07.26.22
Posted in Site News at 6:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 0bde3bfd3d70869732d19d26908f88d1
Latest on Gemini and the New CMS
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The custom-made content management system (CMS) has taken top priority; we’ve meanwhile reached a record number of people and sent a record number of pages over Gemini (today)
THE beta site that’s used to develop and test a new and lightweight CMS improved a lot today, both at the front end and the back end, but what’s more noteworthy today is our Gemini capsule exceeding 55,000 pages transmitted (in that one day alone). We track Geminispace closely throughout the day as the number of active capsules continues to grow. Exciting times.
“When we’re done with Tux Machines we’ll try to do the same here in Techrights — fulfilling a long-term (but not long-forgotten) promise.”This past month we’ve invested a lot of time lessening technical debt and last month we registered Tux Machines for the next 5 years. We want to take it to the next level and bloated software like Drupal isn’t the way to go. We’ll add Gemini support to Tux Machines and make everything lighter. When we’re done with Tux Machines we’ll try to do the same here in Techrights — fulfilling a long-term (but not long-forgotten) promise. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:32 pm 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 Portugal. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.
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Hack your graphics card and discover the inner working of the Linux kernel graphics stack. Delve into the open source display driver world, from how windows get tiled to how compute is accelerated with GPGPU and raytracing is added to games.
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Desktop/Laptop
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Pop!_OS Linux 22.04 LTS was released in late April 2022, shortly after the release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish), on which System76’s in-house built GNU/Linux distribution is based, but featuring a GNOME-based desktop environment called COSMIC.
The Raspberry Pi flavor is called Pop!_Pi and it’s only supported on Raspberry Pi 4 SBCs with 2GB of RAM or more, as well as on Raspberry Pi 400 computers.
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Wayland and the KDE Plasma desktop now run on CheriBSD, the special version of FreeBSD for Arm’s experimental Morello hardware.
The University of Cambridge’s Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions project, or CHERI for short, has been underway for some years, and usable results are starting to emerge. It aims to bake extra hardware-level security protections into processors, and Arm’s Morello board incorporates that research work by CHERI.
And Ruslan Bukin, a researcher at Cambridge’s computer science department and also a FreeBSD contributor, has now ported the Wayland display server and KDE desktop to CheriBSD.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of Regata OS 22.0.3 and some of the applications pre-installed.
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Linux Commands in 60 Seconds is a YouTube shorts series that teaches you simple examples of common Linux commands. In this video, the viewer is shown how to quickly create files.
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One of the most useful features of the Bash shell (Fish and Zsh too!) is the built-in keybindings that can greatly speed up your terminal workflow. By default, your shell uses Emacs-style keybindings, but you can change to Vim-like bindings if you prefer. The following are the commands to change to Vi-bindings (and back to Emacs-bindings).
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Time to check in with the latest edition of LMDE before version 21 of the main version Linux Mint releases – what do you miss? And does this distro deserve more of the spotlight?
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Kernel Space
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Anyone still considering whether to update to 64-bit Linux kernels (opens in new tab) now has another big motivation after it was revealed 32-bit editions won’t be getting a major security fix.
Intel’s Pawan Gupta recently took to the lore.kernel.org mailing list to answer customer questions, one of which concerned the fix to Retbleed for 32-bit OS’.
“Intel is not aware of production environments that use 32-bit mode on Skylake-gen CPUs. So this should not be a concern.” Intel’s Peter Zijlstra chimed in to add: “Yeah, so far nobody cared to fix 32-bit. If someone *realllllly* cares and wants to put the effort in I suppose I’ll review the patches, but seriously, you shouldn’t be running 32-bit kernels on Skylake / Zen based systems, that’s just silly.”
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Graphics Stack
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All of them have reasonable frame rate. However, there was a bit of “cheating” involved. Only “The Talos Principle” game was fully running on the development board (via box64), other two games were only rendered in real time on Adreno GPU, but were ran on x86-64 laptop with their VK commands being streamed to the dev board. You could read about this method in my post “Testing Vulkan drivers with games that cannot run on the target device”.
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For Vulkan 1.3 conformance there are only a few extension left to implement. The only major ones are VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering and VK_EXT_inline_uniform_block required for Vulkan 1.3. VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering is currently being reviewed and foundation for VK_EXT_inline_uniform_block was recently merged.
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Applications
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Looking for an alternative app launching tool for your Linux? Findex is one with highly customizable interface and fast performance.
The app runs silently in the background. Once you hit the shortcut key, a search box pop-up in screen center allows to quickly search and open desired applications.
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Sunamu is a cross-platform desktop tool designed to be blingy first, practical second.
It shows whatever the currently playing song is (from any MPRIS compatible music player/client, e.g., Spotify, Rhythmbox, VLC, Elisa, etc) along with lyrics (fetched from an online source) on your desktop.
And that’s pretty much it!
Its own developers describe it as a “music controller whose only purpose is to look as fancy as possible on secondary displays”, and is popular with (and has some settings catering to) streamers in particular.
It displays lyrics for the playing track where possible, shows album art, has smooth transitions, and condenses down into a ‘mini’ mode when you mouse away from the widget. It can run as a windowed app (with a colourful background) I find it works best for me as a transparent desktop widget (which, helpfully, is the default setting).
You can drag the widget anywhere on your desktop, maximise it (by dragging it to the top of the display), and resize it (mouse near the edge to find the invisible resize grip).
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Instructionals/Technical
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This article explains how you can install OpenShot Video Editor on Ubuntu. OpenShot is a simple, very easy to use free software to edit videos that is suitable for general purpose users including teachers at school. This works with the OS version 22.04 and later as well as 20.04 and before.
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I’ve said this many times before, and I’ll say it many times in the future: Portainer is my go-to container management platform. With Portainer, I can do any task required to manage and monitor container deployments. I can use Portainer on an isolated docker development machine or a multi-node Swarm Cluster.
Wait. Did I just say multi-node Swarm Cluster? I did.
If your Docker deployments are of a large-scale nature, chances are pretty good you’re dealing with a Docker Swarm. For those who don’t know, Swarm mode is built into the Docker Engine and allows you to manage a cluster of Docker nodes for more scalability, decentralized deployments, desired state reconciliations, multi-host networking, load balancing and rolling updates.
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Vim is a powerful command-line code editor tool that’s an enhanced version of the venerable vi editor. Although most people use it with Linux, Vim is compatible with most of the commonly used operating systems, including macOS, Windows, and DOS.
Despite the abundance of graphical rich text editors, familiarity with Vim will help every user, from an experienced system administrator to a newbie programming a Raspberry Pi. However, one important thing to note when using Vim, is that the function of a key depends on the “mode” the editor is in. For example, pressing the alphabet “j” will move the cursor down one line in the “command mode”. You’ll have to switch to the “insert mode” to make the keys input the character they represent.
If you’re new to Vim, open a terminal and run vimtutor to get you started with some initial commands before diving into the rest.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Cassandra on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source NoSQL database management system drawn to manipulate large amounts of information across many servers with no single point of failure. Its linear scalability and proven fault tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure make it the perfect platform for mission-critical data.
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 Apache Cassandra NoSQL database 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.
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A serial port connection allows a user to control systems without a display. Here’s how you can access and use serial consoles in Linux.
One of the indispensable elements when working on embedded Linux projects is accessing your device via the serial console interface. For this, the computer on which you are developing an embedded system must have a serial port. However, very few computers today have a serial port, and that’s why we use USB to serial converters instead.
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ok an alias is simply an appreviation (ll) of a longer command (ls -lah –color) defined in one of those files…
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PeaZip on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, PeaZip is a free and open source file archiving and encrypting software that has been designed based on the 7-Zip and supported compression formats such as GZip, and RAR, ZPAQ, Brotli, and other archiving. It is compatible with both Windows-based and Linux operating systems.
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 PeaZip file archiver utility 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.
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Chromebooks are laptops running relatively lightweight, user-friendly, and effective ChromeOS. It is a full-fledged operating system, which means one can use all their favorite apps on this operating system. If you are a Chromebook power user, you have probably experienced performance issues on your Chromebook. Your system may perform slowly for several reasons, such as crashing, lagging, or shuttering. But don’t worry; we are here to help! We will show you ten ways to speed up your Chromebook and ensure your Chromebook experience is faster again.
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This guide shows how to add a theme to GRUB to improve your Linux user experience. In addition, you get our free GRUB Linuxiac theme.
GRUB (GNU GRand Unified Bootloader) is a boot loader from the GNU Project that loads the Linux kernel. It is also responsible for displaying an options menu from which you can pick the operating system you want to boot into.
However, the default view of the GRUB boot loader is not that appealing. And that’s perfectly normal, given that the main focus here is on functionality. Namely, to load your operating system seamlessly.
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Latest virtnbdbackup version now supports backing up remote libvirt hosts, too.
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Linux is a multi-user environment, which means more than one user can use the system at one time. Granted, that mostly takes the form of console access (via SSH), because you can’t easily have two people simultaneously logging into the desktop GUI (although multiple users can forward X11 GUI applications over SSH with ease). The point is, that a Linux system can include hundreds of users (if necessary). Although you wouldn’t want this, a Linux server can handle 4,294,967,294 concurrent and distinct users.
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Linux runs a multitude of services in the background, including network and system functions. Linux services are also referred to as daemons, which is the term for a collection of back-end processes. Various techniques and technologies can be used to list and manage services on a Linux system. A software package called Systemd is commonly used to administer Linux systems and is a replacement for the init process. Its primary goal is to standardise service behaviour and configuration across Linux distributions; A “system and service manager” is the main part of it.
Systemd provides control over all system Linux tasks. With the help of this tool, a process can be launched or stopped, and Systemd also allows for the listing of all enabled, running and disabled Linux services.
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Most Minecraft servers are run on x86_64 based hardware. Ampere AltraMax chips run AARCH64…which is the non-ARM specific way of saying ARM64 instruction set.
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Today we are looking at how to install NSMB Mario Versus Luigi 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.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
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For Ubuntu 22.04, there’s now an extension to enable animation when you move mouse pointer over app icons on the left/bottom panel.
It’s a magnifying animation for the dock app icons under mouse cursor. Which, remind me of the old popular Avant Window Navigator.
The extension is called ‘Dash Animator‘ designed for Ubuntu with the default GNOME Desktop. As it requires GNOME 40+, only Ubuntu 22.04 meet the request so far. Though, it should also work on other GNOME based Linux that uses Dash-to-Dock, such as Manjaro Linux.
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Welcome to this tutorial where we will learn how to install the Redis server o Ubuntu 22.04.
Redis server is an open source in-memory data store used by many developers as a database, cache, streaming engine, and message broker.
Redis as a real-time data store means Redis’ versatile in-memory data structures let you build data infrastructure for real-time applications requiring low latency and high throughput
Caching and session storage. Redis speed is ideal for caching database queries, complex computations, API calls, and session states.
Streaming and messaging. Streamed data type enables high-speed data ingestion, messaging, event sourcing, and notifications.
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Working with Linux, you will likely have heard of Snap in relation to installing software on a Linux system.
Snap is a software packaging and deployment system for Linux operating systems. Software packages, which are called snaps, and the program for using them, which is called snapd, work on many Linux distributions and provide a way for software developers to package and distribute their applications. Snaps are self contained applications, which run in a sandbox, with controlled access to the host operating system.
