Recent: IBM’s Lennart Poettering on Breaking Software for Pseudo Novelty
Summary: Not a joke. Just check the comments here (many of them; skip Michael Larabel sucking up to Microsoft).
Another 6 years of Team Battistelli? That’s what delegates wanted? Or got bribed to approve?
They should rename the EPO and call it FPO, as it’s run by Frenchmen (21 years out of 24! EPO has almost 40 member states!); the only woman, a British lady, resigned after being abused by what she called “alphamales” (likely alluding to Battistelli’s clique, definitely not her French predecessor)
Summary: António Campinos has made corruption the “new normal”, rendering the EPO's Web site a propaganda machine of Team UPC and other illegal agenda; what’s the legacy to be left (if any)?
The EPO has just recycled old “news”
Summary: With people inside and outside the Office still furious about the epic corruption of last Wednesday the Office (i.e. António Campinos and his crime facilitators) publishes 7 puff pieces in 7 days in the EPO’s Web site (warning: epo.org link)
Video download link | md5sum 465f3740daf0417989d6c5e2b23e274f
The Web Has a CMS Problem
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: In order to avoid link rot and in order to fully preserve the past (archives of pages and documents) we’re migrating Tux Machines to a new system, whose development shall start shortly; if it goes well, we might do the same to Techrights
THIS video and article are the first of a likely long series regarding an ongoing journey.
I’ve been making sites for 25 years and I was closely involved in the WordPress project in its early days in 2004. In recent years I — like many others — became concerned about the direction the Web had taken. Future parts of the series might touch on the pertinent problems (there are so many of them).
Technical debt is becoming a major factor, many things become obsolete very fast (causing Internet rot as it’s sometimes called), and I’m trying to keep online (and fully functional) a site that was created in 2004 (more than 18 years ago). It’s not a bunch of “static” HTML files, it uses a database and upgrade routes are notoriously deficient to say the least.
“Technical debt is becoming a major factor, many things become obsolete very fast (causing Internet rot as it’s sometimes called), and I’m trying to keep online (and fully functional) a site that was created in 2004 (more than 18 years ago).”Among the factors to consider we have HTTPS (self-signed certificate), improved speed, lower I/O (burden on the underlying systems), better security, faster backups, and versatile RSS feeds. It would be nice to add Gopher/Gemini support as an optional protocol, but not a must. Techrights has that already.
As if stands at the moment, we’ll craft our own simple and site-specific CMS for Tux Machines, then use some of the same code here in Techrights. That’s part of a process and in later parts we’ll explain why we’re basically rejecting existing content management software/systems. Some is too bloated, some feels like a hobby*, and some does not actually tackle the core issues, such as complexity. We want something that can be managed (and repaired easily when necessary) for 10 or 20 years to come, knowing the Web might not live that long; after 50 years since its birth it’ll probably be some “legacy” protocol already.
“Assuming we start development of our own custom-made solution, changes will be visible in Git and we’ll give status reports.”After a lot of research I intend to do another long video about the state of the Web and software for managing Web sites (I’ve tried a lot in my personal and professional life). I’ve seen and sometimes used/extended/upgraded some really awful software and I saw organisations getting stuck with systems they could no longer support (e.g. Squiz Matrix or django CMS, not to mention Mambo, PHP-Nuke, Zope and many others). Assuming we start development of our own custom-made solution, changes will be visible in Git and we’ll give status reports. The plan is to first try this as a beta subsite of Tux Machines, then consider cases where Techrights can “borrow” the same tools. As of today, we have 14.3K lines of code and we plan to keep new code short, concise and simple. Only this way it’ll stay trivial to maintain/debug. More in the video above. █
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* A lot of “static” or “flat-file” or “headless” stuff uses bloated networks retrieved via untrustworthy sources such as Microsoft/GitHub/NPM, which themselves may perish, in effect dooming dependencies. “Crates”, “containers” and Node/frameworks themselves have become a bloat factor, even if projects that utilise them are fairly small.
The System76 Lemur Pro is a thin and light Linux laptop with a 14 inch full HD display a 73 Wh battery, and support for up to 40GB of RAM. It also now comes with a choice of 12th-gen Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processor options.
System76 is selling the new Lemur Pro for $1149 and up.
TUXEDO Computers has released a new 15″ Ultrabook running Linux.
TUXEDO Computers has announced a new second-generation Pulse 15 Linux ultrabook with updated components. The new laptop sports an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U that uses only 15 watts TDP and adopts a single fan/heat pipe cooling system. This new configuration offers the same performance as the first-gen ultrabook but draws considerably less power.
According to TUXEDO Computers, “While AMD officially specifies the 8-core processor with only 10 to 25 watts, TUXEDO pushes the power up to a sustained 35 watts (PL1) to offer demanding users very strong CPU performance with relatively low energy consumption.”
Jitsi is an open-source, free conferencing server that can handle chat, video and VOIP conferencing. It’s a great alternative to the likes of Skype and Zoom. You can quickly deploy Jitsi and use it as an in-house solution or even open it up to the public.
I want to show you how easy it is to deploy Jitsi on Ubuntu 22.04. You can deploy this with either a fully qualified domain name or using a server with just an IP address. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll demonstrate using an IP address, which is a great option for an internal solution.
The LXQt environment is a lightweight desktop environment for the Qt application framework. This environment aims to provide a modern and easy-to-use desktop environment for Linux.
LXQt is emerging as one of the popular DEs in the Linux world, and it supports the most popular distributions like Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora, and others.
In this article, we will show you how to install LXQt Desktop Environment on Debian 11 operating system.
It started as a request from our tech lead: please help triage these patches. So I lookedat the set of patches and started with what looked like the simplest one:
I recently came across a cool terminal app that help you check your battery health from the command line.
It’s called Battop and it’s open source software written in Rust. I ran into it after I went looking for a GUI battery status tool for Linux similar to CoconutBattery for macOS (it’s a menu-bar app that shows battery health, condition, capacity, temperature, voltage and so on).
A lot of the guides and tutorials that walk through how to check battery info on Linux all agree on one thing: use upower. It is a solid recommendation. Not only is upower very detailed but it’s dead easy to use as it’s enabled out-of-the-box in virtually every major Linux distro out there, Ubuntu included.
One downside to using upower is that it’s a little utilitarian. It prints a list and that’s it.
You always need a handy and user-friendly tool to check the Linux system summary. Viewing the running task statistics often helps you to fix issues in the system.
We use many tools in our graphics journey. In GIMP, we use Bucket Fill, Eraser and Clone tools all the time, but they have some features you might not have seen yet. I look at tutorials a lot, and saw these tips on Davies Media Design’s YouTube channel. His tutorial was titled “5 Things You Didn’t Know GIMP could do”. If you know all these already, that’s awesome, but if not, I hope you learn something useful.
