07.28.22
Posted in News Roundup at 6:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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A huge number of modern companies know about Linux firsthand. Many of them have been using various distributions in one form or another for many years. It is a large family of open-source operating systems running on a single core. Initially, users used it on their computers, and for many years large companies have been using it to work with servers. Most companies using Linux are large IT organizations.
Many people wonder why large companies use it. What are its benefits? Maybe Linux is suitable not only for large companies but also for small and medium businesses.
Linux is really of interest not only for large IT companies but also for small and medium-sized businesses. We will cover the top benefits of using this operating system and explain why you should use it.
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Switching to a new operating system is a whole different experience. As the interface and features change, it can take some time to explore and understand the new environment you are working in.
Linux is more of a command line-based OS as compared to Windows and macOS, which rely mostly on their graphical user interfaces or GUI. This is one of the reasons why new Linux users often find it confusing and make some beginner mistakes that ultimately dampen their experience.
To get the most out of your new Linux device, here are 10 mistakes you should avoid as a first-time Linux user.
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Desktop/Laptop
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If you look around Google’s Mountain View, CA offices, you’ll see Windows machines, Chromebooks, Macs — and gLinux desktops. G what, you ask? Well, in addition to relying on Linux for its servers, Google has its very own Linux desktop distribution.
You can’t get it — darn it! — but for more than a decade, Google has been baking and eating its own homemade Linux desktop distribution. The first version was Goobuntu. (As you’d guess from the name, it was based on Ubuntu.)
[...]
To make all this work without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, Google created a new workflow system, Sieve. Whenever Sieve spots a new version of a Debian package, it starts a new build. These packages are built in package groups since separate packages often must be upgraded together. Once the whole group has been built, Google runs a virtualized test suite to ensure no core components and developer workflows are broken. Next, each group is tested separately with a full system installation, boot, and local test suite run. The package builds complete within minutes, but testing can take up to an hour.
Once that’s done, all the new packages are merged with the newest gLinux package pool. Then, when Google decides it’s time to release it into production, the team snapshots that pool. Finally, it rolls out the fresh release to the fleet. Of course, it’s not going to just dump it on users. Instead, it uses Site reliability engineering (SRE) principles such as incremental canarying to make sure nothing goes awry.
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If the real CDE is too much hard work for you or for your computer, there’s a new version of the Not So Common Desktop Environment.
Very nearly a decade ago, we reported that the official Common Desktop Environment had been made open source. In its day, CDE was pretty much the unified desktop environment for commercial Unix OSes: it ran on almost every proprietary Unix and Unix-like OS there was, from IBM AIX to DEC’s Tru64, even on DEC’s OpenVMS.
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It is not uncommon for users to want to run a program targeted to one operating system on another type of system. With the increasing prevalence of smartphones, Android has become the world’s most widely used operating system. So users may want to run Android apps on Linux systems in order to get access to a game or other app that is not available in a Linux version or to develop mobile apps on their desktop system. The Waydroid project provides a way to run those apps on Linux, which means they can run on a variety of devices, including Linux-based smartphones like the PinePhone.
Waydroid is similar in concept to the Windows compatibility layer Wine. The fact that Android runs on the Linux kernel makes properly running Android apps on other Linux systems much simpler than doing so for Windows software. It is not possible to simply run Android apps directly on a regular Linux operating system, though, because they depend on a different user-space environment. However, by using kernel features such as namespaces, it is possible to run the entire Android user space in a container on a Linux system. This is the technique used by Waydroid; it runs a complete Android system in a container in much the same way that it is possible to, for example, run Debian in a container on Fedora. That allows Waydroid to have better performance than it would have running in a virtual machine or an emulator.
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Linux users can get in on some of the laptop deals taking place right now, as Lenovo has discounted its popular ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 laptop, and this model includes Linux. Right now you can purchase the laptop for just $1,238, which is a massive savings of nearly $1,100, as it regularly costs $2,336. You’ll need to use the eCoupon code THINKCTODEAL1 at checkout, and businesses, students, and teachers are eligible to save up to an extra 5% as well. If you’d like to expand your screen real estate with this impressive laptop, you can browse some of the desktop monitor deals taking place alongside it.
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Server
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IVM Development Group is pleased to announce the release of pg_ivm 1.2.
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pg_ivm is an extension module that provides Incremental View Maintenance (IVM) feature.
Incremental View Maintenance (IVM) is a way to make materialized views up-to-date in which only incremental changes are computed and applied on views rather than recomputing. pg_ivm provides a kind of immediate maintenance, in which materialized views are updated immediately after a base table is modified.
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Traditionally, system administrators have been responsible for designing, implementing, and managing hardware and underlying operating systems. However, advances in edge computing, machine learning (ML), and intelligent applications have broadened sysadmins’ scope of work and skillset required for software development projects.
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Unless your application is entirely stateless, it will need to store and retrieve persistent data. This is where databases come in — they employ a simple query language that allows authorized users to retrieve and edit data. And now that inroads have been made to enable stateful Kubernetes deployments, many organizations are looking to bring the same scalability advantages of containerization and Kubernetes to database management.
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is home to a wide variety of helpful open source projects. These tools span everything from cloud native networking, to continuous integration, scheduling and orchestration and many other areas. Below, we’ll review three CNCF projects that can be used to support cloud-native databases. These tools specifically help scale the management of distributed databases in the cloud.
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Google recently announced the general availability of Rocky Linux optimized for Google Cloud. The new images are customized variants of Rocky Linux, the open-source enterprise distribution compatible with Red Hat Enterprise.
Developed in collaboration with CIQ, the support and services partner of Rocky Linux, the new images are a direct replacement for CentOS workloads. Started by Gregory Kurtzer, the founder of the CentOS project and CEO of CIQ, Rocky Linux is a downstream, binary-compatible release built using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code. The distribution was born after Red Hat decided not to provide full updates and maintenance updates for CentOS 8 as initially announced.
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Netcraft ☛ July 2022 Web Server Survey [Ed: Microsoft decimated to nothing in Web servers; down sharply on all counts]
Apache continues to hold on to the top spot in the market share of the top million busiest sites with 22.33%, with nginx in close second at 21.55%. Both however have seen decreases in market share of 0.22pp and 0.1pp respectively, with Cloudflare increasing by 0.08pp to 20.26%. If this trend continues, we should expect to see Cloudflare overtake its rivals within the next year.
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My name is Dominhique Dumont, DevOps freelance in Grenoble, France.
My goal is to share my experience regarding a production issue that occurred last week where my client complained that the applications was very slow and sometime showed 5xx errors. The production service is hosted on a Kubernetes cluster on Azure and use a MongoDB on ScaleGrid.
I reproduced the issue on my side and found that the API calls were randomly failing due to timeouts on server side.
The server logs were showing some MongoDB disconnections and reconnections and some time-out on MongoDB connections, but did not give any clue on why some connections to MongoDB server were failing.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Debugging Lisp in Deep Space, 0 Dependency Websites with OpenBSD & AsciiDoc, Deleting old snapshots on FreeBSD, Full multiprocess support in lldb-server, Basic fix between pf tables and macros, and more
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Joel and the orville.
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Time to check out the most recommended lightweight Linux distro from the audience – antiX! Color me surprised.
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Do you still place icons on your desktop? If so, stop! This isn’t 1990. Desktop icons are a paradigm of the very distant past that no longer make sense on modern operating systems and modern desktop environments.
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Hello and welcome to the 476th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this deep dive episode, the hosts interview Torsten Clay, N4OGW, the author of so2sdr, a software application for doing single-op, multi-radio contesting. The program allows for logging, rig control, station mapping on a band plot and much more. Thank you for listening to this episode. We hope you find it informative and enjoyable. Have a great week.
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Sometimes big corporations don’t care if small FOSS projects make fan projects, other times there attention will be grabbed as is the case with the Notkia project which recieved a threatening email from the Nokia corporation.
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Kernel Space
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The BPF subsystem allows programmers to write programs that can run safely in kernel space. All memory accesses and function calls in BPF programs are statically checked for safety using the in-kernel verifier, which analyzes programs in their entirety before allowing them to be loaded. While this allows the kernel to safely run BPF programs, it heavily restricts what those programs are able to do. Among these constraints is a rule that programs cannot store pointers into BPF maps for use (such as dereferencing them or passing them to the kernel in kfunc and BPF helper invocations) at a later time. A patch set by Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi adds this capability to BPF.
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A page-table entry (PTE) is relatively small, requiring just eight bytes to refer to a 4096-byte page on most systems. It thus does not seem like a worrisome level of overhead, and little effort has been made over the kernel’s history to reduce page-table memory consumption. Those eight bytes can hurt, though, if they are replicated across a sufficiently large set of processes. The msharefs patch set from Khalid Aziz is a revised attempt to address that problem, but it is proving to be a hard sell in the memory-management community.
One of the defining characteristics of a process on Linux (or most other operating systems) is a distinct address space. As a result, the page tables that manage the state of that address space are private to each process (though threads within a process will share page tables). So if two processes have mappings to the same page in physical memory, each will have an independent page-table entry for that page. The overhead for PTEs, thus, increases linearly with the number of processes mapping each page.
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One of the key selling points of the BPF subsystem is that loading a BPF program is safe: the BPF verifier ensures that the program cannot hurt the kernel before allowing the load to occur. That guarantee is perhaps losing some of its force as more capabilities are made available to BPF programs but, even so, it may be a bit surprising to see this proposal from Artem Savkov adding a BPF helper that is explicitly designed to crash the system. If this patch set is merged in something resembling its current form, it will be the harbinger of a new era where BPF programs are, in some situations at least, allowed to be overtly destructive.
As Savkov notes, one of the major use cases for BPF is kernel debugging, a task which is also often helped by the existence of a well-timed crash dump. By making the kernel’s panic() function available to BPF programs, Savkov is trying to combine the two by allowing a BPF program to cause a crash — and create a crash dump — when it detects the conditions that indicate a problem that a developer is looking for. Savkov is seemingly not the only one wanting this capability; Jiri Olsa noted that he has gotten a request for this feature as well.
Making panic() available to BPF has some obvious hazards, so one would expect that there would be some guard rails put into place. In this case, the first step is a new flag, BPF_F_DESTRUCTIVE, that must be provided when a program that will invoke destructive operations (such as a panic() call) is loaded. If this flag is not present, the BPF verifier will reject the loading of a program that contains calls to any destructive helper functions, of which panic() is the only one (so far).
Even then, the panic() helper function is only available to tracing programs. It makes little sense, after all, for an infrared decoder to be able to panic the system, though this restriction will prevent a complete implementation in BPF for remote controls featuring a “panic” button. Then, there is a new sysctl knob (kernel.destructive_bpf_enabled) that must be set to a non-zero value; otherwise the panic() call will not be allowed. Even when the sysctl knob has been set, the process on whose behalf the BPF program is running must have the CAP_SYS_BOOT capability.
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Intel has been preparing Idle driver support for the company’s next-gen Xeon CPUs, codenamed “Sapphire Rapids”, over the last five months. Michael Larabel of Phoronix notes that there is still a limitation within the upcoming Intel Scalable CPUs. The processor power state handling is mutually exclusive; specifically, core C-states (C-states) C1 and C1E, or “C1 Enhanced”. The company has been unable to activate both C-states simultaneously, but with the current firmware update published by Intel, it appears a fix has been manufactured.
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Leave it to AMD to continue to add some last-minute coding before the merge window for Linux 5.20 opening next week, reports Michael Larabel of the website Phoronix. Typically, cutoffs for any feature work placed into the DRM-Next queue for each Linux kernel cycle ends near the “-rc6″ point of the cycle. The closing window has yet to stop AMD from attempting to ensure any finalizing of drivers for the upcoming Linux 5.20 kernel for their upcoming RDNA 3 graphics architecture.
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Applications
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Undoubtedly, Notepad Next is an amazing alternative to Notepad++ for Linux users. Notepad Next stands out with a similar interface to Notepad++ and cross-platform support. However, we all know Notepad++ as a popular source code editor for Windows users. It gradually becomes the best alternative to Notepad for Windows because it has more features. Alas! Notepad++ is not available for Linux enthusiasts.
Though a Snap package of Notepad++ is available for Linux users, it’s not up to the mark. Therefore, I discovered something that tries to provide a refined version of Notepad++ for Linux users. Yes, I’m talking about Notepad Next.
Simply Put, for Linux users, Notepad Next is trying to re-implement the features that Snap package Notepad++ offers along with a similar-looking interface. Isn’t it interesting? Let’s dig it deep with me.
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EasyOCR is a free developer-friendly OCR “Optical Character Recognition” that supports 80+ languages including Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and Cyrillic.