Snap provides a solution to the problem of having to develop applications to run on different Linux distributions, which require different packages etc. Snap applications run in a container with restricted access to the host system. Users can grant an application mediated access to extra functionalities of the host via Interfaces, such as recording audio and capturing video.
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GRUB, stands for GRand Unified Bootloader, is default boot loader for most Linux operating systems. GRUB boot loader is the first program that runs when the computer starts. As you may noticed, the default theme of the GRUB menu is bland. It’s just a black background with white characters on it. Some of you may not like the default GRUB theme. In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to change GRUB theme or apply gorgeous themes in-order to make your GRUB menu more beautiful and elegant in Linux.
A few years ago, we published a guide that explained how to configure GRUB2 bootloader settings in Ubuntu. In that article, we showed you how to change the GRUB background.
But, changing background is not the real customization. In this guide, we are going to change not only the wallpaper but also the fonts, theme and the overall design of GRUB.
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In general, what runs on your server should be considered private information that is shared only on a need-to-know basis. If there’s no reason for a user to have insight into what services are running on a server, then a user probably shouldn’t have permission to view process ID (PID) listings.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE Plasma in FreeBSD ports is still version 5.24.6 (in ports HEAD, while the quarterly has 5.24.5). It will remain stuck at that release for a while longer.
KDE ports are mostly administered in the Mk/Uses/kde.mk file in the FreeBSD ports tree. You can look in there to see what the current versions of most-everything is. Individual ports (e.g. x11/konsole) defer to settings in that centralized administration.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The four previously separated repositories core, connector-dbus, renderer and server have been combined into this single repository. I was amongst those who promoted for the split, but since then the conditions have changed and it is far easier to maintain in an all-in-one repository now. Most files should have kept history.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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In accordance with FESCo’s approved[1] keepalive policy, the following Spins/Labs will be dropped from F37 unless new maintainers step up.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Here is the Technical Preview of the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx ROME (Rolling), and after a few time also the 5.0 ’Rock’ snapshot
Installing Rolling is pretty much the same as installing Rock.
There is an auto updater tool in ABF (OpenMandriva Automated Build Farm) which has been kept turned off for longer that we anticipated so Rolling has not been getting many upgrades recently and has not really been ’rolling’. This is because developers have been making some big changes to tool-chain/system packages in the Cooker branch (where the upgrades come from) that would make it unsafe and unwise at this time.
After Rolling official released we will turn auto updater on again and we will have Rolling back to actually ’rolling’.
We believe now Cooker has reached the quality level we want to get in order to release a reliable system.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Compilers have supported these levels since GCC11 and LLVM Clang 12. Over in Red Hat territory, distros since Fedora 32 in 2020 and RHEL 9 this year have targeted and required x86-64-v2. So far, we haven’t heard anyone complaining too much about it – but requiring x86-64-v3 is another matter.
Although SUSE is not yet confirming anything, recent announcements from the openSUSE project are giving some ideas of how this future family of distributions might look. The openSUSE project is asking users to try out the MicroOS Desktop distro “to gain user perspectives on its applicability.” The distro offers both GNOME and KDE flavors, and is still somewhere between alpha and beta testing stage depending on which desktop you choose.
The openSUSE community also has a working group discussing the impact of these technologies. Interestingly, one of the early reactions we’ve read is strongly positive.
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The openSUSE Project is preparing to celebrate its 17th Birthday on August 9.
The project will have a 24-hour social event with attendees visiting openSUSE’s virtual Bar.
Commonly referred to as the openSUSE Bar or slash bar (/bar), openSUSE’s Jitsi instance has become a frequent virtual hang out with regulars and newcomers.
People who like or use openSUSE distributions and tools are welcome to visit, hang out and chat with other attendees during the celebration.
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Red Hat / Fedora / IBM
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Continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) and DevOps — you often hear these terms used interchangeably, and you’ve likely heard them bundled in together with GitOps. So what is GitOps? And when you’re comparing GitOps vs. DevOps, how are they different?
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Back in early July, we covered the launch of IBM’s entry and midrange Power10 systems and mused about how Big Blue could use these systems to reinvigorate an HPC business rather than just satisfy the needs of the enterprise customers who run transaction processing systems and are looking to add AI inference to their applications through matrix math units on the Power10 chip.
We are still gathering up information on how the midrange Power E1050 stacks up on SAP HANA and other workloads, but in poking around the architecture of the entry single-socket Power S1014 and the dual-socket S1022 and S1024 machines, we found something interesting that we thought we should share with you. We didn’t see it at first, and you will understand immediately why.
Here is the block diagram we got our hands on from IBM’s presentations to its resellers for the Power S1014 machine:
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After more than five years of leading Red Hat’s Global Privacy Program and overseeing its creation, growth, and maturity, I know what it takes to cultivate a culture of trust. Our associates, customers, and others are confident that we take privacy seriously, their information is safe, and we’re doing the right things.
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Many companies are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to drive strategic decisions or introduce new business models. According to a global McKinsey study, 56 percent of all respondents report AI adoption in at least one function in 2021, up from 50 percent in the previous year.
Whether your company is just getting started in its AI journey or you are leveraging it across multiple business functions, there are numerous competitive advantages to gain from improved employee experience, deeper customer insight, and enhanced business functions.
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My name is Jess Chitas and I am an intern at Red Hat focusing on contributing to the Fedora community. Over the past couple of months, I have been fortunate enough to work on the new Nest, Flock, and Hatch logos as well as — Colúr — a new Fedora character! In this post, I document my journey from creating Colúr to revamping the Nest, Flock, and Hatch logos!
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Fedora, the popular Linux distribution, will no longer incorporate software licensed under CC0, the Creative Commons “No Rights Reserved” license. In order to support the wide re-use of copyrighted content in new works, CC0 provides authors “a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law.” The license arose in response to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended the duration of copyright by 20 years at the expense of the public domain. But CC0 explicitly says the licensor does not waive patent rights, which for free and open source software (FOSS) is a potential problem. That means, for instance as described here, if you use CC0-licensed code in your project, and the author of that code later claims your project is infringing a patent they own regarding that code, your defense will be limited. Avoiding the use of CC0-licensed code is one way to steer clear of these so-called submarine patents that could years later torpedo you.
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Debian Family
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Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 5.0 or later to 5.3.
You can reduce the size of the download of future automatic upgrades by doing a manual upgrade to the latest version.
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Debian is one of the most loved Linux distributions for its approach to stability and a balance between new features.
Also, it does not come with any non-free firmware.
However, that is becoming an issue for users who want to use Debian on newer hardware.
Most of the latest devices and configurations need non-free firmware to make things work, which includes Wi-Fi, graphics, and more.
And to address that, Steve McIntyre, a Debian developer and a former Debian project leader, has been actively discussing the issue for a while.
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Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
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We present a new email today revealing that Steve McIntyre (sledge), formerly of ARM Ltd, was invited to remove the servers from the home of Frans Pop.
The email reveals that Debian was Pop’s entire way of life. He lived with his servers doing free unpaid work for different Debian teams.
If a volunteer kills himself and gives you a house full of servers it smells a lot like some Debian people got a reward for working Frans Pop to death.
Therefore, if there are no consequences for killing somebody, if they get a reward from his assets, there is no reason for these people to change their behavior towards volunteers.
To put the email in context, remember that Colin Watson was trying to downplay the significance of that phrase “His main concern was his work for Debian”. Yet he lived surrounded by his computers.
We could think of this visit to Frans Pop’s house as some sort of cover-up mission.
McIntyre also tries to use Pop’s previous cancer as a scapegoat for the suicide. His musings about this are absurd. McIntyre lacks the competence to make judgments about such medical matters, just as WIPO lawyers lack the competence to judge who is or isn’t a developer
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Earlier this month, the Linux Mint 21 betas arrived for public testing. Just 12 days later, the Mint team has begun testing the ISO images for the final, stable release of Linux Mint 21. We usually see ISOs being tested several days before the launch of a new Linux Mint version, but sometimes they can fail, which delays things slightly.
Linux Mint 21 is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, which arrived in April. This means that Linux Mint 21 can be installed on a computer when it comes out and will receive security updates until 2027. This long lifespan is great for people who want to run Linux on production machines because they won’t have to reinstall the operating system for five years.
Linux Mint 21 is a pivotal release, not only has the Timeshift backup tool been adopted by the Linux Mint XApp programme, but there’s a new graphical Upgrade Tool now. With Upgrade Tool, Linux Mint users will be able to perform in-place upgrades between major versions of Linux Mint. Previously, you could only graphically upgrade between point releases. The preferred method for major upgrades before was a clean install, but a command line option was available too.
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The days in which a business could thrive by serving customers through brick-and-mortar stores alone are long gone. Almost all retailers now offer a variety of online and offline channels, often with some degree of integration to ensure a smooth customer journey across different touchpoints. However, even these multichannel and cross-channel strategies are increasingly falling short of modern expectations.
[...]
Compute capability, in the form of hypervisors and operating systems is at the heart of every omnichannel implementation, and these core infrastructure components must be reliable. Retailers need to know that their solutions will be well supported not just today, but in the long-term, so it is important to choose technology vendors with a longstanding track record for stability and quality.
At the same time, these infrastructure solutions must be extensible. Omnichannel strategies depend on flexibility to continue meeting evolving customer expectations, which means that infrastructure needs to be able to seamlessly grow out and integrate with newly emerging technologies.
To cut operational complexity while maximising agility, it is best to utilise the same operating system and tooling across platforms. By deploying the same solutions at the edge, on-premises, and in the cloud, it becomes much easier to port workloads and manage the environment without duplicating effort.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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We’re off again! This time to SCaLE 19X- the 19th annual Southern California Linux Expo happening July 28th – July 30th. SCaLE is the largest community-run open-source and free software conference in North America and is held annually in the greater Los Angeles area. We would love to meet you if you’re planning to attend. We’ll be at booth 501.
Check out OSI board member Aeva Black’s keynote presentation on Saturday, July 29th. Aeva will be discussing the impact of this year’s developments on developers and users of OSS software. There is an impressive amount of speakers, all the way up to Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet.
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SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ Tech Talks: An HPE and SUSE webinar series starting on Aug 10 [Ed: SUSE in Germany flirting with the company that infamously helped Microsoft attack GNU/Linux in Munich]
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox has been my web browser of choice for a very long time. Sure, it’s had its ups and downs — such as one extended period when the browser suffered from serious bloat — but, for the most part, the open-source browser has been solid, secure and easy to use.
But there’s one feature I’ve been waiting for a long time to see: One that makes using the browser considerably more efficient when a trackpad is involved, and a feature that makes me jealous every time I hop on my MacBook Pro and use just about any browser. It is a feature that so many users have begged to get, especially in the Linux version of Firefox, which is my go-to combo.
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Programming/Development
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Today we’re releasing GraalVM 22.2! This release brings new features and lots of improvements to the developer experience — let’s go through the highlights!
This release includes support for JDK 11 and JDK 17. As always, you can download GraalVM Community from GitHub, or get the GraalVM Enterprise builds from OTN. You can also install the latest version of GraalVM via the GraalVM Extension Pack for Java for VS Code or with Homebrew on macOS. Now, let’s take a look at what’s new in this release!