I have an older (as in, no longer manufactured) USB TV tuner that is capable of receiving ATSC broadcasts. In the U.S., ATSC is the format for the over-the-air (OTA) HD broadcasts. It’s a KWorld KW-UB435-Q V3. Ironically, while this specific tuner is no longer made/available, it’s a trivial task to find a picture of the item on various retailer websites. The broadcast format will be different for different areas around the world. If I’m not mistaken, most of Europe uses DVB as the broadcast format for their HD broadcasts.
WordPress is a very popular CMS and it remains the easiest and best open-source application to build websites. People mostly use WordPress for blogging, although actually it also supports other types of CMS like e-commerce, forums, etc.
It offers you the freedom to build anything you want, it has thousands of plugins and themes that you can use to customize your website. The installation is fairly easy, you can simply follow the steps in this tutorial and you will learn how to install WordPress on Ubuntu 22.04.
I can surely say you were still using the deprecated Linux commands, knowingly or unknowingly. It’s not your fault as you and I are glued to those commands due to strong habits.
However, new Linux users are also involved in using those commands due to reading outdated online articles or books.
RHEL 9.0, the latest major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, delivers tighter security, as well as improved installation, distribution, and management for enterprise server and cloud environments.
The operating system, code named Plow, is a significant upgrade over RHEL 8.0 and makes it easier for application developers to test and deploy containers.
Available in server and desktop versoins, RHEL remains one of the top Linux distributions for running enterprise workloads because of its stability, dependability, and robustness.
A really strange thing happened the other evening.
I recently learned of the death of one of our longtime PCLinuxOS forum users. Charles Henry Tankersley passed away on February 16, 2022, at age 88. Mr. Tankersley registered as a PCLinuxOS forum member on May 28, 2007, with the username chtank.

Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS arrived on April 21st, 2022, as part of the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) release, but only for 64-bit PCs. As of today, Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS is also available for Raspberry Pi boards, such Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 3+, Raspberry Pi 4, and Raspberry Pi CM4 (Compute Module 4).Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS for Raspberry Pi comes with all the features of Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS for PCs, such as the latest MATE 1.26 desktop environment, newer kernel and graphics stacks, and a recent toolchain, but also some improvements and new features targeted at Raspberry Pi devices.
Vehicles are becoming more connected, autonomous, shared and electric (the famous CASE acronym). While customers expect new features and upgradability, the software and hardware components enabling such innovations require a different system architecture to function. This is a major change for the automotive industry as it requires new software skills, methodologies and business models. At the same time, automotive manufacturers need to adhere to complex and strict industry standards, and uphold safety-critical functions. In this post, we will focus on the different challenges the industry is facing in terms of hardware and software complexity, cybersecurity and safety. We will also discuss how Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) can learn from software companies to survive this transition towards software-defined vehicles and succeed.
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On top of this, regulations are becoming very strict, forcing OEMs to provide patches and fixes to common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE). Taking into account the previously detailed system complexity, it is becoming increasingly necessary to move towards a software-defined holistic context. Only a software-defined approach can provide the required flexibility and scalability that allows companies to comply with regulatory requirements while providing UX updates and handling hardware complexity.
Of course, cybersecurity never only relies on software. Hardware vulnerabilities can also occur and usually lead to even worse consequences. Some hardware issues can be patched via software, but usually these CVEs remain valid throughout the system’s lifetime. For example, Meltdown and Spectre, two of the most widespread hardware vulnerabilities in the world, are still present and affecting tons of devices. This means that during hardware conception, cybersecurity must be taken into account in the specifications and system architecture in order to limit these vulnerabilities.
Makers Kevin McAleer and Sam Machin show us how to control the new Raspberry Pi Pico W over Wi-Fi using MQTT and Node-RED.
They created a combination of hardware and software they dubbed the BlixTerm which took the form of a cartridge connected to one of the PET 600′s expansion ports on the back. Inside the cartridge is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W which connects to YouTube over wifi, loads a requested video, and then converts the 640×200 grayscale stream to an 80×25 grid of ASCII characters from the PET’s internal ROM.
Anvil, a popular web applications development tool has today announced a new toolkit developed for the recently released Raspberry Pi Pico W. The toolkit provides a means of communicating between a web application and a Raspberry Pi Pico W using nothing but Python.
This new toolkit brings secure IoT applications for the Wi-Fi enabled $6 microcontroller. Applications normally reserved for the more powerful, and hard to come by Raspberry Pi.
In 1979, Sony launched the PS-X75 turntable. It quickly gained popularity thanks to its high-fidelity sound output and ease of use. It was easy to use because it was fully automated–a common feature today, but something that was quite exciting at the time. To perform that automation, the PS-X75 contained an integrated circuit that detected record size, dropped the needle, and so on. But that IC was prone to failure. To revive their Sony PS-X75 turntable, MKB-1 used an Arduino Mega to replace the original circuit.
Unlike earlier turntable designs, which were often entirely electromechanical, the PS-X75’s IC controls almost all of the turntable’s functions digitally. That means that when the IC fails, the turntable becomes inoperable. Replacement ICs are almost impossible to find and haven’t been manufactured in many years. For most people, this means that the PS-X75 becomes e-waste when that IC bites the dust. But MKB-1 has some reverse-engineering skill and was able to save their PS-X75 by swapping out original IC for an Arduino Mega.
It is no secret that I have a few things permanently burned into my neurons: the 1802 instruction set, the commands for WordStar, and the commands for emacs. There was a time when emacs was almost my operating system. With no X11, emacs gave you a way to have a shell in one window, check your mail, and keep your work open.
I still use emacs a lot (although I’ve been getting more and more pleased with vscode with an emacs keybinding extension). But I also spend a lot of time — like right now — writing in a Web browser. Especially if I’m writing about code, it gets hard to remember which set of keys you have to use and I’ve wanted to do something about it for a long time. The answer is a very cool program called Autokey. (You can download my files for it, but you probably want to read more first.) It probably doesn’t work if you have switched to Wayland, but it can do a lot for you ranging from saving you some typing to reprogramming your favorite program to have different keystrokes. However, it isn’t without its problems, and I’ll tell you what I know about it.
For the past three months, an elusive bug in Google’s open-source Chromium project has been causing a small percentage of Chrome extensions to silently fail.
The bug affects about three to five percent of users of several popular Chrome browser extensions, according to Jói Sigurdsson, founder and CEO of CrankWheel, maker of a screen-sharing extension for sales teams.