EasyOCR is written in the Python programming language. It can be installed as a Python package, and integrates well with other Python Frameworks like Django, Flask, and others.
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Instructionals/Technical
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If you are facing a problem “Cannot initiate the connection to in.archive.ubuntu.com:80” error while performing the system update or installing some application then here is the solution.
Linux can make new users a little annoying when some warning or error appears, however, resolving errors is the best way to get one step closer to becoming an experienced Linux user. However, coming to the point, i.e how to solve this error.
Such an error appears when the default repository servers are not reachable by our system. In such a case, we can switch to the main servers of Ubuntu to download and install the required packages on our system.
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The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to connect to a single-board-computer like RaspberryPi, Rock64, or more generally a system with a Linux OS. This connection via SSH allows the user to execute commands on the remote machine from another machine.
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If you need Safari on your Linux PC, you’ll be happy to know that it is possible to install it. In this guide, we’ll show you exactly how you can set up Apple Safari on Linux.
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Arch Linux is powerful. It’s also very reliable, secure and all the things that make Linux such a great operating system. However, one thing that prevents many new users from adopting this distribution is its complexity. Arch Linux is simply not Ubuntu. And while there are tools such as the Octopi package manager GUI that make Arch easier to use, it can still be difficult to get applications such as Spotify installed with ease.
Sure, you can add the AUR repository, but even then Arch makes you trudge through a never-ending cycle of dependencies. Software installation alone on Arch Linux can permanently turn a new user away from the platform.
What do you do? You turn to Flatpak and Snap.
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Jack Wallen walks you through the process of deploying Restya with Docker so you can start using Kanban boards in minutes.
I love a good Kanban board. Whether you go with a third-party host or host the boards yourself, there are tons of options available. Given my penchant for Linux, I tend to aim for open source solutions whenever possible.
Restyaboard is one such open source option for anyone looking to deploy an easy-to-use, feature-rich Kanban platform. Restyaboard includes everything you’ll need for a Kanban solution, such as multiple books, drag and drop, list copy, attachments, archive, private and public boards, filters, deadlines, built-in calendar, labels, iCal feed and custom board backgrounds. I show you how you can get Restya deployed in minutes with the help of Docker.
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This tutorial will go over how to set up MariaDB Master-Master Replication on Debian 11 Servers. Additionally, we will go over how to synchronize time using Chrony between MariaDB servers.
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Citra is an experimental open-source Nintendo 3DS emulator/debugger written in C++. It is written with portability, with builds actively maintained for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Citra emulates a subset of 3DS hardware and therefore is useful for running/debugging homebrew applications, and it is also able to run many commercial games!
The project was founded in 2014 and has since seen over 150 contributors! The team is very active and regularly releases new updates. The list of contributors can be found on GitHub. Citra is not affiliated with Nintendo. However, the company has expressed support for the project. In 2019, a Nintendo employee even contributed code to Citra! This shows that Nintendo is open to unofficial projects like Citra, as long as they are not harmful to the company’s business. Thanks to the hard work of the Citra team, fans of Nintendo 3DS games can enjoy their favorite titles on their PC or phone.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Citra on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using two different methods using the command line terminal along.
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Running a cron job every 5 minutes is a commonly used cron schedule. In this quick how-to article, you will learn to schedule a cronjob to run every 5 minutes.
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Over the years, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to use the Linux top command to troubleshoot problems on both server and desktop deployments. Top has always been one of those tools that never fails to feel as if it should be able to do more but never can. That’s why I’m always on the lookout for a top replacement.
When on the desktop, there’s always GNOME System Monitor, which is a very well-designed GUI that makes managing processes very simple. But even that tool has its limitations.
So when I came across a tool named btop, I was pretty thrilled to see that it took that old standby and gave it some much-needed features. Not only does btop list out various system usages (memory, disks, network and processes), but it also allows for interaction with the mouse. Even on a server installation, you can point and click your way around btop to view processes as a tree, hide or reveal certain displays, and access an options menu where you can tweak the look and feel of the display.
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Running a program on an Arduino is easy, but have you tried doing it with a Pi? The Raspberry Pi is powerful enough to be a standalone computer and it’s also good enough to program a microcontroller.
Here, we’ll use a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ to make an Arduino Uno blink an LED!
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I love a good Kanban board. Whether you go with a third-party host or host the boards yourself, there are tons of options available. Given my penchant for Linux, I tend to aim for open source solutions whenever possible.
Restyaboard is one such open source option for anyone looking to deploy an easy-to-use, feature-rich Kanban platform. Restyaboard includes everything you’ll need for a Kanban solution, such as multiple books, drag and drop, list copy, attachments, archive, private and public boards, filters, deadlines, built-in calendar, labels, iCal feed and custom board backgrounds. I show you how you can get Restya deployed in minutes with the help of Docker.
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Arch Linux is powerful. It’s also very reliable, secure and all the things that make Linux such a great operating system. However, one thing that prevents many new users from adopting this distribution is its complexity. Arch Linux is simply not Ubuntu. And while there are tools such as the Octopi package manager GUI that make Arch easier to use, it can still be difficult to get applications such as Spotify installed with ease.
Sure, you can add the AUR repository, but even then Arch makes you trudge through a never-ending cycle of dependencies. Software installation alone on Arch Linux can permanently turn a new user away from the platform.
What do you do? You turn to Flatpak and Snap.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KDE Plasma on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, KDE is a free, open-source desktop environment for those unfamiliar with KDE Desktop. It provides Linux users with an alternative graphical interface to customize their desktop environment and applications for everyday use enhancement. The community of KDE developed 200 plus applications that are supported by Linux-based operating systems such as Krita, Kdenlive, Kdevelop, GCompris, and so on.
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 KDE Plasma 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 Linux, all directories and files have access permissions. You can use chmod to set your preferred access rights for different users. But what decides their default permissions? Let’s talk about umask.
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Games
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The upcoming Godot 3.5 is now considered feature complete, and has received a lot of bugfixes and improvements over the past weeks thanks to all the testers and developers who reported and fixed issues. We are now at the Release Candidate stage, finalizing everything so that we can release 3.5-stable for all users.
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We just announced that we’ll enter feature freeze next week to focus on stabilizing the existing functionality in Godot 4.0 and prepare the first beta release. But we’re not there yet and we’ll keep having frequent alpha builds until we’re ready to slap the beta label on the engine. So here we go with 4.0 alpha 13!
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We’re determined to deliver a stable release of Godot 4.0 as soon as possible. To achieve this, we need to shift the focus from implementing new and exciting features towards stabilizing the existing functionality and fixing bugs.
The road to Beta 1
With that in mind, effective August 3rd we’re entering a feature freeze stage, and no changes to the roadmap for Godot 4.0 will be expected. If you have pending work that you absolutely want to see in Godot 4.0, submit it before August 3rd. You can either open a pull request or contact the Production team directly for your work to be considered.
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In the last edition, I was talking about adding an appropriate dataset to the Comparator Activity. This blog majorly consists of its implementation and the new changes that we now have in the comparator.
[...]
Other issues investigated included making the layout responsive for different screen sizes, handling errors in the log, fixing the logic to avoid multiple wins, adding consistency in variable declarations and their datatypes, adding canvas to the entire exercise view zone, and some issues that arose as a result of the activity’s restructuring, such as selection on tapping the rows and default selection of the first row when the activity opens.
Apart from this, dividing the repeated code snippets into a separate component file and keyboard binding for the activity have also been implemented this time.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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A major part of the on-going preparations of version 6 of the KDE Frameworks is to see that the API breakage due to happen versus version 5 is mostly an API dropage. And software using KDE Frameworks 5 can already find and use the future-proof API in the version 5 series, next to the legacy one. So that the very hurdle to take on porting from KF5 to KF6 is minimal, ideally just changing “5” to “6”, once one has managed to get rid of using the legacy API. This also matches the approach taken by Qt for Qt5 & Qt6, so there is a common API consumer experience. And adding new API already in KF5 allows to field-test its practicability, so KF 6.0 starts with proven API.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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libadwaita is a huge controversy in the Linux desktop community, because of GNOME’s stance towards themes.
I have heard a lot of misinformation surrounding GTK4 and libadwaita, mainly based on misunderstanding. I’d like to take some time to explain what GTK4 and libadwaita are, why GNOME decided to go this route and why it’s a huge step in the right direction.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Garuda Linux brings an important feature to the Arch world: snapshots and rollback.
Garuda Linux is an Arch derivative founded by Indian developer Shrinivas Vishnu Kumbhar, and named – as is the national airline of Indonesia – after the Hindu demigod who is the flying mount of Vishnu. Garuda is one of the newer distros we’ve looked at, founded in 2020.
We have recently looked at Arch Linux itself, and a couple of Garuda’s other relatives – Manjaro Linux and EndeavourOS. Like its progenitor, Garuda is a rolling-release distro, but it periodically issues updated ISO images for installing new machines, so we took the new mid-July snapshot, codenamed “Talon”, as a chance to take a look. We tried the Xfce version, but the selection of desktops is comprehensive: both a Mac-like tuned KDE edition, a KDE Lite version and a KDE-Git edition, plus GNOME, Cinnamon, LXQt, and MATE, and a choice of tiling window managers: Wayfire, Sway, i3WM, and Qtile.
Up front, Garuda has quite startling system requirements: it wants a full 30GB for its root partition, which is two or three times more than most distros ask. There is a good reason, though: Garuda formats the root partition with Btrfs, and uses the Snapper tool developed by SUSE.
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JJM (esmourguit in the forum) has sent me updates for the French langpack.
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pupRadio streamed online radio and TV stations; however, it was discussed on the forum that most of the TV URLs didn’t work. Philh (forum name) has contributed to pupRadio over the years, and has now taken out the “pupTelly” component, so it now only steams audio.
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BSD
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For more than 7 and a half years now, OPNsense is driving innovation through
modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple
and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, fast adoption
of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD
licensing.
22.7, nicknamed “Powerful Panther”, features the upgrade to FreeBSD 13.1,
PHP 8.0, Phalcon 5, stacked VLAN and Intel QuickAssist (QAT) support,
DDoS protection using SYN cookies, MVC/API pages for IPsec status and
Unbound overrides, new APCUPSD and CrowdSec plugins plus much more.
LibreSSL flavour is scheduled for removal at the end of this series
and will likely receive no further maintenance. Software failing to
work properly starting with Tor will have its plugin removed from the
flavour from now on to be able to keep updating the software to their
latest versions in the OpenSSL flavour. The next major upgrade will
automatically transition to the OpenSSL flavour, but we would encourage
everyone to switch between 22.7.x for the least amount of possible impact.
Download links, an installation guide[1] and the checksums for the images
can be found below as well.
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Fedora / Red Hat / IBM
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We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.11.1 is generally available as of July 27, 2022.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
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What makes a great leader? Some of the most important and inspirational qualities have little to do with technology.
Recently, finalists in the 2022 National CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards each shared a piece of advice they had collected over their careers. We’ve rounded up the ten best quotes on soft skills below. Read on, or download the complete quote book for advice on leadership, soft skills, career development, strategy, and more.
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Organizations across industries are turning to data and analytics to solve business challenges. A survey by New Vantage Partners found that 91 percent of enterprises have invested in AI. However, the same study found that just 26 percent of these firms have AI in widespread production.
Organizations are struggling to solve business challenges with AI. They find that building machine learning (ML) applications takes time and requires expensive maintenance and talent that’s in short supply. Leaders say that over 70% of data science projects report minimal or zero business impact.
Here’s how low-code ML platforms can help tackle these challenges.
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Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 18 July at 1300 UTC. The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Ubuntu ☛ Compassionate doc | Ubuntu [Ed: Canonical Says It “Want[s] to be the Best Open-Source Company in the World”, Then Promotes Microsoft’s Proprietary Surveillance While Microsoft Attacks Linux]
The wonderful people that make up Canonical have a goal: We want to be the best open-source company in the world, period.
I think it’s also a goal that’s espoused by our management, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that every person who works here probably wants to make the world a better place, probably through open-source software. It’s in our blood.
I’m really here because I want to write great documentation. Technical writers sometimes enjoy a rather low standard of excellence, to be honest. I’m very happy when someone finds a tiny little mistake in an obscure code example near the bottom of a long article; that means they’re reading it, and that’s often the main criteria of success for documentation. But that’s not the main criterion for me.
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One of the main challenges within the automotive industry today is finding a solution that allows for efficient automotive fleet management. As our vehicles become more connected and require more security and safety than ever before, it becomes extremely important to have a fleet management solution that provides seamless software updates, data analysis and other functionalities.
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Ubuntu ☛ Let’s get confidential! Canonical Ubuntu Confidential VMs are now generally available on Microsoft Azure [Ed: Canonical, a division of Microsoft Corp. Microsoft spying means "confidentiality", according to the sellouts at Canonical, who are boosting those who actively attack GNU/Linux instead of filing antitrust complaints.]