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Mirantis today announced it has acquired amazee.io to advance adoption of a “ZeroOps” approach to deploying applications in Kubernetes environments.
Amazee.io’s open source Lagoon platform provides a layer of abstraction that analyzes how an application is constructed using containers on a local desktop or in a Git repository. Lagoon then automatically invokes the application programming interfaces (APIs) required to deploy that application on a Kubernetes cluster.
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Conciseness is often considered a virtue among hackers and software engineers. FOSS maintainers in particular generally prefer to keep bug reports, questions on mailing lists, discussions in IRC channels, and so on, close to the point and with minimal faff. It’s not considered impolite to skip the formalities — quite the opposite. So: keep your faffery to a minimum. A quick “thanks!” at the end of a discussion will generally suffice. And, when someone is being direct with you, don’t interpret it as a slight: simply indulge in the blissful freedom of a discussion absent of faffery.
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Due to a process issue, CVE-2022-31045 was not included in our Istio 1.14.2 and Istio 1.13.6 builds.
At this time we suggest you do not install 1.14.2 or 1.13.6 in a production environment. If you have, you may downgrade to Istio 1.14.1 or Istio 1.13.5. Istio 1.14.3 and Istio 1.13.7 are expected to be released later this week.
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The Xen Project has released one or more Xen Security Advisories (XSAs). The security of Qubes OS is not affected. Therefore, no user action is required.
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Any time I see that one of the syslog-ng destinations has a major new version, I’m a bit scared, as it is not uncommon to introduce breaking changes with them. MongoDB 6.0, however, was a pleasant surprise. I gave it a quick try, and everything worked as expected. Along the way, I even learned about MongoDB Compass, an easy-to-use GUI for MongoDB databases.
Note that I only did a quick test of MongoDB 6.0. I did not try the new 6.0 specific features. All I did was sending logs from syslog-ng to MongoDB and browsing the collected logs using MongoDB Compass.
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We’re wrapping up another great week with the following activities from the Apache community…
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Perl / Raku
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Over on the p5p mailing list, a user raised the issue that use of variable $00 is an error starting with Perl 5.32, and asked that this “regression” be fixed.
I have always understood that variables whose names begin with anything but an alphabetic or an underscore are reserved to Perl, and you mess with them at your peril. And this is the gist of the Porters’ response to the post. Recent versions of perlvar say this explicitly, though earlier versions of that document restrict themselves to describing currently-implemented special variables.
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Python
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Django is a free and open-source, Python-based web framework that follows the model–template–views architectural pattern. Django advertises itself as “the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines” and “Django makes it easier to build better Web apps more quickly and with less code”. Django is known for the speed at which you can develop apps without compromising on robustness.
When learning a new language or framework, a new way to go about it is to connect to the database and to architect a simple client to perform insert, read, update and delete records to it, i.e. CRUD.
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Rust
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The GNU core utils are fundamental to the Linux desktop but they’re not the only option out there, one notable project is uutils which aims tocreate a set of cross platform core utils in rust
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Leftovers
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Openwashing
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FOSSLife ☛ OS-Climate Releases 3 Tools for Tackling Climate Change [Ed: Linux Foundation would have you believe Microsoft (crime) is "community" and GitHub is "Open Source", never mind the brand "Linux" being misused for greenwashing]
Learn more about the OS-Climate community on GitHub.
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (spip), Mageia (libtiff and logrotate), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk and java-11-openjdk), SUSE (gpg2, logrotate, and phpPgAdmin), and Ubuntu (python-bottle).
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The NSA’s Kubernetes hardening guidelines are extensive and can feel overwhelming. Here’s how you can comply with them.
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Linux is an operating system used for many different purposes, including programming, ethical hacking, and simply studying. These activities require constant internet connection and security to protect critical data like code or client information.
Since VPNs are often touted as a go-to tool for securing your internet connections, let’s explore exactly why you should use one on your Linux machine.
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Last month, we just concluded the Linux Foundation’s 2022 Open Source Summit North America (OSS NA), when developers, technologists, and community leaders from industry, academia, and government converged in Austin, Texas, from June 21-24 to talk about all things open source. Participants and speakers highlighted open source innovation and efforts to ensure a sustainable open source ecosystem.
What did the summit tell us about the state of OSS security? Several parts of the conference addressed different aspects of this issue – OpenSSF Day, Critical Software Summit, SupplyChainSecurityCon, and the Global Security Vulnerability Summit. Overall, the summit demonstrated an increased emphasis on open source security as a community effort with various stakeholders. More ambitious and innovative approaches to handling the open source security problem – including collaboration, tools, and training – were also introduced. Finally, the summit highlighted the importance for open source users to give back to the community and contribute upstream to the projects they depend on.
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Imagine if a customer lands on your website to make a purchase but is greeted with a safety warning instead? Not having an SSL certificate can not only result in a serious loss of traffic, but it can also affect your website’s rankings.
However, an SSL certificate costs anywhere from $5/year to $1000/year and can add to the cost of running your small blogs. Luckily, there are several ways to obtain an SSL certificate for your website for free. In this article, we will go over some of the best methods to get an SSL certificate for your WordPress website.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Lately there was this smell coming from the rug in my hallway. It wasn’t strong but sharp and I noticed it whenever I bent down to pick up my shoes.
Last week I decided to get the smell out and poured some baking powder over it, and covered it with a wet towel. It worked, which was actually a bit surprising.
Anyway, more or less just when I’d done that I went on a trip to Finland for a few days. At some point during that trip, I don’t remember exactly when, I sat down cross legged to wait for someone or something and that same acidic smell hit me stronger than it had ever done in the hallway.
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Technical
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I have added image search to Kennedy, my Gemini search engine. Now you can search for images across all of Gemini space which matches a query.
[...]
The results for an image search includes metadata like the image type, dimensions, and file size. Image type is determined by actually parsing the image using an image library. This is needed because about 1% of respones with an “image/*” MIME type aren’t actually valid images.
* 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 8:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Instructionals/Technical
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The Bash command line is a great way to automate tasks. Whether you are running Linux on a server and need to manipulate log files or other data, or you’re a desktop user who just wants to keep files tidy, you can use a few automation features in Bash to make your work easier.
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Excluding HTML, PDF files are probably the most popular document format on the web. Unfortunately, they’re not compact. For example, I like to download free eBooks. A quick glance at my eBook directory shows that its 75 PDF files consume about 500 megabytes. On average, that’s over 6.6 MB for each PDF file.
Couldn’t I save some storage space by compressing those files? What if I want to send a bundle of them through email? Or host them for download on a website? The transmission would be faster if these files were made smaller. This article shows a simple way to reduce PDF file size. The benefit is that it shrinks your PDFs transparently without altering the data content in any way. Plus, you can also compact many PDF files with a single command.
Compare this to the alternatives. You could upload your PDF files to one of the many online file compression websites. Several are free, but you risk the privacy of your documents by uploading them to an unknown website. More importantly, most websites shrink PDFs by tampering with the images they contain. They either change their resolution or their sizes. So you trade lower image quality to get smaller PDF files. That’s the same trade-off you face using interactive apps like LibreOffice, or Ghostscript line commands like gs and ps2pdf. The technique we’ll illustrate in this article compacts PDFs without altering either the images they contain or their data content. And you can reduce many PDFs with a single line command. Let’s get started.
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Those Linux users who deal with PDF files have plenty of programs to choose from. More precisely, there exist a great number of dedicated PDF tools that can be used for various tasks.
For example, you can install a PDF viewer to open the required files for reading or get a PDF editor to be able to perform certain operations, such as typing text, adding annotations or cropping pages.
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By default, SSH already uses secure data communication between remote machines, but if you want to add some extra security layer to your SSH connections, you can add a Google Authenticator (two-factor authentication) module that allows you to enter a random one-time password (TOTP) verification code while connecting to SSH servers. You’ll have to enter the verification code from your smartphone or PC when you connect.
The Google Authenticator is an open-source module that includes implementations of one-time passcodes (TOTP) verification tokens developed by Google.
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If you are a melophile like me and have multiple accounts on popular streaming platforms like Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, then you might have experienced that there is not an easy way to install them on a Linux system.
However, we have already written a detailed guide on how to install Spotify and Tidal on Linux. So, today the focus will be on Apple Music.
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Games [Some more new titles and even Free/libre ones]
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The latest entry in the Total War franchise was ported by Feral Interactive over to Linux last month. After spending a good chunk of time commanding armies and bringing chaos to the land, I have a few thoughts to share.
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Have the need for speed and love a good retro first-person shooter? DIMENSIONAL SLAUGHTER is what you should take a look at.
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Need a new relaxing puzzle game that doesn’t require guesswork? Recently hexceed gained a Native Linux port. While the main game is completely free, it does have paid DLC which includes a ton of extra content. The main game has a Very Positive review score on Steam so looks like another quality game to add to your collection.
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Looking more promising than ever, the in-development free and open source RPG Veloren has a big new release out. A fully original open source game although it does take inspiration from Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft.
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Black Tabby Games have just announced Slay the Princess. It’s a choice-driven psychological horror visual novel / dating sim with dramatic branching, light RPG elements and hand-penciled art. This is the same developer who created Scarlet Hollow, a popular episodic visual novel.
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GOG has announced their big Find Your Indie Sale is now live with some new releases, more upcoming games and of course lots of discounts to take a look over.
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Act fast if you want to get a good free puzzle game! Kenney is giving away Pixross on itch.io and it has Native Linux support. You might actually already own it though, if you picked up the previous big Indie bundle for Palestinian Aid. Consider this your quick tip to start the week off right.
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This game genre are typically regarded as games of skill, with only some elements of games of chance. They often feature short levels, which rapidly increase in difficulty with simple and intuitive controls. There’s a focus on gameplay rather than story or content.
The late 1970s through the 1980s was the golden age of the arcade games. Many of the games featured here hark back to games popular around that time.
Let’s explore the 10 games. For each game we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screen shot of the game in action together with links to relevant resources.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Devices/Embedded
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Early this month, Axiomtek released their first EATX board built around the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors. The IMB760 is a server-grade board designed to target markets that involve robotics, computer vision and AIoT.
The IMB760 is an Extended ATX motherboard, meaning it measures around 330 x 305mm which allows it to incorporate additional ports. According to the announcement for this product, ”the motherboard offers a dual LGA4189 socket for 3rd Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors with Intel C627A chipset.”
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Open Hardware/Modding [Growing awareness around enthusiasts who tinker with computers]
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Digital displays are useful for quick and accurate readout, but lots of people prefer the physical motion of a needle moving along a dial. For instance, many smartwatch users choose an analog face to show the time, and modern cars with digital dashboards often default to showing an analog speedometer. Following this trend, [Miro Pavleski] built a digital weighing scale with an analog display that not only looks neat, but also serves as a good demonstration of the way that modern scales work.
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They say that if you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself. Oftentimes, that goes double for getting something done at all. Whereas some people might simply lament the lack of a (stable) Thingiverse-type site for, say, jewelry designs, those people aren’t Hackaday’s own [Adam Zeloof]. With nowhere to share designs among engineering-oriented friends, [Adam] took the initiative and created OpenJewelry, a site for posting open-source jewelry and wearable art designs as well as knowledge about techniques, materials, and processes.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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How to turn an open source product into a commercial challenger is no longer a mystery.