As described in the Chromium bug report, event handlers registered via chrome.browserAction.onClicked.addListener sometimes will fail to get dispatched when the associated button or icon is clicked by the user. For an individual using an affected extension, the result would be that the extension’s button just stops responding to click events.
Anyone who follows web browser development even a little has heard of Google’s push for the adoption of Manifest V3 and the havoc it is anticipated to bring to many web browser extensions. Most significantly, Manifest V3 eliminates Web Request API, and replaces it with Declarative Net Request API. This change will seriously cripple many ad blocker extensions, which rely on the Web Request API to effectively block unwanted ads on websites visited by the end user. Currently, no new Chrome extensions are being accepted that are based on Manifest V2, which features the Web Request API.
Starting in June 2023, Google will no longer allow extensions based on Manifest V2 to continue to run, replacing Manifest V2 with Manifest V3. Mozilla, on the other hand, plans to start implementing Manifest V3 in late 2022. But, Mozilla also plans to maintain support for the Web Request API from Manifest V2, allowing ad blocking browser extensions to continue to work.
If you are a Chromium user (or the user of any browser based on it, such as Google Chrome, Opera, Brave, etc.), the implementation of Manifest V3 has already begun. When fully implemented, expect your ad blockers to either cease functioning or to be severely crippled under Chromium-based browsers.
It makes sense that Google would want to cripple ad blockers. Consider that the vast majority of Google’s fortunes are made from selling advertising, especially advertising that is targeted at individual users. If an ad is blocked, it’s not viewed by the end user, and Google gets no money when you cannot view it. Also, when you can’t view it, you can’t click through the ad to visit the advertiser’s website. Those “click counts” are important, especially if you own the website on the other end, or if you sell advertising based on click counts.
Developers of web browser extensions – especially ad blocker extensions – have been very vocal about the implementation of Manifest V3. None have been more vocal than Raymond Hill, the creator of the uBlock Origin ad and content blocker.
Hang on to your seats, gang. This is going to be one rocky, bumpy, crater-filled ride for the next year or so. If you abhor ads on your web pages (like most people do), prepare for the terrifying reality that you can no longer hide them or prevent them from appearing. But then again, there’s always Firefox. It makes me glad to be a Firefox user.
Move on over, Google Translate. Step aside, DeepL. There’s a new kid in the translation neighborhood.
Meet Firefox Translations. Unlike the other online translators out there (including the two already mentioned), Firefox Translations is a client-side translator. While the others are cloud-based, Firefox Translations translates the data in your browser on your local computer, so no information is ever transmitted to or from your computer during the translation.
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Once a page is loaded in one of the supported languages (different from the language used on your computer), you should see the above toolbar in Firefox. Just click on the “Translate” button. If this is the first time you’re using the tool for a particular language, it may take a few seconds to download the translation “dictionary” to your computer. It will then work to translate the page into your native language.
To provide high quality tools for our contributors, together working on office productivity for over 200 million users around the globe, we are searching for a Web Technology Engineer (m/f/d) to start work as soon as possible.
With WordPress 6.1 already in the works, a lot of updates happened during June. Here’s a summary to catch up on the ones you may have missed.
Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the Power Management and Thermal Control Microconference
The Power Management and Thermal Control microconference focuses on frameworks related to power management and thermal control, CPU and device power-management mechanisms, and thermal-control methods. In particular, we are interested in extending the energy-efficient scheduling concept beyond the energy-aware scheduling (EAS), improving the thermal control framework in the kernel to cover more use cases and making system-wide suspend (and power management in general) more robust.
The goal is to facilitate cross-framework and cross-platform discussions that can help improve energy-awareness and thermal control in Linux.
Cloud-native is more than a trend—it’s estimated that by 2023, the majority of new applications will adopt cloud-native components. One aspect of cloud-native is connectivity—networking is essential to enabling containers to talk to one another, especially since multiple containers may comprise a single application. But, it’s not only single containers you have to worry about—architects may want to combine components from multiple clusters, which might be sitting in various clouds or on-premises locations.
Cloud-native networking can help ease this tricky process by creating virtual overlay networks on top of existing networks. And if you’re creating an overlay network for your cloud-native communication, many open source tools are at your disposal. Below, we’ll review some of the projects hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) around cloud-native networking. These tools below use the Container Network Interface (CNI), a CNCF-hosted project that specifies standards for configuring network interfaces to work with pods.
A seemingly major vulnerability has been discovered by security researcher and Northwestern PhD student Zhenpeng Lin, affecting the kernel on the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro and other Android devices running Linux kernel versions based on 5.10 like the Galaxy S22 series. Precise details for how the vulnerability works have not yet been published, but the researcher claims that it can enable arbitrary read and write, privilege escalation, and disable SELinux security protections — in short, this is a biggie. The researcher has verified to Android Police that Google was not informed of the vulnerability before its demonstration on Twitter.
Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced that the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), the Directorate for Digital Services and the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3) are launching the “Hack U.S.” bug bounty program.
The program will offer financial rewards for ethical hackers and security researchers who can identify critical and high severity vulnerabilities in the scope of the DoD’s vulnerability disclosure program.
NIST has not chosen a public-key encryption standard. The remaining candidates are BIKE, Classic McEliece, HQC, and SIKE.
I have a lot to say on this process, and have written an essay for IEEE Security & Privacy about it. It will be published in a month or so.
Late last year, I started exploring the React-based documentation framework Docusaurus, and spent a good chunk of time going through the documentation. (Surprise! They use their own product!) I got pretty familiar with how it works under the hood, and the ways in which it can be expanded on. It’s also got a bustling community, which is unsurprising since it’s entirely open source.
In September 2014, a group of forty-three students were forcibly disappeared in Iguala, Mexico. The devices of a group of experts subsequently investigating this mass disappearance, including for possible governmental involvement, were targeted for infection with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. Evidence suggests that these spyware attacks “were clearly intended to compromise the privacy and integrity of the […] investigative process.” The spyware attacks against the investigators of this mass disappearance is only one illustration of the intimate link between spyware and human rights abuses. These abuses have included enforced disappearances, as spyware has facilitated states’ ability to conduct unlawful surveillance, track dissidents and their associates, and interfere in investigations related to disappearances.
Investigations by research groups such as the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have uncovered that states around the world, ranging from Saudi Arabia to Rwanda, are using new surveillance technologies to monitor human rights defenders, journalists, and political opponents, among others. The global spyware industry which has contributed to the proliferation of these new surveillance technologies has been characterized as “out of control,” “assisting state suppression,” “undermining freedom,” and “a threat to democracy.” These new technologies have allowed states to expand their surveillance capabilities to an unprecedented degree, particularly through the ubiquity of cell phones and other devices that can relay information about a target’s location, private communications, and other activities. Technologies touted by activists, human rights defenders, and scholars as essential tools for democratization and the proliferation of human rights have thus been transformed into tools of oppression by this mercenary spyware. Without intervention, the use of spyware will only further proliferate and create an increasingly insecure world for human rights defenders, journalists, and government critics.