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Open Hardware/Modding
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If you’ve been thinking about investigating the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture, there’s never been a better time — and StarFive is hoping its VisionFive, a single-board computer built around a pair of SiFive RISC-V processor cores, will be just the push you need to jump in and play.
With 8GB of RAM, a number of acceleration coprocessors, Linux support, and a familiar 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, the VisionFive ticks a lot of boxes, particularly in the wake of SiFive’s discontinuance of the HiFive Unmatched — but can it pass our hands-on testing?
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® ShenYu™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).
Apache ShenYu is a Java-native API Gateway for service proxy, protocol conversion, and API governance. It provides a component-rich, easy to extend, and simple to deploy API gateway that reduces costs. ShenYu Gateway is written in Java and its components support multiple languages including .NET, Python, Go, and Java, and deployment with Lua, NGINX, Kubernetes, and Docker.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Different is dope. Firefox has always stood by this. It’s also the mantra of Abby Wren, the woman featured in the pilot episode of our new docuseries, “Firefox Presents.”
Launching Friday, April 15, “Firefox Presents” is a documentary series featuring colorful and inspiring creators who each have a unique journey of finding themselves or their community online. We speak with them about how they are using the internet to overcome obstacles, challenge the status quo and express themselves in a way that encourages and inspires other people to feel welcome and safer online.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Bootstrapped using GtkPopovers to implement popups from LibreOffice’s main menubars for GTK4.
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FSF
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Help improve the Free Software Directory (FSD) by adding new entries and updating existing ones. Every Friday we meet on IRC in the #fsf channel on Libera.Chat.
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Programming/Development
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If you’ve ever written any React code, you’ve probably used arrays to represent state: an array of todo items, articles fetched from the server, and more. But sometimes React doesn’t update after you change that state. Usually, that’s because you mutated an array instead of copying it – a mistake easily prevented by using read-only types like ReadonlyArray. Here’s why you should start switching to read-only!
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React Studio is a free IDE and RAD tool for designers and developers that allows them in designing, prototyping, and building production-ready React apps.
The app is currently available for macOS 10.12 and later, it supports dynamic data, and comes with a rich and advanced visual layout editor.
React Studio supports progressive web apps (PWA) out-of-the-box, which work seamlessly on mobile platforms such as iOS, Android, as well as Chromebooks.
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Hello! The other day we talked about what happened when you press a key in your terminal.
As a followup, I thought it might be fun to implement a program that’s like a tiny ssh server, but without the security. You can find it on github here, and I’ll explain how it works in this blog post.
the goal: “ssh” to a remote computer
Our goal is to be able to login to a remote computer and run commands, like you do with SSH or telnet.
The biggest difference between this program and SSH is that there’s literally no security (not even a password) – anyone who can make a TCP connection to the server can get a shell and run commands.
Obviously this is not a useful program in real life, but our goal is to learn a little more about how terminals works, not to write a useful program.
(I will run a version of it on the public internet for the next week though, you can see how to connect to it at the end of this blog post)
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In this article, I’d like to talk about Android storage.
In recent Android versions, Google decided, for a good reason, to restrict the access to the SD card. This means, even if your application will have the old READ/WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions declared and granted, you won’t be able to freely access the SD Card contents like you used to.
In order to access the SD card or any other shared storage places, you’ll have to use the Android shared storage API. The good news is that, with this API, you’ll be able to access any file from any storage location (i.e. from gdrive), without any special code.
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In our last look at Microchip’s flexible PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit, which blends low-power high-performance field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology with Linux-capable processing cores built around the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), we built our own Linux distribution using the Yocto board support package (BSP) and ran a selection of workloads to put the system through its paces.
The Icicle Kit isn’t designed as a single-board computer you just pick up and use to run pre-built binaries, though: it’s a development tool first and foremost, and whether you’re a professional or a hobbyist you’re going to want to get your hands dirty coding in order to make the most of the board’s capabilities.
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I am going to be attending Akademy 2022 in person!
This is my first time going to Akademy in-person, so it is quite exciting! I will be doing a talk with Bhushan on the state of Plasma Mobile.
[...]
Through 2020, I worked on many Plasma Mobile applications such as KWeather, and also started poking around contributing to the shell. I also did some work for the desktop, including some work on adding fingerprint support to the users kcm.
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I spent the last week in Toronto in the Cpp North conference. It was so much fun just to hang around with people after such a long pause.My talk was about porting large code bases from one build system to another, using LibreOffice as an example The talk should eventually show up on Youtube but there is no precise schedule for that yet.
After the conference ended I had a few spare days to do touristy stuff which was also fun. On the last day when I was packing my stuff I noticed that there was a film crew just outside the conference hotel clearly shooting something. The area did not seem to be closed off so obviously I went in to take a closer look. It was past 9 pm and I only had my phone camera so all the pictures below are a bit murky. On the other hand you can clearly see just how much lighting power you need to shoot high quality video material.
[...]
I stood next to one of the pillars shown in the middle of the picture next to a thing that looked suspiciously like a director’s chair. I just leaned against the wall perfectly still while remaining calm and passive and nobody paid any attention to me at all. I could observe the crew going about their business, browse their monitors (which, sadly, did not show anything interesting) and even see their uncannily realistic looking baby prop up close. I was probably there for around 30 minutes or so until someone finally asked me if I was part of the crew and then kindly asked me to leave which I did.
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Let’s examine four mistakes to avoid when writing programs that use GLib, or, alternatively, four mistakes to look for when reviewing code that uses GLib. Experienced GNOME developers will find the first three mistakes pretty simple and basic, but nevertheless they still cause too many crashes. The fourth mistake is more complicated.
These examples will use C, but the mistakes can happen in any language. In unsafe languages like C, C++, and Vala, these mistakes usually result in security issues, specifically use-after-free vulnerabilities.
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Python
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It was not all that long ago that Python began its experiment with replacing one of its mailing lists with a forum on its Discourse discussion site. Over time, the Discourse instance has become more and more popular within the Python community. It would seem that another mailing list will soon be subsumed within Discourse as the Python steering council is planning to effectively retire the venerable python-dev mailing list soon.
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OSMnx is a Python package that lets you download geospatial data from OpenStreetMap and model, project, visualize, and analyze real-world street networks and any other geospatial geometries.
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Today most of the popular sites or application software are powered by Python as it is a widely used general-purpose programming language. Now why it is popular among users, all due to its simple yet easy-to-understand nature. We prefer using it all the time. As a bonus, it has many Integrated Development Environments which are used for editing and programming in it.
We usually suggest and prefer Vim/Nano for the terminal but many other IDEs such as PyCharm, GNU Emacs and PyZo are available for Ubuntu.
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Gradio is an open-source Python library that is used to build machine learning and data science demos and web applications.
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Rust
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Leftovers
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Science
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Wireless power, no matter how inefficient it may be, sounds good and even looks good with the “5V remote wireless power supply LED pack” we feature in this post. It also feels magical with the LEDs lighting up thanks to magnetic resonance coupling technology.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Openwashing
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Today, Google is announcing the expansion of our partnership with SkyWater Technology. We are working together to release an open source process design kit (PDK) for SKY90-FD, SkyWater’s commercial 90nm fully depleted silicon on insulator (FDSOI) CMOS process technology. SKY90-FD is based on MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s 90 nm commercial FDSOI technology, and enables designers to create complex integrated circuits for a diverse range of applications.
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OSI Blog ☛ What is an Open Source Program Office and why you should have one [Ed: The openwashing hive known as OSI is now more closely connected to LF via TODO Group; these are proprietary people]
The rise of the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) roughly mirrors the proliferation of Open Source software to build and run the most important technology applications within organizations in the world today. A well-designed OSPO is the center of competency for an organization’s Open Source operations and structure. Its role can include setting code use, distribution, selection, auditing, and other policies, as well as training developers, ensuring legal compliance, and promoting and building community engagement that benefits the organization strategically.
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (chromium, gnupg1, java-17-openjdk, osmo, and podman), Oracle (grafana and java-17-openjdk), Red Hat (389-ds:1.4, container-tools:rhel8, grafana, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, pandoc, squid, and squid:4), Slackware (samba), and SUSE (crash, mariadb, pcre2, python-M2Crypto, virtualbox, and xen).
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The Samba Team has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple versions of Samba. An attacker could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
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USCERT ☛ CISA Releases Log4Shell-Related MAR [Ed: Microsoft's friends at CISA trying to recycle FUD from last year instead of cautioning about Windows back doors and actively-exploited zero-days]
From May through June 2022, CISA responded to an organization that was compromised by an exploitation of an unpatched and unmitigated Log4Shell vulnerability in a VMware Horizon server. CISA analyzed five malware samples obtained from the organization’s network and released a Malware Analysis Report of the findings.
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Red Hat Product Security has been developing RapiDAST, a tool that can be used for security testing of products and services. It is also helpful for developers or quality engineers (QEs) to test the security of products during the software development life cycle (SDLC).
As the name suggests, RapiDAST is focused on performing rapid (automated) dynamic application security testing (DAST). While there are many security practices we can consider comprehensively for improving security posture of development environments — threat modeling, software composition analysis (SCA), static application security testing (SAST), fuzzing, penetration testing, etc. — this article focuses on DAST.
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Kali is a Debian-based Linux distro designed specifically for penetration testing. While one can install the tools on any Debian distro to create an equally capable pentesting system, Kali comes with all of those tools built-in and is locked-down by default for security. Over the last few years, Kali has become a favorite of pentesters. And because it is a Debian-based distro, it runs well on single-board computers with ARM processors.
[...]
In this case, that is the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer. It’s paired with a Pimoroni Hyperpixel 4.0″ TFT LCD touchscreen and a Solder Party BlackBerry Q20 keyboard with built-in trackpad. That is a full QWERTY tactile keyboard with a breakout board that provides connectivity options, including the USB connection used here. A small USB hub provides USB-A connections, since the Raspberry Pi only has micro USB ports.
All of that hardware fits inside of a book called Supermind by Mark Phillips. Except it isn’t actually a book. It’s a hollow wood box that looks like a book. We can only imagine that grymoire feels like a spy any time he pulls this book off a shelf and open it up to reveal their pentesting rig.
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Cybercriminals are now attacking the whole world in a very different way. In the past, they were just limited to the normal power users but nowadays they are targeting the critical infrastructures in our society. In most cases, they are trying to take down the whole industrial network and often ask for heavy ransoms. Even if they manage to get hold of a certain portion of the network, chances are that the industrial leader will pay the fees and get their system running again.
Such kind organized attacks on critical infrastructures were not prominent in the past. But things are changing fast and the hackers are trying to attack the organizations as they know it can help them to earn more money in a quicker way.
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Fear, Uncertainty,
Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Beta News ☛ Linux malware reaches an all time high [Ed: Microsoft boosters, as in this case, trying to shift the subject/focus]
In the past cybercriminals have tended to shun Linux in favor of more widely used operating systems, but new data indicates that this trend is starting to shift. Statistics from the Atlas VPN team show new Linux malware reached record numbers in the first half of 2022, with nearly 1.7 million samples being discovered.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Today, Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), along with Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA) and other co-sponsors, introduced a bill to reinstate net neutrality and the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over broadband service. The “Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act” would codify broadband as a “Title II” communications service, enabling the FCC to regulate it as such.
The bill effectively reverses the unprecedented abdication of authority over broadband that FCC Chairman Pai instigated in the agency’s 2017 repeal of its 2015 Open Internet Order that established the net neutrality rules under Chairman Tom Wheeler. Those rules prevented broadband providers from blocking websites, throttling web traffic, or creating “fast lanes” only for those able to pay for prioritization. This bill will not only restore these “net neutrality” protections, but also prevent a future-FCC from backtracking on other broadband consumer protections – fundamental in an increasingly online world. Public Knowledge urges Congress to swiftly pass this bill.
The following can be attributed to Jenna Leventoff, Senior Policy Counsel Public Knowledge:
“For over two decades, the FCC has worked steadfastly to protect consumers’ access to a free and open internet. Before Chairman Pai’s repeal of the agency’s popular net neutrality rules, both Democratic and Republican Commissions maintained authority over broadband. It was only during the Trump administration that the FCC, for the first time, disavowed any authority to fulfill its congressional mandate to ensure all Americans have access to communications services. We’re thrilled that Senators Markey and Wyden and Representative Matsui are taking action to rectify this colossal mistake.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Click on ‘cheat’ and enter the 7 letters of the puzzle, with the anchoring (central) letter at the end. The solutions, if any, will be shown after a short delay.
Please do not look up SpellBinding answers of today’s puzzle. And you don’t want to cheat anyway, right?