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Leftovers
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The golden arches of a McDonald’s restaurant are a ubiquitous feature of life in so many parts of the world, and while their food might not be to all tastes their comforting familiarity draws in many a weary traveler. There was a time when buying a burger meant a conversation with a spotty teen behind the till, but now the transaction is more likely to take place at a terminal with a large touch screen. These terminals have caught the attention of [Geoff Huntley], who has written about their surprising level of vulnerability.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about this image. Perhaps it has such power to so many because we can imagine our souls being birthed alongside these behemoths of condensed energy in great flashes of light. And even with all that bombast in expression, the colourful gasses appear as a gossamer veil that comforts new skin. Any birth is both violent and caressing at the same time, after all. Maybe, therefore, so many of us can relate.
And I keep thinking of where I am viewing it. The living crust of a tiny world, in a tiny solar system, on the edge of a tremendously vast galaxy. A tiny world whose thin, life-giving and sustaining ribbon of air and water is imperiled by the supposed “apex species” that resides upon it. Where the sea and the atmosphere are boiling and seething ever greater with each passing year thanks to the excesses and greed of just a segment of our kind. And for what gain? Power? Status? Access to luxury? Nationalism and flags? Celebrity? Religious dominance?
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Education
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Hardware
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[jasonwinfieldnz] uses twelve small powerbanks day to day – powering LED strips around his trampoline, presumably, to avoid the mess of wires and make the assembly easily portable. However, if you have twelve powerbanks, you’ll find yourself hogging all the household’s microUSB cables every so often, as they eventually discharge. This was not good enough for our hacker, and he decided to build a charging station to refill them all at once.
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In need of a floppy controller for a 286 he was working on, [Gadget Reboot] took to GitHub to see what was available in the open hardware space. There he found an ISA board capable of controlling up to eight drives from [Sergey Kiselev] called the Monster Floppy Disk Controller (FDC) — arguably overkill for the task, but too impressive to pass up. Luckily for us, he decided to document the build process in a video that covers everything from ordering the boards to configuring the BIOS.
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For reasons still unclear, [Techmoan] has procured an RCA 8-track changer that holds five tape cartridges in a custom carrier. It somewhat works, but had a bit of mechanical issues here and there which needed some maintenance. Additionally, the player is designed for the US market and 60 Hz mains, but [Techmoan] is in the UK with 50 Hz.
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Following along with the 2022 Hackaday Prize theme on building a better world by doing what we all do best – hacking together solutions – the fourth round of the Prize focuses on making our local communities more resilient against and sensitive to severe weather and environmental disasters. Whether it’s an early warning system for wildfires or a distributed communication network that will keep working even when the cell phone service goes down, we’re challenging you to help make your world safer by reacting sooner and better. Get your project entered now!
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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In a video posted online, dozens of students can be seen walking out of the auditorium as Collier began her address. The video, recorded and posted by Detroit resident Brendan Scorpio, has been viewed more than 11 million times.
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Randall Anderson was 9 years old when his knees started swelling like soda cans left too long in the freezer. Fatigue knocked him flat for hours at a time. Red rashes ravaged his skin. Finally, the headaches began, the screams, the scans showing signs of brain inflammation. The adults didn’t know what was wrong with him. His elementary school worried that he might be carrying some contagion and sent him home with a private tutor for a month. Some nights during the ordeal he would sleep on his parents’ bedroom floor and squeeze his mother’s hand, afraid he wouldn’t make it to morning.1
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We now live in what might be called an attention economy, full of actors seeking to draw our interest by any means possible. Since low-quality information is just as effective at satisfying our information-cravings as high-quality information, the most efficient means of getting our attention is by mass-producing low-quality “junk info”—a kind of fast food for one’s brain. Like real fast food, junk info is cheap to produce and pleasing to consume, but also high in additives and low in nutritional value. It’s also potentially addictive and, if consumed excessively, dangerous.
Junk info is often false info. But it isn’t junk because it’s false. It’s junk because it doesn’t make your life better, and it doesn’t improve your understanding of the world. All it offers is distraction.
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The failure by global policymakers to act decisively to address the climate emergency threatens to erase decades of progress in the fight against childhood malnutrition in the Global South, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University.
The study shows that children in low-income countries are increasingly suffering from both acute and chronic malnutrition as their communities experience the effects of extreme heat, which is becoming more prevalent and severe around the world as fossil fuel extraction persists and carbon emissions rise.
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Nearly 17,000 monkeypox infections have now been reported across 75 countries, and the World Health Organization declared the spread of monkeypox a global emergency. Meanwhile, the U.S. has stopped short of declaring a public health emergency even with nearly 3,000 cases reported in 44 states. New York alone has reported 900 cases of monkeypox, with rollout of the vaccine inhibited by short supply. We speak to Joe Osmundson, professor of microbiology at New York University, about the queerphobic myths about the viral spread, the global inequity of vaccine distribution and more. “This should have been an easy virus to contain,” says Osmundson. “The immense frustration in our community has been watching hundreds of people get sick, not because they’re having sex, not because of their queer identity, but because they’ve wanted to get vaccinated and those vaccines have not been available.” Osmundson also describes how he helped a friend get treatment for monkeypox. His new book is “Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between.”
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The stretch where Pinelawn Road turns into Wellwood Avenue on New York’s Long Island is known to locals as Cemetery Row. For 3 1/2 miles, the four-lane road is lined with sweeping, manicured lawns with separate entrances to eight cemeteries set back from the street. Comprising 2,300 acres, almost three times as much land as New York City’s Central Park, it’s the largest contiguous area devoted to burials in the United States.
The business district in Cemetery Row has a power plant, a commuter rail station and a suburban-style commercial strip surrounded by burial grounds. Large signs advertise marble slabs, and you can see smoke wafting up from a crematory. Commercial and religious establishments with names such as St. Charles Monuments, Eternal Memorials and Star of David Memorial Chapel alternate with Kerensky Florist, Michelle’s Florist and Chicky’s Florist, not to mention two gas stations and the Barnwell House of Tires.
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Proprietary
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The impact of algorithms can be more than just a few extra dollars at checkout. During the 2017 terrorist attack on the London Bridge, Uber’s pricing algorithm sensed the increased demand and the price of a ride surged in the area. Uber later manually halted surge pricing and refunded users.
The price fluctuations as a result of algorithms have also been found to increase feelings of customer betrayal.
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With the development of artificial intelligence technology, data support is increasing in importance, as are problems such as information disclosure, algorithmic discrimination and the digital divide. Algorithmic price discrimination occurs when online retailers or platforms charge experienced consumers who are purchasing products on their online platforms higher prices than those charged to new consumers for the same products at the same time. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of algorithmic price discrimination on consumers’ perceived betrayal. This paper employed a field experimental method involving two studies. In total, 696 questionnaires were distributed to consumers: 310 for Study 1 and 386 for Study 2. The collected data were analyzed using variance analysis and process analysis methods and SPSS software. Our findings suggest (1) Increased algorithmic price discrimination leads to increased perceived betrayal. (2) Increased algorithmic price discrimination leads to lower perceived price fairness and therefore to increased perceived betrayal among consumers. (3) Higher perceived ease of use of online retailers decreases the impact of algorithmic price discrimination on consumers’ perceived betrayal. We are a small group of researchers focusing on algorithmic price discrimination and integrating algorithmic discrimination into the consumer research field. Our research introduces the concept of consumer perceived betrayal to the field of artificial intelligence. We adopt a field experimental study to examine the impact of algorithmic price discrimination on consumers’ perceived betrayal by introducing variables of perceived price fairness and perceived ease of use.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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They all remember how Google Glass, and the “Glassholes” who wore them in public, became the laughingstock of the world. So they’ve been waiting, biding their time, refining their prototypes, and every so often making sure investors know that, no, they’re not going to let the first potentially iPhone-sized opportunity since the iPhone slip by.
But now, Google itself is taking the next step. And whether you’ve been dreading the moment when Big Tech’s all-seeing eyes reappear on people’s heads or merely counting the days until you can own a hands-free camera-computer, you should know we’re on the verge of contending with them once again.
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[Crackers] used stolen credentials to access a private source code repository and obtain a proprietary access key, which they then used to access and copy large quantities of data associated with Uber’s users and drivers, including data pertaining to approximately 57 million user records with 600,000 driver’s license numbers.
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Four years ago, the Supreme Court took a long look at the wealth of data generated by cell phones and made a good call. It said warrantless access to months of cell site location data was an unreasonable search. If cops wanted weeks or months of cell site location info, they’d need a warrant going forward.
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We’ve noted for years how your mobile phone location data is routinely abused by a long list of bad actors, including your wireless carrier. We’ve also noted how the GOP Senate, hand in hand with the telecom sector, managed to kill FCC broadband privacy guidelines in 2017 that would have gone a long way in protecting consumer data in the post-Roe landscape.
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Defence/Aggression
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The Maryland chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on members of the Montgomery County Council on Sunday to oppose the county’s resolution to formally adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
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Ralph Nader proposes a shift in the State Department’s overall mission as defined by recent years.
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The view that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin…
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– Mahatma Gandhi
Recorded and live testimony before eight hearings of the House Jan.6 committee ripped open Donald Trump’s intensive, unyielding efforts to retain the presidency under false pretenses that could lead to criminal charges.
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The House Jan. 6 committee hearings have raised two overarching questions. The first: Will the Justice Department indict and prosecute former President Donald Trump for leading a criminal conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election? The second: Will Congress enact essential reforms to protect our democracy from a future presidential coup attempt or insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol?
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The January 6 hearings have provided jaw-dropping revelations about former President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and his role in unleashing a deadly mob on the Capitol, but the House committee has not yet recommended criminal charges against Trump. Congressmember Ro Khanna says whether to charge the former president is ultimately the Justice Department’s call, but he stresses the need for accountability. “It’s not enough for the Justice Department to just prosecute the individuals who showed up on January 6,” Khanna says. “I’m hoping that the accountability will go up the food chain.”
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Trump “was told by everyone to halt the violence,” Rep. Elaine Luria, a Democrat from Virginia, said. “But he refused to do anything…It was a dereliction of duty.”
GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois also described Trump’s inaction as a “dereliction of duty.”
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Cubans fought two wars to become independent from Spain in the 19th century. Those wars were the crucible where heroes were forged. José Martí was one such hero, killed in battle in 1895, that still symbolises today the courageous revolutionary spirit of Cubans.
When Cubans had practically achieved their goal to defeat Spanish domination with much human sacrifice at the end of the 19th century, the new coloniser from the North replaced Spain in Cuba for more than a half century of occupation and colonisation until the triumph of the Cuban revolution on January 1, 1959.
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I have often stood on top of the Western and Eastern Heights at Dover looking at the French coast 20 miles away, which is so clearly visible and makes the Channel feel more like a broad river rather than a narrow sea.
Another reason for thinking about the non-invasion of 1940 is that Britain was lucky then and I wonder if its luck as a country has deserted it, as one grossly inadequate government succeeds another.