A British diplomat serving as Envoy Extraordinary to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, William Hamilton (1730–1803) spent a large part of his life in Naples — observing volcanic activity, collecting antiquities, and shepherding adventurous travelers, including kings and queens, to the summit of magma-rich mountains. Present for the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius during the mid-to-late eighteenth century, Hamilton wrote Campi Phlegraei in two parts, with a tertiary supplement, based on his Observations on Mount Vesuvius (1772) for the Royal Society. Composed as a bilingual French and English edition, the work is a notable watershed in volcanology, trading biblically-inflected narratives of catastrophe and creation for precise observational description. To illustrate these volumes in a manner true to his approach, Hamilton recruited the English-born Neapolitan artist Peter Fabris, otherwise known for his paintings of the city’s “pulsating street life — with sellers of melons, cooked apples, corn, truffles and fried pastries”, writes Robert Holland. Hamilton charged Fabris to paint with “the utmost fidelity”, making sure “each stratum is presented in its proper colours”, and fifty-nine of the resultant gouaches were engraved and hand-colored to accompany Campi Phlegraei (literally, the flaming or fiery fields, named after the area west of Naples). In curator and writer James Hamilton’s assessment, Fabris “revolutionized the art of the volcano, and changed our ways of seeing them”.
Visual depictions of wizardry have always been a bit lacking, in my opinion. It is a conundrum, for sure: high level magic does not translate well to mediums like film. Some series come close to satisfying me, but I think it was the first Doctor Strange movie that finally met my expectations. His newest venture continues the trend, and despite a fair few contrived and uninspired fights, still managed to impress me. Something I haven’t said about a superhero movie in a long time.
My body ends up a good part of the day in a horizontal position. Most of this time it is asleep, not sure about quality of sleep sometimes though. Possibly to to the fact that parts of that time lying in bed are awake, spent with the mobile phone in hand, scrolling various »social media«, be it Gemini, less Gopher, more Mastodon and also Twitter, as well as a handful of RSS feeds.
I stumbled on a serious security vulnerability in a widely used gemini server. I am being deliberately vague because I don’t want to enable malicious users to exploit the vulnerability until a fix is available.
I was able to contact the developer of the gemini server. They understand the seriousness of the issue and they are working on a fix which they plan to be available in the next week or so.
I did a scan of all known capsules and there are ~50 capsules with this security vulnerability. Once a fixed version has been released I will provide more information about the security issue.
I have this SVG/Javascript application (Gridmapper) and I’m sort of wanting to rewrite it into a program that runs without a browser. At least I want to see whether I could potentially do it. I’d like to be able to do it.
This is just something on my mind and I’m trying to figure out how to solve. Most web frameworks use a work-stealing thread pool to improve throughput. Maybe one of the threads is overburdened with 100 tasks in its queue. But all the other 15 threads are idle. Other threads should be able to take tasks away from the overburdened thread. Well, I can’t do that (at least not easily) in Drogon and Trantor.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Today again. Part of a pattern.
Far from an isolated incident
Summary: Why is a large company hiring one person considered newsworthy? E-mail tip-offs from the sponsor?
This is a new series showcasing Linux around the world. For the past few years, COVID has largely curtailed gatherings of Linux enthusiasts with only virtual meetings being possible. But as physical meetings are starting to resurface, now is the time to launch this series.
The Armbian “distro” is a build framework to create ready-to-use images with working kernels in variable user space configurations for supported single board computers (SBCs). These are usually Debian or Ubuntu flavored.
The term “Armbian” is comprised of ARM for the RISC processor architecture and the last half (bian) from Debian. Unlike Debian, Armbian Linux is focused and optimized for the ARM architecture. This can be a handy alternative to those who play in the realm of alternatives to the Raspberry Pi board.
So, there I was in Austin, Texas, covering The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit a few weeks ago when — pop! — an electrical surge blew out my Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5, a great two-in-one Chromebook/tablet.
Argh!
I was on deadline — when am I not? — but I didn’t have a backup machine with me. I was in deep trouble. But I was already ready for this disaster. Indeed, one of the reasons I’ve been a Chromebook fan since they first rolled out of the factory is that if a Chromebook dies on you, you can replace it and be back in business in no time flat.
Tired of Distro Hopping? Or looking for that perfect distribution? This is my guide on how I install Linux without downloading 100s of different installers.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Ubuntu Unity 22.04 and some of the applications pre-installed.
The above statements check the comparison box of curl vs wget in terms of their definitions. However, you as a user need more data in the case of curl versus wget before you can comfortably settle for either of these tools.
Rainloop is an open-source, web-based email client written in PHP. It is fast, lightweight, and supports SMTP and IMAP protocols. This guide will teach you to install the Rainloop client on a Ubuntu 22.04 server.
“FFMpeg is a free and open-source video and audio converter. It has been widely adopted by many applications, including VLC, the Android OS, Spotify, etc. ffmpeg provides unparallel features for working with audio and video files.
In this tutorial, we will focus on how to extract audio files from videos and other useful techniques.”
Ansible execution environments have largely replaced Python virtual environments for automation. Legacy virtual environments are sandboxes that start with Python and little more, meaning that you must rebuild your desired environments before you can use them.
In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to shut down your Linux computer using the command-line interface (CLI), aka Terminal.
The shutdown command is especially useful for Linux servers. It’s also useful if you’re writing a bash script or if you just prefer using the CLI instead of the GUI on your Linux distro.
This tutorial will work on any Linux distro, including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, etc.
So, open up the Terminal, or SSH into your server, and follow the instructions below.
In this article, we are going to learn how to install Terraform on Alma Linux 9.
Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services. Terraform codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files.
Infrastructure as code (IAC) tools allow you to manage your infrastructure with a configuration file rather than through a graphical interface. IAC allows you to build, change and manage your infrastructure in a safe, consistent, and repeatable way by defining configurations that you can version, reuse and share.
In this guide we are going to install MariaDB 10 on Opensuse, but first what is MariaDB?
MariaDB Server is one of the most popular open-source relational databases. It’s made by the original developers of MySQL and guaranteed to stay open source. It is part of most cloud offerings and the default in most Linux distributions.
It is built upon the values of performance, stability, and openness, and MariaDB Foundation ensures contributions will be accepted on technical merit. Recent new functionality includes advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, compatibility features with Oracle Database and Temporal Data Tables, allowing one to query the data as it stood at any point in the past.