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What I really wish I could do is taper off my meds as a sort of experiment. Sometimes I doubt whether I really need them.
What that would look like is that I’d need to be 100% sequestered for the duration of the tapering plus 6 months after the final dose. No responsibilities other than self-care. Sort of like a controlled rehab type thing.
I’d also need something like a benzodiazepine to help with the surge in anxiety and paranoia, but I’m not sure if that would be good because I don’t want to become dependent on them.
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Politics
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I’m relieved that Manchin signed, because we’re getting a commitment of 40% emissions reduction by 2030, and that’s a hell of a lot better than what it looked like we were getting a few hours ago (and why I had been sobbing all week like the big old moper snowflake I am)…
[...]
“Energy security” as Manchin defined it means fossils (domestic fossils, which is the “security” part). In other words, we are getting the opposite of what we asked for; some of the money from our precious bill is gonna go straight into the pockets of oil, gas, and coal.
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Technical
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For Linux; if there is a company behind the hard- and software like Valve with the Steam Deck or Jolla with Sailfish OS, it could work. But it is build as gaming console – damn this is a good handheld! – or for a smartphone, not as work horse. The folks at Tuxedo for example do a really good job on their comupters here in europe. The barebones from “Schenker” they use are just not as good as a Macbook – nothing for a guy like me with me who likes a good audio system for example. And the problem with “hey, i’m creating a very nice little program and use the latest and cutting edge libraries so you can’t use it on your LTS linux”-problem still remains. Maybe a Purism Laptop would be a option, but they aren’t present in “the old world” and getting a Librem 5 was a hassle.
* 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 Deception at 2:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 3165cba5a977477568cffb4e3472ec38
Twitter is Dying, But is All Social Control Media Dying?
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Judging by comparable trends in Twitter analytics, traffic is going down as activity levels generally decrease; Facebook has experienced the same thing lately and Microsoft lays off LinkedIn staff, so there's consistency
THE state of Twitter as a company (never mind as a platform) is truly awful. It’s a miracle that anyone at all would want to buy a company that operates at a loss and almost always operated at a loss since its inception. The video above explained the history of losses — billions in losses (cumulative) shouldered by investors like the Saudi “royal” family.
A few months ago we started writing about what the Musk takeover bid meant [1, 2, 3, 4]. The short story is, he quickly realised he was going to pay for a clickfarm, which lies about its size and importance. I’ve decided (after the video) to reproduce the screenshot below for some context (that could not be shown in the video above due to lack of clear annotation of key dates).
Hopefully that alone tells a story. Quite frankly, it seems rather clear to me that Twitter is dying, having been there for 13 years (posted nearly a million tweets with over 100,000,000 impressions). That’s how it is. I’m not in control of that company’s fate and its fate isn’t something I have a personal stake in anymore. I just share my sincere observations above (in a video with analytics for the most part).
For those too busy to listen to a video, I seem to be seeing traffic about 30% lower (at comparable times), analysing the baseline before Elon Musk’s escapades and after that (lawsuit).
It seems clear that Facebook and YouTube are also having issues, but that’s a different subject, better set aside for other videos. We’ve just included some stories in the latest Daily Links about Facebook’s alarming SEC filing. Expect layoffs, says the founder and CEO. LinkedIn (Microsoft) started firing many workers several years ago… it seems like part of a trend across all social control media. █
It should say “have NOT posted anything in a month”; Notice how suddenly the number of impression quadrupled for no reason at all (as I noted at the time) and stayed at that level until the blunder reached the press (plus the SEC investigation)
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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If you plan on using Linux on a PC all of the time, instead of constantly switching back and forth between Windows, one of the best Linux laptops might be worth considering. Deleting Windows entirely from a PC that shipped with Windows also works, but computers built for Linux often have fewer driver problems. The Dell XPS 13 Plus is now certified for Ubuntu 22.04 (and optionally ships with it), and HP just released the ‘Dev One’ in partnership with System76, the developer of Pop!_OS Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Ubuntu 22.04 includes by default PHP 8.1 which is one of the most recent versions of this language. And if I want PHP 7.4 in Ubuntu 22.04, how do I do it? Well, this post is to help you with that.
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Looking to play Stardew Valley with mods on your Steam Deck? It’s possible! Here’s how to add onto the classic farming sim.
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The Linux arping command is like ping, but for local networks only. Its advantage is it operates at a lower networking level, sometimes getting responses when ping cannot. Here’s how to use it.
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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.
Django makes it easy for us to perform file uploads because it provides built-in library and methods that help to upload a file to the server.
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Today we are looking at how to install Project+ v2.29 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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ModSecurity, often referred to as Modsec, is a free, open-source web application firewall (WAF). ModSecurity was created as a module for the Apache HTTP Server. However, since its early days, the WAF has grown and now covers an array of HyperText Transfer Protocol request and response filtering capabilities for various platforms such as Microsoft IIS, Nginx, and Apache. ModSecurity’s primary role is to provide protection for web applications by filtering incoming traffic and blocking malicious requests. The WAF can also be configured to monitor traffic for certain types of activity, such as SQL injection attacks, and generate alerts when such activity is detected. In addition to its security benefits, ModSecurity can improve web performance by caching rules and eliminating the need to repeatedly process the same request.
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Sails.js is a robust Javascript framework that makes it easy to build enterprise-grade Node.js applications. It resembles the MVC architecture of frameworks like Ruby on Rails but with improved support for the more data-oriented modern style of web development. Additionally, Sails.js is compatible with a wide range of front-end technologies, including Angular, React, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. This makes it ideal for developing complex web applications that must run on multiple platforms. With its robust features and easy-to-use API, Sails.js is the perfect tool for building high-quality Node.js applications.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Sails.js on Rocky Linux 9 and access the web-based interface by installing and configuring an Nginx reverse proxy setup.
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As you grow and mature your computing skills and prowess under the Linux ecosystem, you soon find yourself comfortable with the productivity status associated with the Linux command-line environment.
The fact is true, especially for users seeking to master Linux administration footprints. The nano editor is an important file editing tool for such users. It even makes more sense to use nano editor server environments where GUI is not available.
Nano text editor is not as advanced as the likes of vim editor but it qualifies as the perfect starting point before Linux users can transition to those other text editors.
This article will walk us through searching and replacing text on a file opened under the nano text editor in Linux systems.
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Joomla is a free, open-source, and one of the most popular Content Management systems. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Joomla CMS with Apache and Let’s Encrypt SSL on Alma Linux 8.
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Before we can jump into changing the default user home directory on a Linux operating system environment, we should brief through some theoretical and practical information related to the Linux home directory.
By definition, Linux is a multi-user operating system, which creates the need for a universal directory called the Home directory where different OS users can store and create personalized/user-centered files and directories.
These files and directories are only accessible to the homeowner (currently logged-in user). Therefore, each time a new user is created on a Linux environment, the user is associated with a unique home directory accessible only to that user.
On the other hand, the existence of these universal directories also permits a universal user (other than the homeowner) to have access to them. This user is known as root and can access all homeowner directories within a Linux system.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Google Chrome on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Google Chrome is a well-known, secure, and efficient web browser. It is also considered the fastest and most stable web browser. Chrome has a ton of features that make browsing the web a better experience and also Chrome is synced with your Google account, so your bookmarks and passwords will be available on all your devices.
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 a Google Chrome web browser on a Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).
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This is the first part of beginner’s video editing tutorial with OpenShot. OpenShot is a small, user friendly, fast, multiplatform yet full-featured video editor alternative to Movie Maker. In this part, we will begin everything including installing the program, running it, and getting started to the user interface. Finally, this tutorial is intended mainly for school teachers. Now let’s practice!
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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 apt command is shown.
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What is Dash Shell in Linux?
Dash is one of the least known names when you think about shell family. But Dash is not meant to replace your current shell and works under the hood.
You must have many questions related to Dash such as what is its use case, how it’s different from your regular shell, and so on. So let’s dive deep into Dash.
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If you are using Linux, then you know how to use the mkdir command to create a directory, and for files, we use the touch command, which creates an empty file in a second without using any command line editor.
Both commands are handy to use, but how do I use this command to create multiple files and directories at once? Because it’s easy to create multiple files of 10 directories or files, but if someone asks you to create 100 files, you cannot easily do it until you find this article.
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Games
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Valve has released a new SteamOS Beta update for Steam Deck and it finally sorts out the Firefox situation, along with hints of hardware changes, or a new controller coming?
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Gimme! The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is an upcoming adventure from developer Cloak and Dagger Games with publishing from Wadjet Eye Games and it instantly grabbed my attention.
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Valve has announced that the Steam Bash Bash event will be going live between September 19 and September 26. This particular event is more of a violent one with the focus on hack and slash, spectacle fighters and whatever games focus on some form of melee fighting hence the bash bash.
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Here’s one missed from earlier in July, the colourful 3D platformer Hobo Cat Adventures gained Native Linux support. Looks pretty great too with some dark humour and apparently souls-like combat (in other words, difficult).
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Pokete is a game we introduced you too recently that’s inspired by Pokémon but you play it in a terminal. A new release is out bringing some nice advancements.
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Despite the name, VRChat is not a VR-only space and it’s incredibly popular. Recently though, they added in Easy Anti-Cheat and the community is currently very unhappy with it.
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Limit Theory was a once very promising looking space sim that was funded on Kickstarter. Sadly the developer cancelled it but now as promised they’ve opened up the source code. Most of the code is under the “The Unlicense”, which is OSI approved so it is properly open source too.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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The big news in Ventoy 1.0.79 is support for Fedora CoreOS, a minimal Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat after they acquired the CoreOS Linux project back in January 2018. This bumps the total officially supported ISOs to more than 940.
The Ventoy 1.0.79 release also comes with several bug fixes to address a bug that occurred when Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based distributions used an external kickstart file, a bug that made the VTOY_LINUX_REMOUNT option to have no effect in openSUSE Linux, as well as a bug that broke the autosel option.
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A list of ten 32-bit Linux distributions which is still going strong and can easily be adopted for older hardware that supports i686.
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We have plenty of Linux distributions tailored for 32-bit systems.
So, why do I want to discourage using 32-bit and upgrade to 64-bit Linux instead?
There are a couple of reasons, and one of the biggest reasons came to the spotlight this week.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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The Fedora Project has announced that it will no longer permit Creative Commons ‘No Rights Reserved’ aka CC0-licensed code in its Linux distro or the Fedora Registry.
Fedora is a Linux distribution, developed and maintained by the Fedora Project, with sponsorship support from Red Hat and other parties.
The decision to ditch CC0-licensed open source software stems from the fact it could, in the future, pose patent issues.
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Debian Family
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SunFounder TS7-Pro is a 7-inch touchscreen display designed for Raspberry Pi 4 board and the company sent us one review sample for evaluation. SunFounder has a wide range of Raspberry Pi and Arduino accessories designed for makers, and the TS7-Pro 7 is their latest offering that’s optimized to work with Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 3.
Adding a touchscreen display to a Raspberry Pi may be a bit messy with the display or other accessories such as cameras and/or 2.5-inch drive spread on the table, but the TS7-Pro display simplifies all that with a neater assembly. Let’s start the review with an unboxing
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Devices/Embedded
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If you are looking for an ultrawide display to show information on your PC or Raspberry Pi, there’s a 7.9-inch IPS display with 1280×400 resolution that may meet your requirements.
The display is powered through a USB port and outputs video through an HDMI 1.4 input port, so it should work with any hardware equipped with HDMI input and a USB port.
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Yesterday, SolidRun introduced the SolidWAN system-level solutions for software-defined wide area networks. The new products consist of two network devices based on the LX2160A System on Chip (SoC) from NXP.
The SolidWAN LX2160A and the SolidWAN Dual LX2160A offer similar features. The first device features a sixteen-core NXP LX2160A SoC while the dual version offers up to 32-cores for increased performance. According to the datasheet, both models can run on Debian, Ubuntu, OpenWrt and they offer AES acceleration and virtualization support.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Retrograde clocks are unique, in that they eschew the normal fully-circular movement for the hands. Instead, the hands merely sweep out a segment of a circular arc, before jumping back to their start position to begin again. They’re pretty rare to find, but [Jamie Matthews] decided he had to have one. Thusly, he elected to build his own!
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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LibreOffice and OpenOffice are two popular open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office.
Any of them can be recommended if you are looking for an open-source office suite with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and a few other programs.
However, to make the best of an office suite, you should know the differences between them to decide what’s best for you.
Should you use LibreOffice or OpenOffice? What are the differences? Here, I explore more about that.
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Content Management Systems (CMS)
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LinuxLinks, like most modern websites, is dynamic in that content is stored in a database and converted into presentation-ready HTML when readers access the site.