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The author of the report, non-resident fellow of the US Centre’s Foreign Policy and Defence program Jennifer Jackett gushes about the “more consequential” nature of various “technological developments in quantum, cyber, artificial intelligence, undersea, hypersonics and electronic warfare” than nuclear-powered submarines. The latter are, after all, slated to appear much later on the horizon. In the meantime, warring potential could be harnessed in other realms.
Jackett stresses the urgency of appreciating these fields, given that Australia faces “a more hostile Indo-Pacific”. No ironic reflection follows that such hostility has been aided, in no small part, by the AUKUS security pact that has put countries in the region, with China being the primary target, on military notice.
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The United Nations and international human rights groups reacted with alarm and outrage on Monday to news that Myanmar’s coup regime has executed four activists, a sharp escalation of its violent crackdown on opponents of military rule.
“These executions amount to arbitrary deprivation of lives and are another example of Myanmar’s atrocious human rights record,” said Erwin van der Borght, Amnesty International’s regional director. “The four men were convicted by a military court in highly secretive and deeply unfair trials. The international community must act immediately as more than 100 people are believed to be on death row after being convicted in similar proceedings.”
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Given the nature of international institutions, often weak and onerously bureaucratic, there are other aspects to the system of holding the genocidaire-types to account: inadvertent immunity for the perpetrators; the obstructions and impediments of governments; and the reluctance of even using the term to describe abuses.
The military regime in Myanmar will have been hoping for all three aspects to aid their case. But in the International Court of Justice, such expectations may have to be revised. For one thing, the Myanmar junta would have been taken aback by The Gambia’s proceedings against their country alleging genocide. But in November 2019, this West African country, with the support of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) filed a case alleging that Myanmar’s military had been responsible for genocidal acts resulting in “killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, inflicting conditions that are calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, and forcible transfers … intended to destroy the Rohingya group in whole or in part.”
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Sometimes it’s hard to see much difference with the much larger Department of Defense (DOD). Its more belligerent statements or threats since Bill and Hillary Clinton’s days have made the DOD sound almost circumspect.
Recall it was Secretary of State, ‘Generalissima’ Hillary Clinton, under Obama, who, against the opposition of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, pressed the President in 2011 to unlawfully overthrow the Libyan regime unleashing chaos, violence and mayhem in Libya and in neighboring African nations that still prevails today. (Later, Obama said it was his biggest foreign policy regret.)
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Science magazine said Thursday that it uncovered evidence that images in the much-cited study, published 16 years ago in the journal Nature, may have been doctored.
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Environment
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Student climate activists worldwide on Monday celebrated reporting that the U.K.’s University of Cambridge plans to rename its BP Institute for Multiphase Flow in response to recent protests.
“It’s good to see that the pressure is being felt by the university.”
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Climate activists group Just Stop Oil is the latest controversial ensemble to emerge in the UK. Its members are demanding an immediate stop to new oil and gas extraction and say that doing things the normal way haven’t worked.
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Citing the failure of the Biden administration and U.S. Congress to take meaningful action to combat the climate emergency, a group of congressional staff members on Monday staged a sit-in at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Washington, D.C. office that ended in some of their arrests.
“Our house is on fire, and Manchin burned the stairs. Democratic leaders are walking away. We cannot.”
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The Democratic Republic of Congo is set to begin selling huge tracts of land to oil and gas giants later this week—a move that is being decried by environmental justice campaigners and local communities because it would enable new fossil fuel extraction in the second-largest old-growth rainforest on Earth, further endangering the world’s chances of staving off the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
“There is little to suggest that oil and gas revenues would be used for the public good rather than the personal enrichment of political elites.”
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Federal agency staffers and congressional office members have a message for President Joe Biden as his climate agenda languishes in the Senate: Ensure that fossil fuel industry ally Sen. Joe Manchin faces significant consequences for obstructing legislative progress.
In a letter first reported by The Lever on Monday, 165 staffers from federal health and environmental agencies and nearly 80 congressional offices urged Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to “strip Senator Manchin of his chairmanship of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, shut down the Mountain Valley Pipeline Project, eliminate the use of mountaintop removal and coal burning, and establish stringent water and air pollution standards.”
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In 1957, as the postwar economic boom led to a “great acceleration” in hydrocarbon energy use, a group of scientists working for a Texas-based petroleum company called Humble Oil (later renamed ExxonMobil) embarked on a study prompted by growing public concern over air pollution and new research on the consequences of burning fossil fuels. What they found was that the “enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” in the atmosphere was linked to the “combustion of fossil fuels.” Sixty-five years later, reality has proved to be even worse than their findings. With the unchecked combustion of fossil fuels releasing enormous quantities of carbon, the world is now on track to reach 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. At the most recent UN Climate Change Conference, the assembled heads of state produced, yet again, zero binding commitments to reduce those emissions. And despite the green rhetoric, only 6 percent of the fiscal stimulus packages implemented by the G20 nations in 2020 and 2021 have contributed to emissions reductions, even as oil company profits soared to record highs. Amid government inaction, it has also become clear that the private sector will not save us. We’ve been told that benevolent investors would reroute capital away from dirty energy sectors and toward the green industries of the future. But the promise of “socially responsible finance” has proved to be mostly a scam. Despite pledges to do otherwise, Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, has continued to invest in fossil fuel companies, and the production of coal—the dirtiest fossil fuel—is now on the rise.
Meanwhile, with neither states nor capital doing all that much to slash carbon use, emissions have fully rebounded from their pandemic slump. In 2021, the world broke two grim records: the highest recorded carbon dioxide emissions in history and the largest absolute annual increase ever. Year after year, Global North countries delay the promised climate financing for the Global South, which contributed the least to the crisis yet experiences its worst harms. Instead of redistribution, Global South governments can expect what Daniela Gabor and Isabella Weber call “carbon shock therapy,” wherein loans from the International Monetary Fund are conditioned on adopting regressive carbon pricing and cuts to fuel subsidies. Geopolitical conditions are adding fuel to this growing fire. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, governments in the US and Europe are rolling back renewable energy commitments.
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We were warned for decades about the death march we are on because of global warming. And yet, the global ruling class continues to frog-march us towards extinction.
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Energy/Mining
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The average price of electricity in Estonia is to increase to €215.56 per megawatt-hour on Tuesday, according to Nord Pool’s day-ahead prices* for July 26. The average price in Finland, meanwhile, will be more than 30 times cheaper at just €7.13 per megawatt-hour.
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There’s no denying that the cryptocurrency world is chock full of scammers, Ponzi schemes, and sketchy sketchy offerings. But, the prevalence of such things in that world has lead some to argue that if cryptocurrencies were banned, we’d likely have less scams and fraud online. I’ve yet to see any data to support that — because it sure looks like scammers are willing to use any and all options to move money around.
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Over the past four months, Big Oil has rushed to raise gasoline prices—sometimes charging far more at the pump than the increased cost of oil would warrant—and dawdled to lower them when crude’s valuation declined, according to a new analysis released Monday by the progressive watchdog group Accountable.US.
“The longer Big Oil’s predatory pricing scheme persists, the graver the cost to American consumers and the country’s economic health.”
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On December 1, 2021, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court delivered a landmark ruling revoking two previously-granted mining concessions from companies seeking to expand into the exceptionally biodiverse Los Cedros cloud forest. The decision, upheld by the Court with seven affirmative votes and two abstentions, obligates the Ecuadorian government to prevent mining and other extractive exploration within the protected forest area by repealing permits granted to ENAMI, Ecuador’s state mining company, and Cornerstone Capital Resources, its Canadian partner.
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U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna on Monday called out the Biden administration for not participating in an upcoming congressional hearing about leaded aviation fuel harming human health and the environment.
“Many airplanes continue to utilize leaded fuel, putting the health and safety of Americans—especially children—at risk.”
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There’s a lot of talk of off-gridding these days. Folks who want to get away from the electricity that controls our lives. The Internet. Social media. Twitter. Facebook. Meta. More and more AIs are taking over our “jobs” of perceiving and processing our experiences of the world. They were extensions and tools for our brains, but now they are beginning to influence what and how we do the cogito ergo sum thing. We are “lit up” all the time, overstimulated by electricity. Some philosophers fear we may be on the threshold of a dystopian nightmare, about to be absorbed into a hivemind blob we can’t escape from, devoid of individuality and spontaneity.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Porter is the director of Standing Trees, which he describes as the only organization explicitly focused on protecting and restoring wild, public lands in New England. He opposes these logging projects, and before meeting to hike, described to me the regional problem, as he sees it. “There’s really kind of an epidemic of roadless logging in both New Hampshire and Vermont, in the White Mountain and Green Mountain National Forests,” he explained. “Many thousands of acres at this point have been targeted. And many miles of roads have been punched into some of the wildest landscapes that we have in New England.”
Porter is particularly focused on logging in roadless sections of the forest, arguing that the Forest Service is exploiting a loophole in the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule (RACR), one of the final acts enacted by the Clinton Administration, to log in these areas. RACR put administrative protections on 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas throughout the United States, effectively preventing most management activities like road construction and logging. But, Porter said, the Forest Service has not applied that rule to roadless areas that were inventoried post-2001, a distinction he describes as “completely arbitrary” that effectively creates “two classes of roadless areas.”
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Finance
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In a statement on Monday marking 13 years since the federal minimum wage was last raised, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman challenged his ultra-millionaire Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, to live on $7.25 an hour, which is also the hourly pay floor in Pennsylvania.
“Another year, still no change to our shitty $7.25 an hour minimum wage,” said Fetterman, the Pennsylvania lieutenant governor whose populist campaign has attacked Oz as an out-of-touch carpetbagger running to serve the interests of wealthy elites and powerful corporations.
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Around half of U.S. seniors living alone can’t afford their basic necessities, statistics published Monday revealed, underscoring calls for legislation to expand Social Security and lower prescription drug prices.
“The biggest worry I have is not being able to afford living in my home or becoming ill. I know that medical expenses could wipe me out in no time financially.”
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With the Federal Reserve widely expected to enact another large interest rate hike at its policy meeting later this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal on Sunday to warn that the central bank’s approach to tackling inflation “risks triggering a devastating recession” without directly addressing many of the key drivers of recent price surges.
While acknowledging that inflation is “an urgent problem” and that interest rates can “play a key role in maintaining price stability,” the Massachusetts Democrat argued that aggressive rate hikes “are largely ineffective against many of the underlying causes of this inflationary spike,” such as gas and food prices.
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U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday again took aim at the CHIPS Act, proposed bipartisan legislation the Vermont independent noted contains tens of billions of dollars in “corporate welfare” for tech giants—taxpayer money he says would be better spent on programs of social uplift.
“The question we should be asking is this: Should American taxpayers provide the microchip industry with a blank check of over $76 billion?”
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Gloster is the latest hire to join the cyber office. In May, the White House announced that it was expanding the bureau with three new hires, including a former Microsoft executive and a former CIA official.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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— An Overview of Psychological Operations (PSYOP), Federal Research Division, Library of Congress (1989)
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We’ve explained the details of Twitter’s case against Elon Musk and the legal issues at play multiple times, but for reasons I don’t fully understand, the general narrative on Twitter seems to be that Elon is likely to win the case, and it’s because “Twitter lied about spam.” This is not even close to accurate, so I thought I’d lay out the details here in a format that can be sent to people if they start spouting off about how “Twitter lied about spam!” This post, by the way, was inspired by this tweet, which Elon promoted (he responded to the same guy who re-upped the post a few hours later).