In this guide we are going to install MariaDB 10 development version, but first what is MariaDB?
MariaDB Server is one of the most popular open-source relational databases. It’s made by the original developers of MySQL and guaranteed to stay open source. It is part of most cloud offerings and the default in most Linux distributions.
It is built upon the values of performance, stability, and openness, and MariaDB Foundation ensures contributions will be accepted on technical merit. Recent new functionality includes advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, compatibility features with Oracle Database and Temporal Data Tables, allowing one to query the data as it stood at any point in the past.
Install and configure SAMBA server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Linux to share files and folders with Windows 7/10/11 and Linux systems.
Samba is a free & open-source implementation of SMB protocol for integrating servers and desktops running Linux or Unix in environments with Microsoft’s Active Directory directory service. The software can be used as a controller for the domain or as a normal member.
Using SAMBA software the users can easily access the files, printers, and other shared resources on a company network or intranet, among other things. And the best thing in almost all Linux distributions, SAMBA is present in their repositories to install easily.
Samba uses the frequently used client/server protocols SMB (Server Message Block) or nowadays CIFS (Common Internet File System). The latter is an open variant of SMB. If applications are compatible with SMB or CIFS, they can communicate with the Samba Server.
Samba’s SMB/CIFS client is called smbclient. Some desktop variants of Linux have the Samba Client pre-installed whereas others need to install manually. The source code can be found under samba.org.
Remmina is a popular remote control software. Remmina works on multiple protocols like RDP, VNC, NX, XDMCP, SPICE, HTTP/HTTPS, SSH, and SFTP protocols. Remmina is available in 67 languages and can be installed in 50+ distributions.
This tutorial will explain in step by step how you can install jamovi, a free and open source statistical analysis software, a user-friendly alternative to SPSS on Ubuntu. This is not to be confused with JASP, another free software for statistics, which we have already covered at Ubuntu Buzz. We use the OS version 22.04 “Jammy Jellyfish” and this should be sufficient for any later OS version as well. Let’s install it.
Mirage is a fast and simple GTK+ image viewer because it depends only on PyGTK. If you want a decent image viewer and the ability to access it via command line, a fullscreen mode, slideshow mode, essential editing tools to resize/crop/rotate/flip, and a configurable interface, Mirage would be the most straightforward option. Mirage also supports drag-and-drop operations from other applications such as Nautilus, making it easy to view or edit images quickly.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install Mirage on Fedora 36 Linux using the DNF package manager with the command line terminal.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is a rolling release version of the openSUSE project, which ships with the latest stable applications including everyday-to-use office applications, Linux kernel, Git, Samba, and many more. It is an ideal distribution for enthusiasts and developers who are developing the latest application stacks.
For new users to openSUSE, OpenSUSE Leap is a better fit since the software provided is thoroughly tested. It also uses binaries and sources from SUSE Enterprise Linux which results in a stable system, unlike TumbleWeed which is a rolling release distribution.
PostgreSQL is a highly stable and reliable database management system that has been used for over 20 years. It’s supported by an active community who contribute their time to its development, which results in higher levels of resilience, integrity, and correctness. PostgreSQL powers many web applications, including those from Google Earth Engine Geospatial datastore for analytics software like predictive modeling toolsets built using machine learning algorithms created within R/Rapidminer packages
The following tutorial will teach you how to install PostgreSQL on Fedora 36 Linux using the command line terminal and some basic configuration and setup tips.
LXDE, or Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, is a free desktop environment known for being lightweight, fast, and energy-efficient. It can replace the standard default GNOME Desktop on your Fedora 36 Workstation with LXDE using less RAM and CPU than other desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME, which can be desired for low-powered computers laptops, and netbooks users.
LXDE is based on the GTK+ widget toolkit and uses the Openbox window manager. It is also suitable for older computers that may not have the resources to run a more demanding desktop environment, such as KDE Plasma 5. LXDE includes several applications typically found on a default GNOME install, such as a file manager, image viewer, text editor, and Terminal emulator. Overall, LXDE is an excellent choice for users looking for a fast and lightweight desktop environment that is also easy on resources.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install LXDE Desktop Environment on your Fedora 36 Linux workstation desktop with steps on installing optional extra packages with LXDE and how to update or remove the desktop environment in the future if required.
Brave is a free open source browser that blocks ads and trackers by default without having to download an extension that blocks ads. By blocking malicious trackers and ads, not only it serves a safer browsing experience but also it improves the loading speed of sites on your browser.
In this tutorial you will learn how to Install Brave browser on Linux Mint and Ubuntu.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PlayOnLinux on Fedora 36. For those of you who didn’t know, PlayOnLinux is a free and open-source graphical front-end for Wine that allows Linux users to install a large number of Windows-based computer games and applications such as MS Office, Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and several other programs on your Linux system.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the PlayOnLinux on a Fedora 36.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ReactJS on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, React (also known as React.js or ReactJS) is an open-source JavaScript front-end library for creating web frontend and UI components. Many developers are using it because of its flexibility, integrity, and its feature to bring Html directly into JS.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of ReactJS on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
In this guide we will learn how to configure TLS/SSL in kubernetes using ingress for already existing ssl certificates (either Self-Signed) or purchased ones.
For this to work, you should also have a working ingress set up. We will use Nginx Ingress. You should also have the domain used already configured with the Nginx ingress endpoint record.
Cacti is an open-source, web-based network monitoring tool written in PHP. Cacti generates CPU load and network bandwidth utilization graphs using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). This guide will show you, how to install the Cacti monitoring tools on Debian 11.
There are several video games that have been released since the first computer game was created that changed the gaming industry forever. Very old games such as Space Invaders and Space War had huge impacts on inspiring future game producers to be innovative in their thinking. As technology advanced, the improvements in the gaming experience increased significantly. There are a few stand-out video games that are regarded as revolutionizing the computer gaming industry with impacts that would last forever.
To test KDE Plasma 5.25, I installed a new virtual machine using the KDE Neon distribution. At first, I attempted to use the testing release, but that failed every time I ran the installer.
Instead, I opted to go the stable route, which offers a lovely presentation of what KDE Plasma 5.25 is all about. I will warn you even the stable version of KDE Neon (as shipped with KDE 5.25) isn’t exactly the most stable desktop I’ve ever tried. In fact, I found KWin regularly crashed on me. Is this a product of Neon or KDE 5.25? We may never know. It took me a few installs, but I eventually managed to get a reliable desktop up and running.
Some EasyOS testers have been reporting to me by email, instead of via the forum. We had two boot failures, reported by Reynaldo and Alfons.
Firefox Browser received an incremental update to 102.0.1 and shipped to the software repository.