While we employ built-in server caching which creates static versions of the site, we don’t generate a full, static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. However, sometimes a full, static HTML website is desirable. Because HTML pages are all prebuilt, they load extremely quickly in web browsers.
There are lots of other advantages of running a full, static HTML website.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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The University of California system has reached an open-access agreement with the Nature journals, growing UC’s transformative series of publisher pacts but also showing its persistent cost-based limits.
UC’s new arrangement expands a relationship first reached in 2020 with Springer Nature by adding the company’s prestigious Nature family of journals to the open-access options available to UC authors.
The 2020 agreement led to a tripling of open-access articles by UC authors publishing in the journals that Springer Nature made eligible for it, the company said in its announcement of the expansion.
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Programming/Development
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This post has been adapted from an article in issue 19 of Hello World magazine, which explores the interaction between technology and sustainability.
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From experience, being connected to a community of fellow computing educators is really important, especially given that some members of the community may be the only computing educator in their school, district, or country. These professional connections enable educators to share and learn from each other, develop their practice, and importantly reduce any feelings of isolation.
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Earlier I described the Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB). It’s a filesystem (like FAT or ext4), combined with plausibly deniable full disk encryption (similar to LUKS or VeraCrypt) in a “batteries included” fashion. Plausible deniability aims to make it difficult to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that additional secrets exist on the disk, even in the face of forensic evidence.
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Unix has always excelled at processing text, and Linux is no different. And the tools to work with and transform text files still exist on all Linux systems.
Like other computer systems, early Unix printed on paper, using a typewriter-style printing device. These printers provided limited formatting options, but with clever application of Unix tools, you could prepare professional-looking documents.
One such tool was the pr tool, to prepare text documents for printing. Let’s explore how to use standard Unix tools, such as the pr processor and the fmt text formatter, to prepare text files for printing on a typewriter-style printer.
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In this guide, we will see a brief introduction to Dockerfile and how to use Dockerfile to automate the process of building custom docker images.
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Python
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Vectorization in Python, as implemented by NumPy, can give you faster operations by using fast, low-level code to operate on bulk data. And Pandas builds on NumPy to provide similarly fast functionality. But vectorization isn’t a magic bullet that will solve all your problems: sometimes it will come at the cost of higher memory usage, sometimes the operation you need isn’t supported, and sometimes it’s just not relevant.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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Configuration syntax checking and/or testing is a key step to perform after making changes to an application’s or service’s configuration file or even after running updates. This helps to reduce the chances of the service failing to restart due to configuration errors.
Several applications/programs or service daemons ship with commands to check configuration files for syntax correctness. We have put together a list of common applications and services on Linux systems and how to test or validate their configuration files.
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Leftovers
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Sometimes you need to display a number nice and large, making it easily readable at a good distance. [Lewis] has just the thing for that: a big expandable 7-segment display.
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Back in the early days of the home computer revolution, data was commonly saved on tape. Even better, those tapes would make an almighty racket if you played them on a stereo, because the data was stored in an audio format. The Simple Universal Modem from [Anders Nielsen] is built to work in a similar way, turning data into audio and vice versa.
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As a mode of recommendation, the newspaper fiction review has less to recommend it than ever before. Space limitations, personal considerations, and editorial preferences combine to force it to assume a somewhat gaunt profile: What many readers encounter are cautious judgments affixed to a skeletal summary, leaving little opening for the decisive and expansive claims on a reader’s attention that make a piece of criticism valuable on its own, or even simply viral. Limited in terms of space and energy, the newspaper review also faces a raft of online competition better suited to the digital age—sites like Amazon and Goodreads that aggregate and quantify consumer-oriented opinion—as well as those longer essay reviews or works of literary criticism that appear in general-interest or so-called little magazines and tend to situate the given book in a political, intellectual, or aesthetic context.
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Being on this list subjects Cuba to a series of devastating international financial restrictions. It is illegal for U.S. banks to process transactions to Cuba, but U.S. sanctions also have an unlawful extraterritorial reach. Fearful of getting in the crosshairs of U.S. regulations, most Western banks have also stopped processing transactions involving Cuba or have implemented new layers of compliance. This has hampered everything from imports to humanitarian aid to development assistance, and has sparked a new European campaign to challenge their banks’ compliance with U.S. sanctions.
These banking restrictions and Trump-era sanctions, together with the economic fallout from COVID-19, have led to a severe humanitarian and economic crisis for the very Cuban people the administration claims to support. They are also a major cause of the recent increase in migration of Cubans that has become a major political liability for the Biden administration.
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As the Cuban government celebrates the July 26 Day of the National Rebellion–a public holiday commemorating the 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks that is considered the precursor to the 1959 revolution–U.S. groups are calling on the Biden administration to stop its cruel sanctions that are creating such hardship for the Cuban people. In particular, they are pushing President Biden to take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
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It was all so innocent then. Back in 2012, London was a city filled with Olympic dreams. There was frivolity. There was a measure of national unity. There were many pints. No one had yet heard the word “Brexit.” And the London mayor, a clownish lad by the name of Boris Johnson, was several years away from leading a crisis-ridden British political system down the sewer. He was too busy getting stuck on a zip line. As everyone laughed, they did not realize that 10 years later, the joke would be on them.
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Science
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In 2001, I had the honor of being named Hispanic Engineer of the Year by Great Minds in Stem (GMiS), – one of the proudest moments in my career. GMiS is an organization dedicated to ensuring that Hispanic students of all ages are inspired to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). For 33 years, GMiS has recognized the achievements of the top engineers and scientists in the US Hispanic community that have been nominated in more than 20 categories in industry, government, academia and the military. Winners receive their awards at a gala event that serves as the climax of the annual GMiS conference.
A few weeks ago I received an email announcing that the 2022 GMIS conference will take place in October in Pasadena. A few days later a childhood friend sent me an article about the great Afro-Cuban singer Celia Cruz, whose music I’ve been listening to since growing up in Havana and who like me left Cuba in 1960. It reminded me that when we were asked to pick the walk-in music we wanted played as we approached the podium to receive our award and give our acceptance speech, I picked a song by Celia Cruz. Finally, earlier this year I signed up to 23andMe which confirmed that my DNA is 99.7% Ashkenazi Jewish, not surprising given my parents background.
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Hardware
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Restoring vintage electronics is a difficult hobby to tackle. Even the most practical builds often have to use some form of modern technology to work properly, or many different versions of the machine need to be disassembled to get a single working version. Either way, in the end someone will be deeply hurt by the destruction of anything antique, except perhaps with [Marco]’s recent tiny arcade with a unique CRT display.
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Laptop computers may be ubiquitous today, but there was a time when they were the exclusive preserve of rich businesspeople. Back in the early ’90s, the significant added cost of portability was something that few were willing to pay. As a result, not many laptops from those days survive; for those that do, keeping them running can be quite a challenge due to their compact construction and use of non-standard components.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Now, a new study has undermined the aforementioned “serotonin hypothesis” — namely that, as the American Psychiatric Association puts it, “differences in certain chemicals in the brain may contribute to symptoms of depression.” That hypothesis motivated the pharmaceutical industry’s drug formulations, and indeed, underpins the chemistry of their anti-depressant drugs (particularly SSRIs, or selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors), which were marketed to correct said imbalance. Neurologically speaking, these kinds of drugs perpetuate the presence of serotonin, a neurotransmitter with a wide variety of functions, in the brain; specifically, a “reuptake inhibitor” prevents the serotonin from being reabsorbed as quickly as it might naturally, meaning more of it circulates for longer.
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Of the over 476 million indigenous people in the world today; an estimated 42 million live in the Americas. They represent thousands of different cultures and ethnic groups whose survival is due, in part, to the efficacy of their traditional health practices.
Indigenous peoples in this region have, over several centuries, developed a complex series of practices as well as an understanding of the human body. During several trips to the region, I was able to see the use of traditional medicine among the population of the Andean countries.
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For decades we have known there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos.
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Proprietary
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The tech world has become obsessed with productivity – it’s quite the buzzword. Google is joining the trend with new ChromeOS features, including quite a few that will lead to greater productivity. Many video-editing features are being added as well.
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CISA signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Ukrainian State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP) amid the eastern European country’s ongoing war with Russia, an aggressor in the digital realm that has attacked both Ukrainian and American cyber networks and infrastructure in the past.
The cooperation pact bolsters information sharing on cyber incidents and creates pathways between the two agencies to share key data on critical infrastructure. It also authorizes joint exercises and training sessions between the two agencies.
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Nearly one-third of organisations have suffered a ransomware attack enabled by a malicious insider, a threat seen as commonly as the accidental insider (35%), according to a new report from cloud visibility and analytics company Gigamon.
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The Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act passed in March does not cover private companies who do not operate in the critical infrastructure sectors and does not include safe harbor and shield laws that would encourage private companies to engage in the process.
Oftentimes, companies will avoid interacting with law enforcement to avoid the stigma associated with being a victim of a cyberattack and out of fear of being held liable by regulators and investors, said Trent Teyema, senior fellow at technology policy university collaborative GeoTech Center.
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Since UEFI firmware is embedded in a chip on the motherboard and not written to the hard drive, it is immune to any hard drive manipulations. Therefore, it is very difficult to get rid of UEFI-based malware: even wiping the drive and reinstalling the operating system will not touch UEFI. For this same reason, not all security solutions can detect malware hidden in UEFI. Simply put, once malware has made its way into the firmware, it is there to stay.
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Security researchers with Kaspersky have analyzed a UEFI firmware rootkit that appears to target specific motherboard models from Gigabyte and Asus.
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Rootkits are malware implants which burrow themselves in the deepest corners of the operating system. Although on paper they may seem attractive to attackers, creating them poses significant technical challenges and the slightest programming error has the potential to completely crash the victim machine. In our APT predictions for 2022, we noted that despite these risks, we expected more attackers to reach the sophistication level required to develop such tools. One of the main draws towards malware nested in such low levels of the operating system is that it is extremely difficult to detect and, in the case of firmware rootkits, will ensure a computer remains in an infected state even if the operating system is reinstalled or the user replaces the machine’s hard drive entirely.
In this report, we present a UEFI firmware rootkit that we called CosmicStrand and attribute to an unknown Chinese-speaking threat actor. One of our industry partners, Qihoo360, published a blog post about an early variant of this malware family in 2017.
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Earlier this year, Kasperksy identified anoother UEFI rootkit called MoonBounce that was used against one known victim.
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Both links have lots of technical details; the second contains a list of previously discovered UFEI rootkits. Also relevant are the NSA’s capabilities—now a decade old—in this area.
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Researchers have unpacked a major cybersecurity find—a malicious UEFI-based rootkit used in the wild since 2016 to ensure computers remained infected even if an operating system is reinstalled or a hard drive is completely replaced.
The firmware compromises the UEFI, the low-level and highly opaque chain of firmware required to boot up nearly every modern computer. As the software that bridges a PC’s device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI—short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface—is an OS in its own right. It’s located in an SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch the code. Because it’s the first thing to run when a computer is turned on, it influences the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The changes are a part of Google’s overall new approach to the Workspace suite (including Docs, Sheets, etc.) that’s supposed to provide a more unified style and new AI-powered features like the Gmail search improvements that were just announced.
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The Irish government on Wednesday said it will appoint two additional commissioners to Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, lead regulator in Europe for tech giants Alphabet Inc’s Google, Meta Platforms unit Facebook, Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp and Twitter Inc).
Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said the appointments will support existing commissioner Helen Dixon and improve the commission’s ability to handle an increased workload and increasingly complex investigative requirements.
Ireland regulates a number of large U.S. internet giants because their European Union headquarters are in the country, but its DPC has been criticised for long, plodding investigations into big tech multinationals. Pressure has been building for a pan-European approach to data and privacy protection.
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Here are just two of the many things the Securities and Exchange Commission forbids investment companies from putting in their marketing literature:
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The EU border agency wants to repeat a failed tender to procure rotary-wing aircraft. These could be used in areas where there is a lack of runways. The scenarios fit a Greek border river where many dead bodies wash up.
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The font of not-great ideas continues to overflow at Lawfare. To be fair, this often-overflowing font is due to its contributors, which are current and former members of spy agencies that have violated rights, broken laws, and otherwise done what they can to make internet communications less secure.
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A key U.S. Senate panel on Wednesday took what one leading child advocate called “an important step toward creating a safer and less exploitative internet for children and teens.”
“We are hopeful that lawmakers are ready to do what’s needed to protect young people from the unacceptable risks they face online every day in this country.”
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T-Mobile hasn’t been what you’d call competent when it comes to protecting its customers’ data. The company has been hacked several different times over the last few years, with hackers going so far as to ridicule the company’s lousy security practices.