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Mainstream political pundits gain wealth and clout by speculating about elections – who’s up, who’s down, who’s raising the most campaign cash (but almost never from whom, of course). Now, they’re looking ahead to the congressional midterm elections three months away.
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Multiple news reports revealed Monday that two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence recently were subpoenaed and appeared before the federal grand jury probing the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Marc Short, who served as Pence’s chief of staff, “was caught by an ABC News camera departing D.C. District Court on Friday alongside his attorney, Emmet Flood,” the outlet reported, sharing a still from the footage and citing sources familiar with the matter.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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I strongly oppose the attacks on Dr Berger who has, from the beginning, stood up for measures to prevent misinformation and against mass sickness and death during the COVID-19 pandemic that continues to rage across the world.
I am encouraged by the people calling out the anti-democratic action of AHPRA, which is silencing Dr Berger and his supporters such as the SEP in Australia. It’s extremely telling that Twitter has banned the SEP for calling this out, an action that should be understood and condemned by all.
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Despite this, Twitter has not responded to an appeal submitted by the SEP on Friday morning (AEST), demanding the reinstatement of the account and an explanation for the censorship.
Yesterday morning, a second appeal was submitted, which has also been posted publicly on Twitter by SEP National Secretary Cheryl Crisp. It states: [...]
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Three Democratic Party committees on Monday protested the refusal of the streaming service Hulu to run several campaign ads denouncing Republican policies ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, with the Disney-owned company saying the content of the ads was too “sensitive” and “controversial.”
As The Washington Post reported, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) made attempted ad buys with the streaming service on July 15 for ads regarding gun control policy and abortion rights.
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Unless you are a publisher—or happen to be reading this in prison—you may be unfamiliar with the “Exclusion Notice” that prison authorities use to justify the withholding of magazines and other printed matter from incarcerated subscribers. Over the past several months, we at The Nation have received a number of these notices from the Office of Publication Review (OPR) at the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry. True to its Orwellian name, the explanations the OPR provides for banning a given issue are always vague and lacking any specific citation of allegedly offending material. Our April 5/12, 2021, issue, for example, was suppressed because it allegedly “Promotes Superiority of One Group Over Another, Racism, Degradation” and “Acts of Violence.” Since they gave no further detail, we can only assume the authorities objected to the cover story, “Black Immigrants Matter.” Our July 26/August 2, 2021, issue, devoted to “This Way to Utopia: Dreams of a Better World,” was excluded on the grounds that it might “Encourage Sexual or Hostile Behaviors.” The June 13/20, 2022, issue, with a cover story profiling former Maine governor Paul LePage, was also banned for alleged racism. As a one-off, such egregious misreading might be funny. Almost. But Malcolm X says in his Autobiography that reading in prison “changed forever the course of my life”—as it has for countless other prisoners. So when the notices kept coming, we decided to do something about it.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Ukrainian journalist Denis Kazansky has accused Alexander Sladkov, a war correspondent for the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK), of fatally hitting a man with his car in the Luhansk region.
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Bellingcat’s lead Russian investigator Christo Grozev has refuted the FSB’s claims concerning his connection to an alleged Ukrainian operation to entice Russian Air Force pilots to hand over their planes.
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In mid-April, officials in Russia’s Bryansk region declared a “heightened terrorist threat level” in their jurisdiction. In the months since, the region has repeatedly come under shelling. On June 11, a fire broke out on a military base in Klintsy, a town just 46 kilometers (about 29 miles) from the Ukrainian border, and three days later, multiple shells hit the village of Zaimishche on Klintsy’s outskirts. Then, on July 5, three people in masks allegedly fired on the Klintsy base. The Ukrainian government has denied responsibility for at least one of the attacks in the area and has refrained from directly commenting on others. Russian news outlet 7×7 went to the Bryansk region to learn how local residents feel about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its consequences. With the site’s permission, Meduza is publishing an abridged translation of the report.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Pro-abortion rights advocates on social media Monday spoke out in defense of incoming medical students at University of Michigan who walked out of a ceremony to protest the keynote speaker’s pro-forced birth views, pushing back against claims that the students behaved “unprofessionally.”
Noting that Michigan has a decades-old state law criminalizing abortion care—which for now is blocked by a temporary injunction—Dr. Karen Gibbins said that accusations of unprofessionalism are coming from “the same people who help anti-abortion people get and maintain positions of power.”
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The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals tends to be the cop-friendliest jurisdiction. Unexpected outbursts by recently appointed Judge Don Willett aside, the Fifth Circuit tends to maintain the law enforcement status quo. It has held this line so frequently even the Supreme Court — which made qualified immunity the mess it is today — has had to send horrendous decisions back down the judicial pipe for the Appeals Court to fix.
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Simultaneously, it’s clear that young people in the labor movement want to bargain on climate issues in contract negotiations, according to LNS’s preliminary survey results. While it has been challenging to get some older workers involved in the climate struggle, Dedmond said, younger workers are quicker to see the connections between intersecting crises they’re dealing with. “Young workers bring a refreshing analysis to note that we don’t have to trade off good jobs for the environment and we don’t have to trade off the environment for good jobs — we can very much work in concert.”
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Iowa State University professor Dave Peters has been studying the effect of inflation on people in rural communities as part of the school’s Small Town Project. He found that this year alone, expenses for rural Americans had increased by 9.2%, but their earnings only increased by 2.6%.
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Officers arrived at the building in the 200 block of East Ohio Street around 4:30 p.m. after police in Alpharetta, Ga., requested a well-being check on Raheel Ahmad, 36, the reports state. His family had reported him missing from the Atlanta suburb, where he lived.
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In April 2021, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals forced itself through uncomfortable legal contortions to award qualified immunity to Denver, Colorado police officers who detained a man, seized his recording device, and made an apparent attempt to delete his recording.
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The proclamation “I will aid and abet abortion” appeared across social media soon after Donald Trump’s Supreme Court justices did what they were appointed to do: overturn Roe v. Wade. Leaving aside the question of whether it’s a great idea to advertise one’s intent to engage in legally risky behavior, the posts signaled rising anger over the court’s endorsement of forced pregnancy. Notably absent amid that anger was any actionable outrage from President Biden, who had nearly two months after a leaked Supreme Court draft to mobilize against the elimination of legal access to abortion in at least 13, and as many as 26, states. Instead Biden has only just begun “mulling” the option of declaring a public health emergency, after taking two weeks following the decision to issue an executive order that some called a decent first step and others described as toothless.
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Pope Francis puts on an indigenous headdress during a meeting with indigenous communities, including First Nations, Metis and Inuit, at Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church in Maskwacis, near …
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This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
In May, a gunman killed ten Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and livestreamed the event on Twitch. While that by itself was horrific, many were further disturbed upon learning that the shooter’s manifesto made references to memes and online platforms where he spent most of his time. It didn’t take long for public figures to demand law enforcement target the online pipeline that “radicalized” him.
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With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the battleground for abortion access now shifts to the states, even as the U.S. faces the worst rates of maternal mortality among all rich nations, with Black maternal mortality three to four times higher than the national average. Now a new documentary examines the crisis of Black maternal mortality through the families of two young Black women who died after giving birth. “Aftershock” is co-directed by Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt, who join us to discuss how Black women navigate a healthcare system built against them and efforts underway to reduce racial disparities. “We know that Black women’s health and infants’ health is the marker of the health of a nation,” notes Lee. “In a system that puts profit over people, doesn’t listen and center birthing people already, Black women are even more affected by this due to the systemic racism that’s ingrained into our system,” adds Eiselt.
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Democrats since WWII moved toward accepting a more ethnically diverse democratic society. And while they often fall short in pursuing one, they have rhetorically embraced a multicultural society. As a result, regardless of who controls Congress or the presidency in the next two elections, immigration and birth rates over the past half-century will soon result in an America with a population of less than half from European descendants.
The clash of these two views is at the heart of the debate between the Democrat and Republican parties. Candidate Donald Trump’s message was and still is wanting to Make America Great Again. It looks back to when European ethnic groups were shaping America’s future.
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In the last two decades, 50 countries around the world have liberalized abortion laws. Some reform is still restrictive, enabling abortion when there is a threat to the pregnant person’s life or when pregnancy results from rape. But while these changes have resulted in overturning total bans on abortion, the United States is going in the opposite direction.
The U.S. Supreme Court on June 24 overturned the nearly half-century-old Roe v. Wade case that guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion. The court enabled the ability of 50 individual U.S. states to ban abortion. Twenty-six states are either certain or considered likely to enact the ban.
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Russia’s annual spring draft concluded on July 15, marking the first round of conscription since Moscow began its full-scale war against Ukraine. According to Article 59, section 3 of the Russian Constitution, those who are unable to perform military service due to their beliefs have the right to substitute service — commonly referred to as “alternative civilian service” (ACS). Human rights defenders and activists note that interest in ACS has grown since the start of the war, as has the number of conscientious objectors. In turn, enlistment offices responded to this trend with threats and intimidation. Meduza reports on how conscientious objectors and those who provide them legal assistance experienced the spring draft.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Calcutta High Court (‘Calcutta HC’) disposed of the petition filed by Ashlesh Biradar challenging an internet shutdown order dated 03.03.2022 (‘Suspension Order’) issued by the State of West Bengal. The Court made an important observation that all state authorities are bound by both the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules, 2017 (‘Telecom Suspension Rules’) that regulate the manner in which telecom services are to be suspended by governments, as well as the directions of the Supreme Court in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India. This was the same matter in which the High Court issued India’s first reasoned interim order lifting an ongoing internet shutdown. This interim order has been confirmed by the final order.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Still, Amazon, ESPN+ and YouTube, which explored a bid for the rights in 2014, remain in the hunt, some of these people said. Brian Rolapp, the N.F.L.’s chief media and business officer, said in a statement that the league expects to finalize a deal in the coming months. “A number of companies are in strong position to potentially land Sunday Ticket, but we still have a ways to go in this process,” Mr. Rolapp added.
Some details of the negotiations have been previously reported by the SportsBusiness Journal.
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Monopolies
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Four corporations control 90% of the baby formula market in the United States, and as a national baby formula shortage drags on, it has impacted working-class families of color the most. We get an update from Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California, who just wrote an open letter urging leaders of federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration to take bolder action to address the shortage. Khanna discusses efforts to increase production domestically and supplement the shortage with formula from other nations, and why he is calling for President Biden to go further and pass antitrust laws to reduce reliance on corporate monopolies for vital products. “Why is it that we are so dependent on one or two manufacturers in this country?” says Khanna. “This is a problem not just in baby formula.”
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Copyrights
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There’s something odd going on in media reporting on the expiration of Disney’s copyright on the initial version of Mickey Mouse that is set to occur in 2024. Given the subject matter, we’ve talked Mickey Mouse quite a bit on this site, specifically noting the “coincidence” of copyright term extensions that have occurred roughly each and every time Disney’s copyright was about to expire. The context in this throat-clearing is, essentially: Mickey Mouse should have been in the public domain years and years ago but isn’t because Congress keeps extending the term so it never occurs.