HomeBank is the free software you have always wanted to manage your personal accounts at home. Homebank has been updated to 5.5.6.
Vivaldi Browser has been updated to 5.3.2679.68 and shipped to the software repository.
Opera Browser has been updated to 88.0.4412.74 and shipped to the software repository.
Google Chrome Browser has been updated to 103.0.5060.114 and sent to the software repository.

openSUSE Micro is a new Linux distribution geared toward hosting containerized workloads with automated administration and patching. With this open-source, purpose-built operating system you’ll have an environment specifically designed for workloads that would benefit from transactional updates. This rolling-release distribution could be just the thing your company needs.openSUSE Micro aims to be predictable, scalable, reliable and flexible. With this new take on containerized deployments, you don’t have to learn a new package format (as it uses standard openSUSE RPMs), there are no size limitations and it can be rolled out easily and repeatedly.
Oracle announced the general availability of its enterprise OS, Oracle Linux 9, for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures.
Oracle Linux is a high-performance and secure operating system for application development and deployment. It is the second one of the “big three” RHEL-based forks (AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux) that is releasing a stable version of the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.
As we announced earlier, AlmaLinux 9 was the first to be announced, and Oracle Linux 9 has now jumped on the bandwagon.
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.10.7 is generally available as of July 6, 2022.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
IT execs and hiring managers aren’t just prioritizing automation skills anymore. They’re carving out whole roles that are largely defined by IT automation.
This is a twist on the general fear that automation eliminates jobs. It’s true that automation – not just in IT but across a wide range of roles and industries – is impacting various jobs, now and in the future. But automation will also likely create many new jobs that don’t exist yet or didn’t exist, say, 10 years ago, even as it gets rid of other positions.
IT occupies an interesting space in that broader trend. Many of the dominant and emerging trends in IT – hybrid cloud, containerization, orchestration, CI/CD, cybersecurity – depend heavily on automation. That means they also depend heavily on people with the right mix of skills to implement and manage the various tools and technologies underpinning modern software development and IT infrastructure.
The work around Raspberry Pi 4 has been on going for a number of years, but we’ve never officially supported it due to lack of accelerated graphics and other key features. A few of us have led the push to get the accelerated graphics work over the line upstream so it now makes sense to enable this in Fedora and make support for the Raspberry Pi 4 more official.
Recently, Red Hat relaunched the Developer Subscription for Teams, enabling organizations already running other Red Hat technologies to access Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their development activities without friction. In this article, we clarify what Red Hat defines as development activities and highlight some exciting use cases for the Developer Subscription for Teams.
The presiding panelist is Matthew Kennedy. He has worked at the WTO Secretariat in Geneva. He gained his Master of International and Comparative Law at ULB in Brussels, the same venue that hosts the FOSDEM conference where Molly de Blanc infamously used cat pictures to promote shaming the developers.
Each party to the dispute was asked to propose three candidates. From the list proposed by Jonathan Saul Cohen, acting for the cabal, WIPO has selected Clive Thorne of British law firm McCarthy Denning.
Firefly ITX3588J mini-ITX motherboard with Rockchip RK3588 SoC now has a little sister/brother based on Rockchip RK3568 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor called ITX-3568JQ, and designed to power Arm PCs, cloud terminals, industrial controllers, edge computers, advanced NVR, NAS devices, and more.
The motherboard supports up to 8GB RAM, 128GB eMMC flash, offers SATA storage, dual Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6, optional 4G or 5G cellular connectivity, can handle up to three independent displays, and offers plenty of I/O options including an RS232/RS485 DB9 connector and a PCIe slot.
[...]
Firefly will provide support for Android 11.0, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04 and RTLinux, but the Wiki is currently empty.
Love LoRa®? Wish it were easier to design and implement complete solutions with LoRaWAN® connectivity? Now it is.
We’re happy to announce the launch of two new ready-to-use, industrial-grade gateways for LoRaWAN® connectivity for indoor and outdoor use, resulting from Arduino Pro’s partnership with RAKwireless™.
The WisGate Edge Lite 2 and WisGate Edge Pro ensure secure and reliable connectivity for a wide range of professional applications. They’re suitable for medium-sized to wide area coverage in industrial environments and remote regions. Smart cities and smart agriculture to logistics and building automation. The sky’s the limit!
On top of the existing non-volumetric fog, Godot 4.0 introduces a new type of fog: Volumetric Fog. For the 4.0 release, we decided to take Volumetric Fog one step further with the addition of FogVolumes. These allow users to dynamically place fog and control complex fog effects with shaders.
This post starts off with a high-level description of what FogVolumes are and how to use them, and then includes some technical details about what is going on under the hood and how we get them to render so fast.
“VNC” (or Virtual Network Computing) compatibility has a long history in Qt, and we are now improving this story with Qt 6.4.
GitHub and GitLab are free web-based version control system and collaboration platforms for developers. While, they are free on certain aspects, many developers and companies like to have their own version control system self-hosted on their servers.
[...]
Gitly is released under the GPL-3.0 License.
As I was sitting in a meeting room, speaking with one of my teammates, our manager walked in with the rest of the dev team. The door slammed shut and our manager revealed that he had a big announcement. What unfolded before our eyes was the next project we were going to develop—an open source CLI (command line interface) application.
In this article, I’d like to share what I learned during our development process, and specifically what I wish I had known before we began developing Datree’s CLI. Perhaps the next person can use these tips to create a great CLI application faster.
My name is Noaa Barki. I’ve been a full-stack developer for over six years, and I’ll let you in on a little secret—I have a superpower: My interest and expertise are evenly split between back-end and front-end development. I simply cannot choose one without the other.
[...]
Use CLI commands that are named in a SINGLE form and VERB-NOUN format. This allows the command to be read like an imperative or request, for example: Computer, start app!
Minimize with the total number of commands you use, and don’t rush to introduce new verbs to new commands. This makes it easier for users to remember command names.
“The SQL LIKE operator allows performing logical evaluation for any matching records. Using the LIKE operator, you can specify single or multiple conditions. This allows you to perform an action such as select, delete, and updating any columns or records that match the specified conditions. It is mainly paired with a where clause to set the conditions.
In this tutorial, we will look at the workings of the LIKE clause and how we can use it to specify multiple conditions.”
“JSON is a popular data-interchange format that has been widely adopted across the development community. However, JSON has strict schema and formatting tools.
JSON does not natively support multi-line strings. This can be quite frustrating when looking for flexibility and storing large texts.Let us discuss a simple workaround and how we can use multiline strings.”
“When working with PostgreSQL databases, you will encounter instances where you must drop records from a table. Before running a delete query, it is important to ensure that the table does not leave any incomplete relationships between tables.