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Defence/Aggression
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In the early days of the February invasion, pro-Kremlin Russian news outlets shared a story about a Russian soldier who had sacrificed himself to save a young woman in Kharkiv. The woman, the reports alleged, took cover along with her mother and the “unknown soldier” after being fired upon by Ukrainian troops. However, both the woman, 29-year-old Karolina Perlifon, and another Russian soldier who survived the attack said it was Russian troops who opened fire on the civilians and their comrades-in-arms. Though pro-Kremlin propagandists never revealed the name of the soldier who was killed, journalists from the independent Russian media project Verstka managed to uncover his story. With permission, Meduza published the investigation in Russian, with minor edits. The following translation has been further edited and abridged for length and clarity.
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This is an important statement in any society, but especially for our democracy.
Unfortunately, far too few of our leaders – or even our neighbors – are making statements like this. As a result, we’re normalizing the use of violence more and more.
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Firearm companies have raked in over $1 billion from selling AR-15-style rifles over the past decade, a U.S. congressional committee revealed in a report ahead of a Wednesday hearing, prompting calls from Democratic lawmakers and gun control advocates for a renewed assault weapons ban.
“The business practices of these gun manufacturers are deeply disturbing, exploitative, and reckless.”
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It had to happen: Because of the January 6 select committee’s disciplined, scripted, riveting rollout of evidence that twice-impeached Donald Trump schemed to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the media now talks about it like it’s a hot new reality-TV show. Last Thursday’s tick-tock of the 187 minutes of violence at the capitol, during which Trump either did nothing or egged on the crowd, wasn’t the “series finale,” we’re told, but a “season finale” designed to keep us tuning in to this hit show when it returns in the fall.
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The U.S. Department of Justice is directly investigating Donald Trump’s actions as part of a criminal probe into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, news welcomed by lawmakers and watchdogs who have accused the DOJ of dragging its feet despite having a strong case for prosecuting the former president.
The Washington Post reported late Tuesday that “prosecutors who are questioning witnesses before a grand jury—including two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence—have asked in recent days about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won.”
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U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders warned after meeting with Brazilian civil society leaders on Tuesday that the Latin American country’s far-right leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, appears poised to replicate Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the democratic process in a bid to stay in power as he trails in the polls to leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“Like Trump, Bolsonaro is attempting to undermine democracy in Brazil, the largest country in Latin America,” Sanders (I-Vt.) told the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor. “It is important that the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress stand for democracy and support the results of the upcoming election. The enemies of democracy are working together across borders, and supporters of democracy must do the same.”
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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According to estimates from the project To Be Exact, at least 10 Russian government agencies have removed data from open sources since the war began. Retrieving a record from the Unified State Register of Real Estate now requires permission from the property owner, and Russia’s Finance Ministry plans to allow over 1,300 companies not to publish any information about themselves in the public domain — “to counter sanctions,” according to officials. Since 2012, the Moscow-based nonprofit Information Culture has been one of the main organizations advocating for information transparency in Russia. Its director and cofounder, Ivan Begtin, told Meduza about the decline of open data policies in Russia.
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Environment
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Manchin deserves all this condemnation and more, but it is bizarre that his Republican counterparts haven’t faced this intensity of criticism, even though they are at least as culpable. Search the news stories and public statements cited above, and countless others from the same time frame, and you’ll find that Republicans’ role in blocking Build Back Better is rarely even mentioned—and certainly not identified as the principal reason climate legislation routinely dies on Capitol Hill.
Manchin is only one senator. His opposition to Build Back Better mattered only because all 50 Republican senators stood in lockstep against climate action, just as their party has done for 30 years.
And yet, today’s Republicans pay no political price for torching the planet. In a democracy, elected officials are free to vote for or against whatever they please, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be held accountable for their choices. But most political observers, journalists, and even political adversaries simply accept the GOP’s climate obstructionism as an immutable fact of life, not worth calling out or wasting energy on.
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Progressive leaders in Congress and activists on Wednesday came together to call on U.S. President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency, which would give his administration more resources to take on the global crisis.
“It couldn’t be clearer that the climate crisis is here and needs to be addressed urgently,” said Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who kicked off the event a day her district endured extreme heat.
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Late on May 31, 2018, five days after she was sworn in as prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley and her top advisers gathered in the windowless anteroom of her administrative office in Bridgetown, the capital, for a call that could determine the fate of her island nation. The group settled into uncomfortable straight-backed chairs around a small mahogany table, staring at framed posters of Barbados’ windmills and sugar cane fields. Mottley, who was then 52, can appear mischievous in the moments before her bluntest declarations, but on this evening her steely side showed. She placed her personal cellphone on speaker and dialed a number in Washington for the International Monetary Fund. As arranged, Christine Lagarde, the managing director, answered.
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Energy
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Now consider this: In 2020, oil accounted for more global energy consumption than any other source—approximately 30 percent—and the EIA projects that, on our present course, it will remain the world’s number-one source of energy, possibly until as late as 2050. Because it’s such a carbon-intensive fuel (though less so than coal), oil was responsible for 34 percent of global carbon emissions in 2020 and that share is projected to rise to 37 percent by 2040. At that point, oil combustion will be responsible for the release of 14.7 million metric tons of heat-trapping GHGs into the atmosphere, ensuring even higher average world temperatures.
With CO2 emissions from oil use continuing to rise, there’s zero chance of staying within that 1.5 degrees Celsius limit or of preventing the catastrophic warming of this planet, with all it portends. Think of it this way: The stunning heat waves experienced so far this year from China to India, Europe to the Horn of Africa, and this country to Brazil are only a mild foretaste of our future.
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Recent figures indicate that Estonia saw the fastest spike in electricity prices in the EU last month, but the historical relationship of prices paid by Estonian consumers to prices on the Nord Pool exchange indicate that the increase in electricity prices in Estonia is nonetheless inexplicably large, Bank of Estonia economist Kaspar Oja said Wednesday.
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Will civilization collapse because it’s running out of oil? That question was debated hotly almost 20 years ago; today, not so much. Judging by Google searches, interest in “peak oil” surged around 2003 (the year my book The Party’s Over was published), peaked around 2005, and drifted until around 2010 before dropping off dramatically.
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For some perspective on this, recall that, in those pre-fracking days at the start of the century, many experts were convinced that world petroleum output would hit a daily peak of perhaps 90 million barrels in 2010, dropping to 70 or 80 million barrels by the end of that decade. In other words, we would have little choice but to begin converting our transportation systems to electricity, pronto. That would have caused a lot of disruption at first, but by now we would be well on our way to a green-energy future, with far less carbon emissions and a slowing pace of global warming.
Now, compare those hopeful scenarios to the latest data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). At the moment, world oil production is hoveringat around 100 million barrels daily and is projected to reach 109 million barrels by 2030, 117 million by 2040, and a jaw-dropping 126 million by 2050. So much, in other words, for “peak oil” and a swift transition to green energy.
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But while some specific threats to the industry have subsided, that doesn’t mean coal-fired power plants will make a comeback.
As an economist, I analyze the coal industry, including power plant construction and retirement plans. I see three main reasons U.S. coal plants will continue to close down.
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The widespread adoption of the CAN bus (and OBD-II) in automobiles was largely a way of standardizing the maintenance of increasingly complicated engines and their needs to meet modern emissions standards. While that might sound a little dry on the surface, the existence and standardization of this communications bus in essentially all passenger vehicles for three decades has led to some interesting side effects, like it’s usage in this project to display some extra information about an electric car’s battery.
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A charity with ties to senior Conservative MPs has appointed a professor who said protecting the environment was an “innovation of the Devil” and has dismissed the science of human-caused climate change.
Samuele Furfari, a former EU energy advisor, this month joined the “academic advisory council” of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – the UK’s main climate science denial group, which has ties to several of the politicians who ran to replace Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
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The Biden administration on Wednesday announced a new initiative to bring solar power to low-income families across the U.S.
“Deploying community solar is a vital move to protect both our climate and the millions of households most vulnerable to utility shutoffs and dirty energy price spikes.”
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Wildlife/Nature
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But residents of El Rosario, who are paid by the government to protect the monarchs’ overwintering ground, refute that claim. Instead, they insist that problems threatening the butterflies exist along the insects’ migratory routes in the United States and Canada, a factor that was included in the announcement from IUCN. However, IUCN did also mention in that press release that legal and illegal logging has already destroyed “substantial areas” of the butterflies’ winter shelter in Mexico and California.
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Kenya’s Wildlife and Tourism ministry says that climate change is now a bigger threat to elephant conservation than poaching.
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This method “requires farmers to cut off airflow and heat their barns to 104 degrees Fahrenheit until the animals die from heatstroke,” states an article in Sentient Media. The “plus” means that, in addition to shutting down the ventilation system during VSD+, the barns are also exposed to extreme heat, humidity, and carbon dioxide (CO2) to suffocate the animals and bake them alive.
Highly pathogenic avian influenza is a recurring phenomenon in the poultry and egg industries. The current outbreak in the U.S., which began in February, has antecedents in 2015, 2006, and 2003. Low pathogenic avian flu outbreaks in chicken and turkey flocks are routine events involving the mass culling of millions of birds.
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Overpopulation
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It would take 1.75 Earths to provide for the world’s population in a sustainable way, according to the measure, which was created by researchers in the early 1990s.
Global Footprint Network said Earth Overshoot Day has fallen ever sooner over the last 50 years.
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A report on the Pakistani Health Minister’s plan is here: “An ‘out of Pakistan’ solution for population control—produce kids in non-Muslim nations,” by Akansha Sengupta, The Print, July 20, 2022: [...]
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Minister of Health and PPP member Abdul Qadir Patel Monday offered an ‘out of Pakistan’ solution to the population problem—couples wanting more kids should leave the country and add to the Muslim population in nations where they are in minority.
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Finance
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Even having a steady job and savings are irrelevant for someone if they are gypsy: when it comes to looking for a place to rent, they have such a disadvantage from the outset that they need much more perseverance and resilience than average in order to succeed. It is against the law to exclude someone from the pool of potential tenants solely on the basis of the color of their skin, but these are not situations where the law is easily enforced. The Equal Treatment Authority has been shut down, and the ombudsman receives one or two complaints a year.
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The U.S. Senate on Wednesday passed sweeping bipartisan legislation that Sen. Bernie Sanders and progressive advocacy groups decried as a massive giveaway to corporations such as Intel, whose CEO has been lobbying aggressively in support of the bill’s subsidies for the profitable microchip industry.
“Congress should be ashamed to pass this corporate giveaway after a year of complete failure to do anything whatsoever for needy American families.”
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In recent months, a number of policymakers have cited inflation concerns as the source of their opposition to budget reconciliation proposals that would raise taxes progressively and boost federal spending on public investments and social insurance. (Many of these proposals were once collected together and named the Build Back Better Act (BBBA), but since negotiations over the full BBBA faltered there has been no single name for the shifting permutations of tax and spending changes that are under debate.)
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Republicans believe their laser focus on inflation in the midterms will override voter anger over the attempted coup, four years of Trumpism, multiple regressive Supreme Court rulings especially on reproductive rights, school shootings and other mass shootings, and GOP state attacks on voting, public education, and LGBTQ+ rights. But only if we, and the Democratic Party leadership, let them get away with it.
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Oligarchs of the dominate economic class in the United States continue to pour billions of dollars into the pockets of politicians. The drift towards oligarchy was propelled in 1976 with the Supreme Court’s Buckley v. Valeo decision. It continued in 1978 with the Bellotti v. Bank of Boston decision and culminated with the dreadful Citizens United v. FEC decision in 2010. Politicians were deemed legally for sale to the highest bidder.
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In the streets of the nation’s capital and on its cable television networks, progressives are demanding that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer immediately schedule votes on a pair of antitrust bills designed to rein in Big Tech’s growing power—something he promised to do by “early summer.”
“Schumer has a choice: Side with greedy monopolies or the American people.”
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We speak with Marxist economist Richard Wolff about how experts forecast another economic recession in the United States, with inflation at a historic high and a federal minimum wage that hasn’t changed for 13 years. The Federal Reserve plan to combat rising inflation by raising interest rates delivers a “body blow to a working class” already suffering from decades of upward wealth redistribution and a pandemic, says Wolff, emeritus professor of economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst and visiting professor at The New School. His latest book is “The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself.”
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We look at the looming possibility of a global recession amid rising inflation, the pandemic and the Russian war in Ukraine. World financial institutions and wealthier countries should take stronger actions such as writing off debts that are crippling developing nations, says Jayati Ghosh, economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “This is just completely lack of political will. It’s not because we don’t know what to do.” Her piece in The Guardian is headlined “There is a global debt crisis coming — and it won’t stop at Sri Lanka,” and she also discusses other countries on the brink of an economic collapse, including Pakistan, Nepal, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Panama and Argentina.