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Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN continues its crackdown on pirate IPTV services. The Hollywood-supported group says it has reached a €70,000 settlement with a major vendor after information exposed through the court located the person in Brazil. BREIN, meanwhile, reports that it has shut down dozens of illicit IPTV vendors and hundreds of sites that offered these services.
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Christopher Boomer, whose games have been viewed over two billion times, recently obtained a DMCA subpoena compelling Roblox to identify alleged pirates. In its response, Roblox says the subpoena could affect hundreds of thousands of innocent gamers. In an interesting twist, Roblox cites a recent high-profile DMCA case involving Twitter and the right to anonymous speech.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Technical
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I’ve never considered putting analytics on my blog for this very reason (of course, with my self-imposed extremely strict design rules any javascript would be impossible either way). The follower count in the fediverse has much the same effect and require a conscious effort on my part to ignore.
It’s weird how we can get stuck staring at numbers. I guess this is why gamification so often works. We look at those digits and think “higher is better; I must climb the global scoreboard” as if there was such a thing as a competition.
* 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 IRC Logs at 2:04 am by Needs Sunlight
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
Enter the IRC channels now
IPFS Mirrors
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QmZMZ4fQYrB7q3dKZTQ8aEDA1HBPGo9qVcURLLCYR5siUn |
IRC log for #boycottnovell
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QmTSR9bDSTVUzHMxbJzqAJLqbJzTgva6v4hkRxk5Nayqn2 |
IRC log for #boycottnovell
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QmT23UXffsWiFMzGRzqjV1agekzDe9sFnk8a9osSnSv1Q5 |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
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QmdEd2CNy18Kgx8DWV51BB4Eion3XQbp4Gcg9QZbM5aibe |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
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QmVZ94bWriMj5mqsVZApwSyX7MDiHEZS6W1o9PsVXcXHRm |
IRC log for #techbytes
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QmNhz8gwivJx8TLKkK4NPUFuVPjbRDK2bpKRzFouYDfroM |
IRC log for #techbytes
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QmRyH35AYU67hCKhVzprCQt9dLfFoQmX3mbWgLDkrHT3xr |
IRC log for #techrights
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QmbiQUChxFcSHgV84DeLS2TFdAxrKexBkSnUSntcXtSGMq |
IRC log for #techrights
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Bulletin for Yesterday
Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmUmo6iUYY6LPz7rMxVJXtYjzryXZaVK76GtZjE3wXnAbk
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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We are starting to see a few companies such as Dell return to offering laptops which are running Linux, instead of Windows. There are also some Windows laptops which are advertised as being approved for use with Linux, if you wanted to switch after the fact. However, most Windows laptops can be convinced to boot to Linux if you are willing to put in the work. The Register describes the steps on doing this, in their case they are leaving the Windows install active so they can dual boot; perfect if you want to dip your toes into Linux without leaving Windows, or if you want a multipurpose laptop.
The first step should be to ensure Linux can actually see the hard drive, as there are now a number of common features which will prevent that, all of which can be solved by booting the laptop into Windows. The main worries are ensuring BitLocker is disabled, moving off of Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology, disabling Windows’ Fast Boot and making sure that your disk is set to run in AHCI, not RAID, as all of these will prevent Linux from even seeing your hard drive. Although Windows likes to get upset when you change some of these settings, the article contains simple command line tools that will smarten it up. Once your Linux boot disk can see the drive you are ready to get going.
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Server
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Virtio-net failover is a virtualization technology that allows a virtual machine (VM) to switch from a Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) device to a virtio-net device when the VM needs to be migrated from a host to another.
On one hand, the Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology allows a device like a networking card to be split into several devices (the Virtual Functions) and with the help of the VFIO technology, the kernel of the VM can directly drive these devices. This is interesting in terms of performance, because it can reach the same level as a bare metal system. In this case, the cost of the performance is that a VFIO device cannot be migrated.
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This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.13.5 and 1.13.6.
FYI, Go 1.18.4 has been released, which includes 9 security fixes. We recommend you to upgrade to this newer Go version if you are using Go locally.
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This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness and some additional support. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.14.1 and Istio 1.14.2.
FYI, Go 1.18.4 has been released, which includes 9 security fixes. We recommend you to upgrade to this newer Go version if you are using Go locally.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to be having some fun in the terminal with some cool, bizarre, fun, and just plain amusing terminal commands. Then we will be discussing Linux Mint’s latest beta release. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!
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We continue our introduction to Linux series with what you need to get started. From making bootable media through trying the live environment, installing and getting new software applications.
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Graham played with a Steam Deck, Will switched to Firefox, Félim cleaned up his home directory, and Joe obsessed over battery health. Plus Copilot follow-up, and more.
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Kernel Space
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This week I was planning on talking about Device Mocking with KUnit, as I’m currently working on my first unit test for a physical device, the AMDGPU Radeon RX5700. I would introduce you to the Kernel Unit Testing Framework (KUnit), how it works, how to mock devices with it, and why it is so great to write tests.
But, my week was pretty more interesting due to a limitation on the KUnit Framework. This got me thinking about the Kernel Symbol Table and compilation for a while. So, I decided to write about it this week.
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Instructionals/Technical
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When Typing update and upgrade commands, I got an error that there are some package conflicts if upgrading, and this error is from wxgtk. The system is say : remove wxgtk-common can breaks dependency wxgtk-common.
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Infrastructure as Code or IaC is a new approach in which coding is used to set up an infrastructure. This means instead of manually setting up VMs, networks, and other components of a network, we write code that describes the infrastructure and simply run that code to get the desired state. Terraform has emerged as an outstanding tool that uses the IaC approach.
Like many other tasks, Terraform can be used to create and manage an AWS S3 bucket. Versioning means keeping several versions, or you may simply call them variants of a file. Versioning in AWS S3 can be used to maintain and restore different variants of the object stored inside it. This has many benefits. For example, we can restore accidentally deleted items.
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It is impossible to avoid file creation and modification of OS routines under Linux file management. Every time a user logs into a Linux operating system environment, it is almost a surety or guarantee that we are going to create, modify, or create and modify several files.
Linux makes it possible to find the age and modification time associated with a targeted file. So how does finding a file’s age and modification time help us? Well, for users who want to be thorough with every file footprint associated with their Linux operating system, this article guide is for you.
Also, for users that are interested in career paths related to system auditing, determining the age and modification time associated with an existing file is a priceless skill.
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MySQL is a free, open-source database management system based on SQL or Structured Query Language. It is one of the most widely used database systems for several well-known applications. MySQL is used for data warehousing, e-commerce, and logging applications, and its most famous feature is web-based database storage and management.
While MySQL has many capabilities, its most common use is to store data for websites. This data can be in the form of user account information, product catalogs, or anything else that needs to be stored in a database. MySQL is a powerful tool that helps to keep track of this data and make it accessible to website visitors. In addition, MySQL makes it easy to retrieve data from the database and present it in a way that is easy to understand. For these reasons, MySQL is an essential tool for any website that needs to store and manage data.
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In this article, we will show you how to install novelWriter on Ubuntu systems
novelWriter is an open source plain text editor designed for writing novels assembled from many smaller text documents. It uses a minimal formatting syntax inspired by Markdown, and adds a meta data syntax for comments, synopsis, and cross-referencing. It is designed to be a simple text editor that allows for easy organisation of text and notes, using human readable text files as storage for robustness.
A markdown-like text editor designed for writing novels and larger projects of many smaller plain text documents.
It is designed to be a simple text editor that allows for easy organisation of text files and notes, with a meta data syntax for comments, synopsis, and cross-referencing between files, and built on plain text files for robustness.
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In this guide, we will show you how to install DeSmuME on Ubuntu systems.
DeSmuME is a great Nintendo DS emulator.
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Today we are looking at how to install FireAlpaca 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.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
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End-to-end encryption is an increasingly popular method that online services are using to ensure their users’ security. End-to-end encryption, also known as E2EE, encodes messages sent from one user to another in a way that ensures that only the sender and recipient can decode the message.
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Last week, I was working with another developer to build some customer Kernels that were testing different options. One thing his team wanted to test was what would happen if we switched the HZ (scheduler) value from 100 to 1000. Building a Kernel with this option is fairly trivial: we use make menuconfig to set the value we wanted and rebuilt. However, since the testing was going to need to compare to a baseline, we wanted to clearly label our Kernels. To do so, we modified the toplevel makefile.
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In this article, we will show you how to install Qmmp in Ubuntu systems.
qmmp (for Qt-based MultiMedia Player) is a free and open-source cross-platform audio player that is similar to Winamp. It is written in C++ using the Qt widget toolkit for the user interface.
It officially supports the operating systems Linux, FreeBSD and Microsoft Windows. In most popular Linux distributions, it is available through the standard package repositories. It is the only audio player not featuring a database that uses the Qt library.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Desktop Dimmer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Desktop Dimmer is a freely available and open-source application that can control the brightness of your desktop screen including primary and secondary brightness. To ensure eye safety, it includes color temperature control that can easily be set based on your choice.
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 Desktop Dimmer 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.
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In this article, we will illustrate how to install DeaDBeef player on Ubuntu systems
DeaDBeeF (as in 0xDEADBEEF) is a modular cross-platform audio player which runs on GNU/Linux distributions, macOS, Windows, *BSD, OpenSolaris, and other UNIX-like systems.
DeaDBeeF plays a variety of audio formats, converts between them, lets you customize the UI in almost any way you want, and use many additional plugins which can extend it even more.
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Games
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We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much? see ratings) perfectly with Proton since they were released in June 2022 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks…
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Use Linux long enough, and you’ll discover one of the many reasons why the open source operating system has become so beloved across the world. Choice. With Linux, you can either just go with the defaults that ship with your distribution, or you can install more options to give you a variety of choices. This goes for nearly every user-facing piece of software, from web browsers, email clients, file managers, image editors, and even desktop interfaces.
That’s right, if you don’t like GNOME, move to KDE, Cinnamon, Mate, Pantheon, Budgie, Xfce, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, or any number of desktop environments or window managers.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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It’s been a while since I last updated my progress. I’ve made significant progress after the last update.
I started creating the User model in the last update. By now, I have migrated the whole User model to the Database from the GSettings and refactored the codebase accordingly.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Fedora, the popular Linux distribution, will no longer incorporate software licensed under CC0, the Creative Commons “No Rights Reserved” license.
In order to support the wide re-use of copyrighted content in new works, CC0 provides authors “a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law.” The license arose in response to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended the duration of copyright by 20 years at the expense of the public domain.
But CC0 explicitly says the licensor does not waive patent rights, which for free and open source software (FOSS) is a potential problem. That means, for instance as described here, if you use CC0-licensed code in your project, and the author of that code later claims your project is infringing a patent they own regarding that code, your defense will be limited.
Avoiding the use of CC0-licensed code is one way to steer clear of these so-called submarine patents that could years later torpedo you.
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Debian Family
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Many free and open source software organizations make big statements about their commitment to freedom and empowerment. Personally, I feel those commitments are meaningless if they don’t include women.
Before the pandemic, I supported a number of events in the Balkan countries, including Kosovo, the host of the recent DebConf22. The events before the pandemic were all incredibly successful.
Why did none of these people come to DebConf?
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 745 for the week of July 17 – 23, 2022.
