotion and used them to buy some cigars from cigar Web site through the mail when I was underage. I think the statute of limitations is up on that. It was over 23 years ago.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The greatly expanded crossbench elected to federal parliament has reacted furiously to the Albanese government’s cuts to its staffing allowance. But the well-financed independents are well placed to make a virtue of the new austerity and remind us why they are at the vanguard of fresh thinking in politics, writes Mark Sawyer.
Of all the misdeeds of the Morrison government, this one seems to have been the least publicised. Who knew, outside those involved and a select few in the Canberra bubble, that the crossbenchers that served in the 46th parliament had been allocated extra staff?
Media outcry? What media outcry? Vital government services being cut here there and everywhere, as the taxpayer funds more fancy-pants advisers and strategy gurus for the bloated political class?
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Footage has emerged of the Uzbek authorities cleaning up a huge amount of blood after suppression of protests in Nukus, Uzbekistan.
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After recording the video, Khan attempted to defuse the situation by trying to reason with Mullah and the crowd, which had become increasingly aggressive. Khan helped the truck driver get back into his vehicle to escape the scene. As Khan himself began to depart, Mullah cried out to him saying that he was a part of the extremist group Jammat-ud-Dawa, that he had “fought in Kashmir”, and that he has connections in “high places,” insinuating that the matter won’t end with them departing.
Khan has not reported the incident to the police and has yet to be contacted by provincial government authorities, whom he tagged when he uploaded the video on Twitter.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Deutsche Welle is German public, state-owned international broadcaster, funded by German taxpayers. Voice of America is run by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), a government agency which is funded by the US Congress. The two websites have not been accessible in Turkey since Thursday.
DW said in a statement that it did not comply with the rules because “licensing would have allowed the Turkish government to censor editorial content.”
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It was not initially clear what triggered the attack, with some suggesting that it was over a QR code introduced by Samsung, the South Korean electronic giant, that allegedly had blasphemous content against the Prophet. Earlier this year, a man had threatened to set a Pepsi truck on fire over a similar issue.
However, it was later clarified that the alleged blasphemous content was shared through a WiFi device that was located inside the outlet.
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An OnlyFans creator who goes by the name Kitty Lixo said on the podcast “No Jumper” that after her Instagram account got banned, she managed to get it reinstated by systematically having sex with Meta employees (formerly known as Facebook employees).
Lixo didn’t say what got her banned in the short clip podcast host Adam Grandmaison posted on Twitter yesterday. But she did say that the first time it happened, she started sleeping with a friend at the company to get the account restored.
Later on, when she got banned again, she said she approached things even more organized manner.
“I went on his LinkedIn and I searched up [his connections] in the integrity department,” Lixo said in the clip. “We met up. I fucked a couple of them. I was able to get my account back two, three times.”
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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On May 13, two days after the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli Occupation Forces, as her loss still dominated international news cycles, thousands of Palestinian mourners gathered to pay tribute to the woman who had given them voice for so long. They came to lay her body to rest.
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Zubair was arrested on Monday for the crimes of hurting religious sentiments and inciting enmity under Sections 153 and 295 of the Indian Penal Code.
In 2018, Zubair posted a tweet which depicted a hotel having its name changed from “Honeymoon Hotel” to “Hanuman Hotel.” Hanuman is a Hindu god. Delhi Police arrested him based on a complaint over that tweet, which alleged Zubair tweeted a “questionable image with a purpose to deliberately insult the god of a particular religion.’
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Despite a growing recognition of the problem, the United States continues to see newspapers die at the rate of two per week, according to a report issued Wednesday on the state of local news.
Areas of the country that find themselves without a reliable source of local news tend to be poorer, older and less educated than those covered well, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications said.
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Nevertheless, the current economic downturn isn’t the only factor to blame for the recent flurry of layoffs in the media industry. Just a week ago, streaming giant Netflix laid off 3% of its workforce, or about 300 employees, in its second round of layoffs following its disastrous first-quarter results. But Netflix’s woes have little to do with the broader macroeconomic picture and more to do with the streaming landscape and management’s shortcomings.
Big media mergers and acquisitions have also resulted in layoffs associated with restructuring and rebalancing. Earlier this week, it was reported that CAA and ICM’s merger would result in roughly 105 layoffs. And around 1,000 employees at Warner Bros. Discovery are also getting axed, according to reports. At the time of the merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery, management said it would be looking to create $3 billion in cost savings. Though layoffs are always difficult, post-M&A layoffs are often par for the course.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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A picture with Ms Kling’s tweet showed an error message on the BA website saying “Title and gender do not match. Please try again” above Dr Kling’s attempt to input her details as a female doctor.
The comment prompted hundreds of infuriated replies on social media.
British Airways has been beset by IT problems in the past, including a number of IT failures that have caused flights to be delayed and cancelled.
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The one-man grand jury charged the defendants with misconduct in office, perjury, willful neglect of duty, obstruction of justice and more than nine counts of manslaughter. The defendants argued that Michigan law requires a prosecutor, not a judge, to issue indictments in a public courtroom so that a defendant is aware of what he’s being charged with and has an opportunity to present evidence to defend himself. The State argued that a preliminary examination would be redundant because the judge must already decide if there is probable cause.