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Ellen Brown argues that tather than making money harder to get, the U.S. government needs to focus on the other side of the demand vs. supply inflation equation.
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The U.S. Federal Reserve is on the verge of causing a disastrous surge in unemployment, progressives said Wednesday after the nation’s central bank raised interest rates for the second consecutive month—doubling down on its dogmatic quest to reduce prices even as slowing wage growth offers more evidence that inflation is being driven by corporate profiteering and supply chain issues rather than excess demand.
“Our country’s lowest-paid, most vulnerable workers have endured too much already to be sacrificed in pursuit of severe rate hikes.”
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The U.S. Justice Department announced Wednesday that a mortgage company owned by billionaire businessman Warren Buffett engaged in an illegal “pattern or practice of lending discrimination” by “redlining” in the Philadelphia area, and will pay $20 million in a settlement agreement.
“The complaint also alleges that Trident’s employees exchanged emails where they referred to neighborhoods of color as ‘ghettos’ and made racist jokes.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The new information about Microsoft’s tracking and mitigation of DSIRF / KNOTWEED’s exploits was published at the same time as a written testimony document submitted to the hearing on “Combatting the Threats to U.S. National Security from the Proliferation of Foreign Commercial Spyware,” held July 27th.
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Meta Platforms met expectations but saw its total revenues fall in the second quarter amid a downturn in the economy and increased competition for digital advertisers.
Total revenue for Meta was $28.8 billion in the second quarter ending June 30, according to the earnings report released Wednesday, down 1 percent from the second quarter in 2021.
The social media and tech company also reported total costs and expenses of $20.4 billion, a 22 percent increase year over year.
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When we read articles on the Internet, we need to become more aware that we are literally being bombarded by a nuclear firestorm of lies. These lies are designed to brainwash and manipulate us into supporting multinational corporations that are not at all interested in protecting us. Instead, the writers of these false articles are hired to protect corporations like Microsoft and maximize their quarterly profits by producing a wave of propaganda. We this in mind, let’s first look at the Skidmap Malware claim.
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While $2 billion of the direct assistance funds is already earmarked for legacy programs—specifically, technologies that the Department of Defense wants to produce within the US—the other $50 billion is generally available for the development of additional domestic silicon manufacturing in the country.
The big winners, should the CHIPS Act be signed into law, will be companies like Intel, who either already have chip fabrication facilities in the US or are planning to build them—but other chip companies, particularly those that take a lead role in chip design but don’t manufacture products themselves, warn that the bill doesn’t go far enough in helping the US silicon industry.
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The company also saw net income fall by 36 percent, landing at $6.7 billion for the second quarter, while total costs and expenses rose by 22 percent to hit $20.5 billion. And as the social media giant faces heated competition from rivals like TikTok, daily active users across Meta’s family of apps were in the low single digits; Meta’s flagship social platform, Facebook, saw a modest 3 percent increase during the second quarter.
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Zuckerberg said the company had seen “engagement trends” that were “stronger than we anticipated” on Facebook, thanks largely to an increase in the consumption of videos. He said that Reels, the company’s short-form video format aimed at TikTok, is monetizing faster than Stories did after the company copied that format from Snapchat several years ago. In the long run, the company expects Reels to be a revenue driver, but for now the company is prioritizing Reels and not making much money from them.
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In the less than 72 hours since being publicly ridiculed by right-wing Rep. Matt Gaetz, political strategist and college student Olivia Julianna had raised over $300,000 as of Wednesday for abortion funds that offer direct financial assistance to people who need abortion care.
“This is absolutely the most insane amount of donations we have had thus far from individuals, especially in such a short frame of time,” Olivia, who goes by her first and middle names publicly, told The Washington Post Wednesday. “On a broader scale, this highlights the extreme power of social media mobilization, and it shows Republican politicians that their cheap attacks and political theater will no longer be tolerated.”
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As the war in Ukraine has raged on, the Russian authorities haven’t let up on their quest to stamp out what’s left of the country’s domestic opposition. In just the last month, Moscow municipal deputy Alexey Gorinov has been sentenced to seven years in prison for calling the war in Ukraine a war; Helga Pirogova, a municipal deputy from Novosibirsk, has been forced to leave the country under threat of criminal prosecution, and Moscow opposition figure Ilya Yashin has been sent to jail on criminal charges of spreading “fake news” for speaking truthfully about Russian atrocities against civilians in Bucha. For insight into where Russia’s democratic opposition went wrong — and what it needs to do now — Meduza turned to activist and former Moscow deputy Yulia Galyamina.
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While Democratic leaders on Wednesday celebrated a surprise budget reconciliation deal with Sen. Joe Manchin on new climate and tax policies, progressive campaigners had a range of responses, from cautious optimism, to skepticism, to outright concern.
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China warned that there could be serious consequences, including a military response, if U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi follows through on plans to visit Taiwan in August, according to the Financial Times. If the trip happens, Pelosi would become the most senior U.S. official to visit Taiwan in 25 years. “The question is: Is this signal just intended to really stick it to China very quickly, without actually benefiting Taiwan, or is it something that should be best not done?” says Taiwanese American journalist Brian Hioe.
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“The world owes us a debt, and we will make sure to get it from them.” The Prime Minister spoke about war, race, Europe, utility price cuts and his vision of the future in his speech over the weekend. Here’s Telex’s video summary of the main points. (English subtitles available.)
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With right-wing officials suggesting there is not yet enough evidence of Hungarian authoritarian Viktor Orbán’s racist views despite his recent speech which has drawn comparisons to Nazi propaganda, the largest annual gathering of conservatives in the U.S. is moving forward with plans to host the prime minister next week.
“Let’s listen to the man speak,” Matt Schlapp, chair of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), said Tuesday, ahead of the group’s summit scheduled to take place in Dallas next week. “We’ll see what he says.”
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The Democratic primary field in the race to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin shrank for a second time in less than a week on Wednesday as Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry announced he would end his campaign, leaving progressive Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes as the frontrunner.
Barnes received key endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in recent days, and on Monday fellow progressive candidate Tom Nelson said he was throwing his support behind the lieutenant governor after his campaign ran out of money.
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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The push, which Zuckerberg calls building the “Discovery Engine,” is a radical departure from Facebook and Instagram’s historical focus on showing posts from a user’s social graph, or list of friends. The shift is intended to compete with TikTok’s heavy use of AI to serve up videos regardless of where they come from. That approach has quickly made TikTok one of the most used apps in the world and spawned a whole new creator economy.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Dr David Berger, a respected Australian physician and dedicated zero-COVID advocate who is being threatened with deregistration by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) over his social media condemnations of the government’s “let it rip” coronavirus policies.
The campaign to restore the SEP_Australia’s Twitter account was a success and after nearly a week of being locked out, the account was restored late last night. While Twitter admits the video did not violate any rules, it fails to explain why it censored the SEP or why it took so long to restore the account.
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The film is based on the true story of Betty Mahmoody’s escape from Iran in 1986.
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Robert Bwenje had accompanied Assistant Pastor Ambrose Mugisha of Elim Pentecostal Church in Nyamiringa village, Kapeke Sub-County, Kiboga District, to an open-air debate about Christianity and Islam in Sirimula village, Kyankwanzi District on July 6.
Following the debate, eight Muslims including two women put their faith in Christ, said Pastor Mugisha, 25.
“This angered the Muslims, but they could not attack us because we had tight security from the police,” he said.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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It is a dangerous, unpredictable time. Since the Home Secretary signed the extradition order, a provisional appeal has been filed by Julian’s lawyers. ‘Provisional’ is part of the tortuous process of appeal. The lawyers must submit what are known as ‘perfected grounds of appeal’ in the next few weeks, then the US and the Home Secretary file their responses. Only after that does it go to a judge (not sitting in a court) to decide whether or not he will accept it. It may sound meticulous but, having observed it, it looks to me like a finely spun blanket of obfuscation over a profoundly biased system.
Until the High Court hearing last year, I believed the country’s senior judges would reject the US appeal and reclaim something of the mythologized notion of British justice if only for the system’s survival, which partly depends on ‘face’ within the arcane reaches of the British establishment. This show of ‘independence’ in support of justice has happened in the past. In Julian’s case, the facts are surely too outrageous — no properly constituted court would even consider it — yet I was wrong. The decision by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales last October that the US in effect had the right to fabricate and belatedly introduce ‘assurances’ that had not even been part of previous due process was quite shocking. There was no justice, no process; the guile and ruthlessness of US power was on show. Might is right.
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It didn’t bother me more than when I perceived it for myself while watching Judy Woodruff of th PBS NewsHour interview Assange from London’s Ecuadoraian embassy in August of 2016 — just months before the election that resulted in Trump getting elected as president under a cloud of controversy that enveloped both candidates: His sexual scandals; Her handling of emails.
Judy and I go back a long way; she has long been one of my favorite newsreaders and interviewers on the nation’s only network that is calm and rational and mostly balanced; paid by “viewers like you” and corporations, like the DNC. And though she never crossed the line, it was clear that she didn’t trust Assange and seemed to be openly questioning how he received the first batch of emails from the DNC that he’d already published on Wikileaks. He begins by chiding the senior journalist for calling a “leak” of material a “hack,” which was the line that the Obama administration was pushing through the MSM. This may be a moment when the media posture toward Assange began to change, and it’s valuable to watch this rare and revealing footage:
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A trio of congressional lawmakers reintroduced the Espionage Reform Act on Wednesday to prevent reporters from being prosecuted for publishing classified information—a common journalistic practice used to expose government wrongdoing.
“Journalists should never be prosecuted by the government for what they publish. Especially when politicians abuse the law to keep the public in the dark.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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“We’re talking about almost 400 water systems who are failing to provide safe, drinking water to their customers,” said Michael Tilden, Acting California State Auditor. “That’s significant.”
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Iran’s Guidance Ministry has told advertising agencies that under the government’s tightening of the so-called hijab and chastity law, women are now prohibited from appearing in advertisements.
The ministry sent a letter to agencies over the weekend following the release of a promotional video by the Domino ice-cream company that featured an actress wearing a sweater donning additional layers of clothing while images of ice cream flash across the screen.
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She was escaping threats of a forced marriage with a local Taliban fighter in her district in northern Afghanistan and relocating to another country. “One of their commanders who was only being referred to as ‘maulavi’ [a title given to a religious leader] demanded that my parents marry me to him. They wanted to control and punish me for my work against them,” F.J. said, referring to her reporting critical of the Taliban’s treatment of women and minorities.
“When I refused, they were offended and at first threatened to kill my parents, but then they threaten to kidnap me,” she told NPR, speaking from the location where she is in hiding.
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Since they took control of the country in August 2021, the Taliban have violated women’s and girls’ rights to education, work and free movement; decimated the system of protection and support for those fleeing domestic violence; detained women and girls for minor violations of discriminatory rules; and contributed to a surge in the rates of child, early and forced marriage in Afghanistan.
The report, Death in Slow Motion: Women and Girls Under Taliban Rule, also reveals how women who peacefully protested against these oppressive rules have been threatened, arrested, detained, tortured, and forcibly disappeared.
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In less than a year, the Taliban have decimated the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan. They have violated women’s and girls’ rights to education, work and free movement; demolished the system of support for women and girls fleeing domestic violence; arbitrarily detained women and girls for infractions of the Taliban’s discriminatory rules; and contributed to a surge in the rates of child, early and forced marriage. Women who peacefully protested against these restrictions and policies have been harassed, threatened, arrested, forcibly disappeared, arbitrarily detained and tortured.
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They interviewed 90 women and 11 girls aged between 14 and 74 years of age across Afghanistan.
Among them were women detained for protesting who described torture at the hands of Taliban guards, including beatings and threats of death.
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Amnesty said Afghanistan’s economic and humanitarian crisis has deprived women and girls of education and job prospects. The report documented cases of forced marriages of women and girls to Taliban members — under pressure by the Taliban member or by the women’s families.
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The Taliban seized Kabul as U.S. and NATO forces were withdrawing from Afghanistan, ending a nearly 20-year war against the Taliban’s insurgency. The world has refused to recognize the Taliban’s rule, demanding it respect human rights and show tolerance for other groups. The U.S. and its allies have cut off billions in development funds that kept the government afloat, as well as froze billions in Afghan national assets.
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“And you’re dropped into society so damaged that you don’t know how to fit in,” he added. “That’s the part of these exonerations that people don’t realize. They think you’re fine because you’re finally free, and you look, on the outside, like you’re fine. But you’re not. On the inside, you’re spinning. You’re lost and struggling with so much. It’s hard.”