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Open Hardware/Modding [The past and future of open hardware, Purism, and Arduino]
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They say a sucker is born every day, and at least on the day of my birth, that certainly may have been true. I have a bad habit of spending money on open hardware projects that ultimately become vaporware or seriously under-deliver on their expectations. In my ledger are EOMA68, DragonBox Pyra, the Jolla Tablet — which always had significant non-free components — and the Mudita Pure, though I did successfully receive a refund for the latter two.1
There are some success stories, though. My Pine64 devices work great — though they have non-free components — and I have a HiFive Unmatched that I’m reasonably pleased with. Raspberry Pi is going well, if you can find one — also with non-free components — and Arduino and products like it are serving their niche pretty well. I hear the MNT Reform went well, though by then I had learned to be a bit more hesitant to open my wallet for open hardware, so I don’t have one myself. Pebble worked, until it didn’t. Caveats abound in all of these projects.
What does open hardware need to succeed, and why have many projects failed? And why do the successful products often have non-free components and poor stock? We can’t blame it all on the chip shortage and/or COVID: it’s been an issue for a long time.
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Nearly every person on earth has experienced some impact from the supply chain in the past two years. As we wrote in part 1 in April of 2021 “Prices will increase for consumer goods” and time has proven that accurate. We also declared the problem: “Parts, price, and lead-time” along with the solution: “Pay, price, and persevere.”
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In typical applications, the optimal mirror is as flat as possible. The flatter the mirror, the less optical distortion it imparts onto the reflected “image.” Distortion isn’t often desirable, so precision mirror manufacturers take great pains to manufacture ultra-flat mirrors. But distortion is sometimes a good thing, such as when you want to focus reflected light. In some cases, one might even want to adjust mirror distortion. To experiment with that idea, YouTuber Breaking Taps built a thermally actuated deformable mirror controlled by an Arduino.
Breaking Taps has something of an obsession with microscopes and, in turn, optics. That led him to the research that inspired this project. That research described a mirror that deforms based on thermal actuation, as opposed to some kind of MEMS (micro-electromechanical system) actuation. The use case for such a deformable mirror is in astronomy. A precisely controlled deformable mirror lets a telescope compensate for atmospheric optical distortions. Those distortions can change based on atmospheric conditions, which is why on-demand deformation has a use.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Enterprise DB helps organizations get the most out of PostgreSQL. Nearly 1,500 customers worldwide have chosen EDB software, services, and support. Their offices worldwide enable deploying their global expertise locally, and support customers more efficiently.
Scott Horn, CMO, EnterpriseDB, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:
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Programming/Development [Commits, Go, and criticism of developers]
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The process of writing “good” commit messages is sacrosanct to some developers. A quick search will pop up dozens of articles on “How to Write Good Commit Messages.” Proper style? Formatting. Imperative voice. Capitalization. Hard wraps.
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In Go and Golang programming, a scheduler is responsible for distributing jobs in a multiprocessing environment. When the available resources are limited, it is the task of the scheduler to manage the work that needs to be done in the most efficient way. In Go, the scheduler is responsible for scheduling goroutines, which is particularly useful in concurrency. Goroutines are like OS threads, but they are much lighter weight. However, goroutines always take the help of the underlying OS thread model and the scheduler it works on is at a much higher level than the OS scheduler. This Go programming tutorial provides a quick look at the concepts behind the Go scheduler.
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Four workers arrive at a construction site to help. They each take a shovel and are eager to start shoveling. But what is that? They notice some dents and some dried cement on the shovels. So what now?
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Meanwhile the last worker is busy waving around the shovel and complaining to everyone about the broken tools they have to use. This worker constantly demands a new shovel even though another worker made it clear that there would be no newer shovels any time soon and that nothing could change that. At the end of the day the efficiency of this approach lies at -160%. Not only was no work done by this worker because of all the waving and complaining. Furthermore, the constant complaining kept several other people busy who would have been able to do some work otherwise.
Dear contributors, please don’t be Worker 4.
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It’s pretty simple: if you’re not satisfied, switch to something you like, or even create something and share it with the community.
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Perl / Raku
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Python
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“In Python, PySpark is a Spark module used to provide a similar kind of Processing like spark using DataFrame, which will store the given data in row and column format.
PySpark – pandas DataFrame represents the pandas DataFrame, but it holds the PySpark DataFrame internally.
Pandas support DataFrame data structure, and pandas are imported from the pyspark module.
Before that, you have to install the pyspark module.”
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R
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There is a requirement to return only the common values from R data structures like vector, list, and dataframe.
In this article, we will discuss how to perform the intersect() operations in vector, list and dataframe.
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“When a production sensor fails, you’ll only be able to collect accurate measurements on four of the assembly line’s six measurement points. However, one of the quality sheet’s marks is illegible. You may be without samples for a whole shift. Therefore, this may influence your statistical computations. Missing data is not handled gracefully by several processes. In this article, we’ll look at a few different techniques to get rid of NA values in R. This permits you to restrict your computations to R data frame rows that meet a specific level of completion.
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Consider a requirement that you need to reorder the columns in an R data frame. How can you do that? Go through this article to get the solution for the given requirement.
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One day, Person X asked Person Y, “How do you get the values present in the data frame column in R language?” So, Person Y answered, “There are many ways to extract columns from the data frame.” So, he requested Person X to check this tutorial.
There are many ways to extract columns from the data frame. In this article, we will discuss two scenarios with their corresponding methods.
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“Visual representations of data include graphs and charts. Your goal as a data scientist is to make perfect sense of vast amounts of information. Three procedures are involved in data analysis. Obtaining Data, cleaning, and altering the data is an important part of the process. To further evaluate the data, construct a visual display from it. Data visualizations with the plot are tremendous tools for making complicated analysis easier to understand. But first, let’s go through some fundamental plotting principles like scatter plots. A scatterplot is a diagram that presents the levels of two numerical variables in a set of data as geometrical points within a Cartesian diagram.”
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Leftovers
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Science
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I’m a software guy, and have been a while. I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing or studying many a software failure, and even causing a few. Comes with part of the job. When a software system fails, we open it up, take a look at how it works, make a patch, then close ‘er up and release a new version. Done, more or less, usually. This is possible because the “how it works” part – the computer program – is generally available for inspection and modification. This is especially true in the free/open-source part of the industry, where all the program source code is available to end-users.
Enter the brave new world of neural-network or “machine learning” based AI – the new hotness in the last decade or so. All of the above goes out the window. There is nothing to open, because all there is is an array of numbers, millions and billions of them. There is no finding out how it works. All the developers know, roughly, is that after tremendous amounts of automated computation, the neural nets generally produce expected outputs for most inputs they tested. That means that if something goes wrong, there is usually no practical engineering fix, other than running a new batch of automated computation, hoping the new network learns by itself how to avoid the problematic case.
The result is something that looks like it works, but we don’t really know how & why. What could go wrong?
Tesla autopilots are based on computer vision, which uses a bunch of neural networks that consume video data from several cameras around the car. Some researchers successfully fooled the neural nets to misinterpret speed limit signs by putting little stickers on real signs. We know there have been a bunch of autopilot crashes where the software was just not good enough, where road markings were weird or construction equipment confused the thing. Hey, don’t worry, a later version probably corrects some of those problems, maybe!
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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My vitamin D wasn’t low during my last few blood tests, as much as it didn’t register. I was warned that it could lead to all sorts of health problems later in life, and could even get me into trouble if I caught something serious like Covid.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Security
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Well, the popularity of blogging websites has increased multifold times. With this, the Ghost CMS has currently become one of the most popular open source blogging platforms around.
Ghost is a free and open-source blogging platform. It is written in JavaScript and MIT License distributes it. Ghost is designed to ease the process of publishing content online for both individual bloggers and online publications.
It is simple, yet powerful, and provides everything you need to create a beautiful website or blog. One of the things that set Ghost apart from other CMS options is its focus on security. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the key security features of Ghost and how they can benefit your website or blog.
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Environment
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says he is open to “sensible” changes to the government’s climate reform, but will not buckle under pressure from the Greens to increase the 43% emissions reduction target. Michael West on Albo’s first two months in office and the looming climate clash.
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Finance
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The 26 billionaires’ collective wealth grew by $500 billion between 2013 and 2018 while their total federal income taxes were just $24 billion. The taxes paid were not based on wealth growth, which under current law is not taxed, but rather on “taxable income”: wages, private business earnings, dividends, interest, profits from the sale of stocks and other investments, and other sources. As is usual among the ultra-wealthy, that taxable income—in this case, $132.2 billion—is far smaller than their leap in fortunes.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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I’ve been learning a lot of random things recently. The other week, I signed up for an electronics course on Ohmify and bought a bunch of components and tools so that I could follow along. I’m having a lot of fun trying out the different activities on that website. I just started so I’ve only made simple circuits, so I have a lot of learning to do! I also need to get a drawer for all these components that I got online because it’s a bit of a mess right now.
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Technical
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Alternative frontends refers to websites/services such as Newpipe or Invidious for YouTube.
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If something exists, there must be a reason behind it, even if it does not make any sense. With alternative frontends, the most “normie” response would be to be able to access contents from those centralised sites indirectly, such as, when the access of youtube.com is denied in a place, the person can self host (or sometimes just use a new/unpopular instance) Invidious, and with that way they can access contents within YouTube without using a proxy/VPN/custom DNS.
The other reason is to view content that requires an account. Sonetimes the content owner/website does not want you to see contents without an account/verification, which often times does anything but annoyance. Using such software allow users to view such contents without the need of an account/verification.
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He goes on to list a few C “competitors” and asks if there are any more. He mentioned most of what I would have, although I would point out that (as much as I love it) Rust has terrible compile times. I can only speak to languages that I have some experience with, so I’ll share one modern and one old that are worth considering.
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This is a nostalgia inspired bonus. My first computer, like a lot of kids growing up in the 80′s, was a Tandy TRS-80. It was primitive, ugly, and gave me a headache if I stared at the screen for too long. That said, I had a lot of fun abusing GOTO in order to write choose your own adventure style games in Basic.
FreeBasic is surprising. Like Nim, it transpiles to C and then from there compiles to native code. And yes, you can actually write usable programs this way – the compiler itself is written in FreeBasic. While I’m offering this as a bit of a tongue in cheek answer, it’s still pretty cool.
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Science
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A stretch of airspace spanning 165 miles (265 km) across England is set to become the world’s longest dedicated drone corridor, with the UK government approving plans for the initiative as part of a wider push into next-generation aviation. Called Skyway, the drone superhighway will connect towns and cities, and will initially be used to survey infrastructure such as roads and ports.
The Skyway project will be centered on the town of Reading, and will connect with other towns and cities in the area, including Oxford, Cambridge and Milton Keynes. UK company Altitude Angel is leading the initiative, with the proposal officially approved by UK Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng at the Farnborough International Airshow on Monday.
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Programming
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After installing regolith2 desktop (Ubuntu 22.04) on my System76 laptop I have been tryinging to install Profanity 0.12.x (xmpp client) from source but “make” was always failing.
When the compiling failed, I tried installing from the os repo (version 0.11.1) but when I tried connecting to the server it would fail.
When compiling the latest (v0.12.1) from source, I was very careful to make sure all of the dependencies were installed but I still got errors when running make.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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