Ultimately, the Michigan Supreme Court found that if a court uses a one-man grand jury, the defendant is entitled to a preliminary examination, and that a judge may not issue an indictment authorizing criminal charges. The cases were remanded to the state district court.
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In 2014, Flint managers appointed by Snyder took the city out of a regional water system and began using the Flint River to save money while a new pipeline to Lake Huron was being built. But the river water wasn’t treated to reduce its corrosive qualities. Lead broke off from old pipes and contaminated the city’s system for more than a year.
Lyon’s lawyers led the challenge that resulted in a unanimous Supreme Court ruling Tuesday that a judge sitting as a one-person grand jury had no power under Michigan law to return indictments.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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It’s raining heavily here. Not a torrential pour like earlier, but a dense drizzle. I was sitting on my balcony observing it, absorbing it, smoking and sipping coffee. Fireworks went off in the distance, or so it sounded. I couldn’t see anything.
The only thing over-riding the noise of the fireworks was my neighbor, “A”, throwing a tantrum, fighting with her cat, being a complete and total pest like she always is. I know she has some series of mental health issues with her, as do many, including myself, but I don’t verbally, audibly, and physically lose my mind and dismantle my apartment every other night like she does. Everything she owns and is not glued down gets thrown and slammed here and there.
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The two hardest things to do as a Catholic are 1) Give up your sins, 2) Confess your sins when you fail to give them up.
[...]
Which indicates that the person making that silly claim doesn’t know Catholic theology. In order to be forgiven in Confession, you need to make a “firm purpose of amendment.” In other words, if you just intend to commit the sin again, then your sins are not forgiven in the confessional. While yes, we fall, you must go to Confession with the intention that you will *never commit that sin again.*
[...]
Many Catholics stay “Catholic” while denying Catholic teaching. Either they state that they don’t believe their sins are really sins, or that Jesus never meant for people to confess their sins to a priest, only straight to God. I find this dishonest, because once a Catholic does this, he no longer is Catholic. He is embracing Protestantism.
The other thing that happens to many Catholics that abandon Confession is that they abandon belief in God. And it really happens in that order. Once they can no longer fight Satan in Confession, by speaking truth, in defiance of the Father of Lies, they state that, “Well, there isn’t a God anyways. There is no sin.” But the cause of the abandonment of belief in God is the fear of Confession.
I’ve seen both many times over my half-century of life.
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Politics
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I wouldn’t complain about someone just skipping to 3. I can’t argue with a blank stare, and when people tell me about how the oils used in Peanut Butter damage the rainforest, I probably look like a mannequin. But I’m not about to start lecturing people that the asphalt on the roads sometimes contains trace amount of animal parts, so we may as well eat battery-chicken eggs, and someone once killed a cow, so now we’re all polluted by vegan-original-sin forever.
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Technical
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Every since watching this nifty video on boot sector games, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of optimizing for code size, i.e., making the compiled code as few bytes as possible.
[...]
Something which challenged me recently was trying to reduce the compiled code size of a small program I wrote in Mecrisp Stellaris Forth. The program was supposed to read the function bits of the RP2040 GPIO CTRL registers, and output the current function that is set for each GPIO pin, in a human readable format. There are nine function options for each pin, and there are 29 pins. The exact function in a slot varies, however, for each pin, e.g., function 1 for GPIO 0 is SPIO RX, but for GPIO 2 it is SPIO SCK, and for GPIO 8 it is SPI1 RX.
[...]
That sounds good, but I don’t know how to accomplish that without either rewriting the whole GPIO_FNS’ word in assembly, or coming up with a fancy Forth compile-time word which somehow builds the array and all the other branching code. Both ideas sound daunting, but perhaps this could be my next mini-project…
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Science
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The existence of a mechanical calendar that was built over 2,000 years ago is a valuable reminder: humans are clever and resourceful, and when given the opportunity to do so, we can create wondrous things.
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Internet/Gemini
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I just noticed that today marks exactly six months since I started this gemlog. Looking at the commit history for this capsule’s text content, its anniversary was actually yesterday, and the server, smolver, goes back even further than that. Regardless, I view the gemlog as more of a milestone, at least in the nontechnical sense. Getting the server code correctly serving basic gemtext was a satisfying milestone as well, but the gemlog seems a more scalable one, so that’s what I’m going with.
Looking at the dates on my gemlog posts, it is obvious my enthusiasm was strongest at the start, but I am definitely still interested. This has become a nice creative outlet for me in a way that is simultaneously hard to describe, and surprising to my overly analytical brain.
Here’s to many more Geminiversaries to come!
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Programming
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I am current rebuilding the chess section of my capsule. The new code will be written in Python, and for practice, I’m re-implementing the other CGI scripts on my capsule to use Python instead of Bash.
So far I’ve rewritten two scripts: my age in miles and the capsule guestbook. The age in miles script was extremely easy to rewrite, but I wanted the guestbook script to follow the same principles the chess site will. To that end, I write each entry in the guestbook to a SQLite database, then regenerate the guestbook gemtext page from the rows in the database.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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