In PostgreSQL, we can use the CASCADE DELETE feature to accomplish this. This feature allows a delete operation to remove the specified records and any foreign keys that reference them.
Using this article, we will review how to perform a cascade delete in PostgreSQL.”
“Kibana is a free and open-source analytics and visualization platform for Elasticsearch. It provides a browser-based graphical interface for interacting with your Elasticsearch database.
It is very simple and intuitive. You can perform operations such as search, view, update, delete and query all the indices in your Elasticsearch cluster. When it comes to visualization, it offers a wide range of options, including charts, tables, maps, etc.
However, Elasticsearch and Kibana have a notorious reputation for being difficult to set up and configure, especially when getting started.
I wrote this post after seeing Flavio Poletti’s blog post entitled OATH Toolkit. I have been a fan of time-based one time passwords (TOTP) for many years. In fact, I used Mobile-OTP in commercial applications for several years before the Initiative for Open Authentication (OATH) and OATH/TOTP were codified in RFC6238.
Now-a-days, OATH/TOTP is the best choice for time-based one time passwords, and has been for at least a decade.
“When trying to install Python packages, you may sometime encounter “default to user installation because normal site-packages are not writeable” error. In this attempt, we will explain why this error occurs and how we can resolve it.”
Pip is the most popular and versatile package installer for Python. It offers a command-line utility that allows you to manage Python packages easily.
Using pip, you can perform actions such as downloading, installing, updating, and uninstalling packages with simple commands.Pip uses a caching mechanism that allows you to download and install Python packages faster. It works by storing a cache of the downloaded packages on the local wheel.
The caching mechanism allows pip to improve the download and installation of the packages. This is because pip does not need to download already existing packages.
In some cases, pip may not need to redownload a package when updating if it already exists in the cache.
This tutorial will discuss how to work with the pip cache, how to manage the pip cache using various commands, and how to clear it when you need to start afresh.
This guide will discuss the “No module named matplotlib” error in Python: why it occurs, and how to resolve it in different environments.
“In this tutorial, you will learn the various methods you can use to specify multiple conditions using the np.where() function.”
Frequently, you may need to customize the default font size in the plots created with matplotlib. Thankfully, matplotlib has extensive support for text manipulation, including font size adjustment and more.
Python is at its peak popularity due to its easy-to-understand syntax and versatile libraries. With that in mind, using Python tools for data science isn’t surprising. Data scientists do not have an easy job. They have to understand tons of complex ideas and polish existing data in order to interpret them.
To make things easier, Python tools containing various libraries exist to deal with such tedious tasks. For instance, data scientists have to analyze a large number of data and follow through with several processes to come to their conclusion. That means a lot of repetition is undoubtedly at play here – and python tools come in handy right at this point.
“JSON or JavaScript Object Notation is a lightweight data exchange format that is widely adopted by modern applications. Whether you are working in NoSQL databases or fetching API data, you will encounter JSON.
It is a heavily adopted language due to its simplicity but strict schema. This helps to reduce errors while still retaining human readability.
Pandas is a free and open-source Python library that provides fast, flexible, and expressive data structures that make working with scientific data easy.
Pandas is one of Python’s most valuable data analysis and manipulation packages.It offers features such as custom data structures that are built on top of Python.
This article will discuss converting a column from one data type to an int type within a Pandas DataFrame.
TensorFlow is a free and open-source library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It offers a vast collection of tools and utilities that makes the process of machine learning and AI more intuitive and fun.
TensorFlow is cross-platform and can be installed on any machine running Linux, macOS, Linux, Android, or a JavaScript engine.In some instances, you may face a “No Module Named TensorFlow” error when attempting to use TensorFlow in your application.
Throughout this guide, we will explore various scenarios of why this error occurs and how you can resolve it.
Whether you think they’re neat or annoying, stickers indicating what’s inside your computer have been a key part of basically every pre-built machine this side of Apple. The last 30 years has seen tremendous shifts in the public image of a typical PC, but there is a high chance that your new ultrabook, just like the desktop your family once bought for Microsoft Excel and Quake, would come covered in vendor badges. Today’s Tedium goes into the origins of the long-running marketing scheme and some of its historical highlights. Stick with us if you want—we promise that’s the last sticker pun you’re going to read here.
STMicro introduced the VL53L8 multi-zone direct Time-of-Flight (dToF) sensor last month, but here’s another ToF sensor with VL53L5CP specifically designed for the PC market with the enablement of features such as user detection, gesture recognition, and intruder alert.
STMicro says the ranging sensor continuously scans its field of view to map the scene and gather intelligence without using a camera or recording images. With 64 (8×8) zones within a wide 61-degree field, the VL53L5CP can detect and track multiple targets, calculating at their X/Y/Z coordinates and motion at high speed.
Malicious individuals are using stolen personally identifiable information (PII) and voice and video deepfakes to try to land remote IT, programming, database and software-related jobs, the FBI has warned last week.
A quick search online for EFB applications shows plenty of third party software available to use on EFBs. Many of these applications are available for download on public app stores. Some of these applications are developed by small software companies, others by large well known software developers. It is not for us to speculate how much involvement or oversight state regulators have had in the development and testing of these EFB applications, but we should keep in mind that there are thousands of EFB applications available and they can originate from anywhere in the world.
With regards to EFB integrity, often the complication with third party applications, as opposed to performance applications, is the added risk of using different data sources as well as the potential for using software which has not been risk-assessed or security tested to the same standard as that of aircraft manufacturers. Performance applications will complete calculations locally and any required data is entered by the pilot. Many third party applications complete calculations locally but require access to databases online to source required information. In some cases, these databases are connected to other databases which feed into them. This creates more attack surfaces for tampering with an EFB.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ldap-account-manager), Fedora (openssl1.1, thunderbird, and yubihsm-connector), Mageia (curl, cyrus-imapd, firefox, ruby-git, ruby-rack, squid, and thunderbird), Oracle (firefox, kernel, and thunderbird), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (dpdk, haproxy, and php7), and Ubuntu (gnupg2 and openssl).
OpenSSL has released a security update to address a vulnerability affecting OpenSSL 3.0.4. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.
CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), North Korean State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Use Maui Ransomware to Target the Healthcare and Public Health Sector, to provide information on Maui ransomware, which has been used by North Korean state-sponsored cyber actors since at least May 2021 to target Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) Sector organizations.
In 2020 and 2021, we filed three RTI applications with the Delhi Police seeking information on their use of FRT. The information was refused under Section 8 of the RTI Act. Some information was refused on the ground that it is not available. The Delhi Police also said they have “Nil” information on CCTV cameras! Our first appeals against these responses were rejected, so we filed Second Appeals with the Central Information Commission. They were heard on June 29, 2022, and the Delhi Police were directed to revise their response to the RTI applications, in compliance with the RTI Act.
[...]
IFF has been tracking the development of the Delhi Police’s facial recognition system since 2019, along with tracking instances of facial recognition use in the country overall, through Project Panoptic. In October 2020, we filed two RTI applications with the Delhi Police, seeking information on their use of FRT in traffic management and criminal investigation, which was widely reported in the media. In 2021, media reports also recorded the Delhi Police’s use of FRT for investigations in the pogrom that took place in North-East Delhi in February 2021. So, we filed another RTI application with the Delhi Police in March 2021 asking them for information on this.
Daily life, for better or worse, revolves around having access to the internet, and the Kenyan government wants to assure its citizens that that will not change during the upcoming general election cycle. Kenya’s general elections to elect a new President and members of the National Assembly will take place on August 9 and the race is close and tense. Much of the tension is the result of the outgoing president, Uhuru Kenyatta, throwing his support behind opposition leader Raila Odinga rather than William Ruto, the current deputy president.
Waves of disinformation pushed by paid social media influencers have been a growing concern in the run-up to elections that some experts worry could lead to violent eruptions. The country is still haunted by clashes during the 2007 elections that left over 1,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), set up in the wake of the violence 15 years ago, rates the likelihood of electoral violence as just about “medium high risk,” while in Nairobi County, home to the capital city, the risk of violence is considered to be “very high.”
After three years of intense negotiations, the EU Digital Services Act has finally arrived. On 5 July 2022, the European Parliament approved the final text of the future EU content moderation rule book. The DSA has been labeled by some as a “gold standard” for content and platform governance in the EU. In this blog post, we unpack what this long-awaited law contains and what changes people can expect to see as the law becomes applicable in 2024.
[...]
The DSA applies to hosting services, marketplaces, and online platforms that offer services in the EU. The DSA will apply to all providers regardless of their place of establishment. In other words, if individuals are residing in the EU they will fully benefit from the DSA’s protective scope. Hence, the DSA is putting people first by default and not corporate interests.
New sets of obligations are designed as “made to measure”: the DSA singles out Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) as well as Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs), which are platforms with more than 45 million average monthly active users in the EU. This way, the law rightly recognises the platforms’ specific control over public discourse and the often manipulative influence they have on people’s behaviour online.
Twitter Inc. said Tuesday it has filed a legal challenge against the Indian government’s orders that the social-media company block some users’ accounts and individual tweets in the country, ramping up a battle over online speech between U.S. tech giants and New Delhi.
Internet shut down for 20 hours during demonstrations when tens of thousands took to the streets
Demonstrations have been continuing in Sudan as citizens demand an end to military rule, with the death toll rising to at least 113 protesters killed since the military coup last October.
Last Thursday, the internet was shut down for about 20 hours during protests when tens of thousands of civilians took to the streets of the Sudanese capital Khartoum and its twin cities of Omdurman and Bahri; at least nine people were killed. Participants and Sudanese activists abroad had been sharing photographs and videos of the demonstrations on social media using the hashtag #EyesOnSudan.
“It is unacceptable for the military in Sudan to continue to perpetrate brutalities against the Sudanese people during protests whenever the internet is shut down. This impunity must be condemned by all,” tweeted Felicia Anthonio, a campaigner who works with Access Now on their #KeepItOn campaign, which fights against internet shutdowns.
Online freedom in India is in peril — constitutional courts must intervene and protect the rights of millions.
Twitter’s legal challenge against the Indian government’s blocking orders comes against the backdrop of rising digital authoritarianism, and imminent threats to free speech. The court must declare the government’s overbroad censorship actions as unconstitutional, and bring to light authorities’ abuse of power online.
The Indian government and Twitter have locked horns in the past, but this case is not about one Big Tech firm versus the Indian government. It is about protecting human rights, and holding the Indian Ministry for Electronics and Information Technology to account for abusing its already flawed web censorship powers under India’s Information Technology Act.
“A democracy cannot survive without free expression, and the current wave of digital authoritarianism in India puts the world’s largest democracy at risk,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Senior International Counsel and Asia Pacific Policy Director at Access Now. “Authorities are targeting people for content posted online, and regularly intimidating web platforms and social media services into complying with its censorship through rights-violative tools such as the IT Rules and other provisions of the Information Technology Act. Today, Twitter is standing up for the population and doing what should be the government’s job: safeguarding our rights.”
I’ve recently pruned many of my old posts, after doing a quality check. Some were something that wasn’t worth-reading, not leaving you with a sense of “oh! didn’t know that! awesome that I learnt something new about X”, something which I strive to achieve from now on, on my new posts. Of course, I can’t always achieve that, so there’ll be some ramblings here and there.
I wrote many of the posts just for the sake of writing that day, not that I felt inspired or the need to write that day, which as I later realised it’s the wrong mentality for a blog. From now on, the blog will be more of a self-reflection journal and memory bank, things that help me over all. I’m happy that someone else can take and be influenced by an idea I put on the table. Even if the post inspired one reader, it’s a great thing.
As for myself, I teethgnashingly write more “I think”, “for me”, “it seems to me” and so on, on my own blog no less, because I kept getting pushback from people commenting on my blog arguing with me that the things I said are not universally true, which seems super obvious to me because I am writing on my blog. Grrrrr.
Perhaps I hear my words in my own voice, see myself sitting in a coffee house with friends, and we don’t qualify every statement. Those qualifications are implied by the simple fact that we are people talking to each other.
Other people are probably hearing those words like they read the newspaper. “News” is supposedly “universally true” or aims to be. I think. Hah!
It seems to me that I have been force-fed Google’s services by almost everyone in my life: friends, family, but most notably school. My school’s tech department *really* loves Google and uses it for *everything* – Google Classroom for homework assignments, Gmail for all communications, Google Slides for lesson presentations, I could go on all day. What really bugs me is the fact that in order to see what homework I have, I have to log in to Google Classroom every day, using an account with my real name on it! As if just using their products wasn’t enough, they made a G Suite for Education account for every student with no warning or prior notice, using real names! (Granted, when I joined in year 7, I was fairly indifferent towards Google, but still.)
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Summary: The YouTube channel formerly known as The Linux Gamer became just Gardiner Bryant or “TLG” and it’s not even acting like an organic, grassroots effort but more like a marketing operation; is Bryant a PR operative?
Meanwhile, Spamnil has bought himself another round of clickfraud in YouTube. The Linux Foundation passes money to a fraud and it does the same itself.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Guest Editorial Team
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