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Democratic U.S. lawmakers and reproductive freedom advocates on Wednesday denounced Senate Republicans for blocking proposed legislation that would safeguard access to contraception as GOP-led states enact total abortion bans in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s reversal.
“These extremists are pulling back the curtain to reveal just how out of touch they are with Americans. Voters won’t forget it come November.”
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Janine Jackson: The anticipated—but still devastating—Dobbs decision aims to take reproductive health care out of the hands of countless people, and it’s already having that effect. But one might think as terrible as that is, at least a person can go online to learn how to get to the nearest abortion access point, or order pills from Canada.
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The six-time Emmy Award winner, television legend and political activist adds another achievement to his already monumental history: a century of life.
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In the weeks following the Dobbs decision, national polls showed that a significant swath of registered voters are united over abortion rights as a priority. But perhaps most vitally, recent research makes it clear that the Roe reversal has brought to the fore a potential coalition of abortion rights supporters that, if successfully leveraged, could prove a powerful challenge to the anti-abortion movement.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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With the midterms looming, Democrats are apparently once again embracing one of their favorite “strategies”: pushing bills they know have no chance of passing, that may not even do the thing they claim to do, in a bid to make it look like at least they’re “doing something.”
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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U.K. TV giant ITV reported better-than-expected first-half 2022 revenue on Thursday, including a gain of 6 percent in total external revenue and a 5 percent improvement in advertising revenue, but the latter declined in the second quarter amid difficult comparisons with the year-ago period.
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So, we just had a post mocking the Democrats for whining about Hulu refusing their issue ads, and falsely calling it “censorship.” And now we have Republicans issuing a bullshit blustery threat letter to Google not to limit searches for sketchy fake abortion centers.
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What a terrible world it would be if Republicans and Democrats alike start pushing for 1st Amendment-violating demands on websites that they be compelled to carry speech they don’t want to. Over the last few years, we’ve seen mainly Republicans pushing for these kinds of “must carry” / “can’t moderate” rules in response to what they (without any actual evidence) believe is anti-conservative bias in moderation. The end result were some blatantly unconstitutional laws that have been mostly… ruled unconstitutional.
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Monopolies
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One could question whether offering some collaborative marketing was really meant to address such deep-rooted anti-competitive behavior, or if the goal was simply to let the complaint go away with some marketing dollars.
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The PC Hardware + Microsoft Windows 8 with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) will monopolise amd64 hardware. If you (or your OS project/supplier) make your own kernels for amd64, you will not be able to boot them (unless you buy a key from a company working with the monopoly, or possibly go to arcane efforts, a deterrent to free choice & supply).
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In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission sued to block Meta, formerly known as Facebook, from buying game developer Within in a bid to limit the company’s reach in the virtual reality market. The complaint advances relatively untested theories arguing that antitrust laws account for actions taken by a firm that isn’t yet a monopolist but is positioned to become one. The legal action potentially indicates a pivot from the agency toward limiting acquisitions by dominant firms in markets for growing technologies.
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Patents
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Republican lawmakers are working behind closed doors to convince the Senate parliamentarian—the chamber’s unelected rules arbiter—to tank Democrats’ watered-down but still potentially impactful proposal to require Medicare to negotiate the prices of a small number of prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies.
Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), a major beneficiary of pharmaceutical industry campaign cash, admitted as much in remarks to reporters on Tuesday, saying that he and his GOP colleagues are “going through line by line, literally, making objections” in private meetings with the Senate parliamentarian, who is tasked with offering advice on whether reconciliation provisions comply with chamber rules.
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Trademarks
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For roughly the past four years, we have been following the trademark lawsuit brought by the Girl Scouts of America (GSA) against Scouts BSA, formerly the Boy Scouts of America. While these two organizations coexisted peacefully for many years thanks to BSA’s “girls have cooties” viewpoint, that changed when BSA suddenly started allowing girls to join and underwent the rebrand to Scouts BSA. That rebrand often times included putting “girl” and “scouts” next to each other in recruiting branding, the use of Girl Scout slogans, pictures of in-uniform Girl Scouts in BSA recruiting material, and on and on. GSA notably also provided real-world examples of the above causing confusion in the public.
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Copyrights
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Hacking, cracking, piracy group Blizzless Project has released special versions of Starcraft: Remastered, Warcraft III: Reforged, and Diablo II: Resurrected, enabling them to be played offline with no connection to Battle.net. In what appears to be a message to Activision Blizzard, the team suggests it will put right what the company has been doing wrong.
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VPN detection service GeoComply helps rightsholders and streaming platforms ban so-called ‘geo pirates’, users who bypass geographical restrictions using online tools. Because some VPN providers use residential IP addresses to circumvent such restrictions, GeoComply is now blocking these as well. The company bills it as a revolutionary technology.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Politics
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To be able to withstand the punches life throws at you, being flexible is helpful, methinks. It allows you to focus on what matters to you, overlook what doesn’t, and dodge them punches like a pro. Not only that, but you can more easily experiment with things and try to find what works best. “If you don’t have the room to fail, you only have the room to remain” (if it almost rhymes it’s true, amirite?)
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Technical
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Cybersecurity is a hot field and while we’ve made leaps and bounds in the field, there’s also been a growing number of clickbait and sensationalist headlines making the rounds. Every “major” vulnerability now seems like it needs to be accompanied by a domain, logo and FAQ talking about how dangerous it is. Similarly, on a weekly basis news outlets mention some super sneaky cross platform rootkit undetected by all anti-virus vendors giving hackers full control of your system.
[...]
Recently, a cybersecurity “advisor” posted on twitter a screenshot of a supposed Discord scam where an image failing to load allows them to steal your discord token and bypass 2FA. There was only a screenshot, but no technical writeup or proof of concept. One should be skeptical because there are two major vulnerabilities implied here: the ability for an automated script to bypass 2FA to steal your token, and doing so via an image that would bypass Discord’s content security policy and/or electron sandboxing.
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Science
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First, it should be uncontroversial to assert the antiracist principle, anchored in basic biology, that we are one species. There are observable differences in such things as skin color and hair texture, as well as some patterns in predisposition to disease based on ancestors’ geographic origins, but the idea of separate races was created by humans and is not found in nature.
There are no known biologically based differences in intellectual, psychological, or moral attributes between human populations from different regions of the world. There is individual variation within any human population in a particular place (obviously, individuals in any society differ in a variety of traits). But there are no meaningful biologically based differences between populations in the way people are capable of thinking, feeling, or making decisions. We are one species. We are all basically the same animal.
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The oddly prophetic 2006 comedy film Idiocracy features an isotonic drink called Brawndo, whose marketing continuously refers to its electrolytes as a miraculous property. Brawndo is revealed in the film to be useless for agricultural irrigation, but yesterday perhaps a couple of Hackaday writers could have used a bottle or two. At the MCH hacker camp, the record heat of a Dutch summer under the influence of global warming caused us to become dehydrated, and thus necessitated a trip to the first aid post for some treatment. We’d done all the right things, staying in the shade, keeping as cool as we could, eating salty foods like crisps, and drinking plenty of liquids, so what had gone wrong?
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Internet/Gemini
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But this all begs the question, why do we need search? Is search good for the community?
I myself am a datahoarder in some respects, and the thought of content being lost to time brings me no pleasure. However, I think it’s worth considering that an immortal, searchable archive of everything may not be an unequivocally good thing.
[...]
This state of affairs accurately describes the way that the internet currently functions. Regardless of who controls the internet or how decentralized platforms are, the fact that you can always dig back in time and find digital traces of everyone’s pasts means that we are constantly participating in an administrative surveillance state. (At least, each of our online identities are — what connection an online identity bears to your personal identity is a topic for another time.) The problem then, is not that a state or corporation controls the internet, but that the internet itself _assumes the state form_. Everything can and will be held against you in a court of law. Identities are not allowed to be changing and dynamic — if you change as a person, your only choice is to discard an identity and take up a new one.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in IRC Logs at 2:32 am by Needs Sunlight
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
Enter the IRC channels now
IPFS Mirrors
| CID |
Description |
Object type |
QmRX3oaSf1ovftzQknSC5aVxzj39s4aXtyoLezYPNDhNir |
IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmNxsks6jkVTP1DWSzAPNjw6ECh6TMXkFwBtRU8XLZBKCB |
IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmPQRrE4RwppG7Cj8vjtbr1VcPW4cbPhy4Krk37jP4AFSA |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmTbaEmwYeMEHtP9i6ocoviqp1ZrsSMqHJ4uScAKbujbiM |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmWLVoyvegAqFNaN8nKoEce9Tm7UnpfSNEJsosjbnKs6PY |
IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmVHcRfyGrYfMfEE7tW388Ai5FYZHMbyaoJaZ6FHYRAPQC |
IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmZjcoXjaADwa4pexCvCafzQZo2FutHqSg7NqZVsSEJAk8 |
IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmZ4wbJfGNFoUmdSo8Mr2BETs9tgudpceXa9pe8edUgfQS |
IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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Bulletin for Yesterday
Local copy | CID (IPFS): Qmd5sSa6zctA8RcuhbgaMD5PKt4K2aGr7vwBWUT9GrkoLL
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 1:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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The HP Dev One Linux laptop is a reasonably priced, user-repairable machine with plenty of attractive features, says Scott Gilbertson, in this review.
“Combining HP’s hardware capabilities and industry experience with System76′s Pop!_OS desktop has produced the best all-around Linux laptop you can buy right now,” Gilbertson says.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this video, we are looking at how to install Minetest on Pop!_OS 22.04.
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Maxie Reynolds of Subsea Cloud tells Doc Searls and Shawn Powers how the marine underworld is the future of data centers as well as data communications. Putting data centers under the ocean? Yes, it’s a real thing, and it’s discussed on this episode of FLOSS Weekly.
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As we all well know I am very Harmful and Dangerous so youtube decided to bring me down a peg a slap a strike on my channel, turns out though they have no idea what they’re doing and removed the strike anyway.
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Kernel Space
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XDP (or Express Data Path) is a networking utility available in the Linux kernel. XDP is used in many popular companies to solve some serious networking issues they face while handling millions of requests per second. This is an MIT licensed open source program merged in the Linux kernel from version 4.8.
XDP is a performance and programmable network data packet processor. It comes into existence to mitigate some serious server-side issues like DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks or as a load balancer.
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Applications
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The GTK feed reader Liferea released version 1.13.9 recently with generic Google Reader API support, UI improvements, and bug-fixes.
This is the last release of the 1.13 unstable series of Liferea (Linux Feed Reader). It makes possible to import from FeedHQ, FreshRSS, Basquz, and other feed readers using Google Reader API (exclude Miniflux due to this bug).
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We are happy to introduce our first in-house developed program to the world: FOSS Post Collapse Monitor.
There are many indicators for a possible collapse in human civilization, motivated by climate change and other elements. Many people started carefully monitoring these elements in order remain alerted as much as possible, and make sure they are prepared for what is to come.
One can find many useful interactive maps online which provide alerts about possible hazards, accidents and natural disasters, but you don’t always want to open them manually each time you want to check them. Additionally, you may want to keep your markings/edits on some of them (Which may support that unlike the others), and hence, putting all these maps in a different standalone window would give the best experience.
This is the idea of this small app; it is a web browser with 7 maps (Currently) which show different hazards alerts, disaster alerts, future projections for areas with high probability of floodings, earthquakes, natural disasters and many other interesting data.
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Setting up a VPN on Linux used to involve the terminal, Stack Overflow and a computer science degree. Nowadays, the process is a lot simpler and some VPN providers have released graphical user interfaces for Linux and simple installs via the Snap Store or other click and play solutions. In this post we’ll take a look at some of the easiest ways to get a VPN on Linux and explain some of the benefits that a VPN can bring to your Linux experience.
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Roam note-taking aids busy minds to create, and connect their created notes, which allows them later easy browsing and organization of dozens of notes.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Ubuntu and other major Linux distributions automatically detect the system graphics card and install their open-source driver by default. To install a proprietary driver, you need to perform a few more steps.
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The LAMP is a shortcut to Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The Linux operating system in this tutorial will be the latest Ubuntu 22.04. Apache is an HTTP web server used to serve the requests, MySQL is a relational database management system used for storing data, and PHP is the website’s language. The LAMP stack is used for creating websites and web applications. We are going to explain in more detail how these four software are connected to each other.
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In a previous article, I showed you how to build your very own Nextcloud server. In this article, we’re going to extend the storage for our Nextcloud instance by utilizing block storage. To follow along, you’ll either need your own Nextcloud server to extend, or perhaps you can add block storage to a different type of server you may control, which would mean you’d need to update the paths accordingly as we go along. Block storage is incredibly useful, so we’ll definitely want to take advantage of this.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Remmina on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Remmina is a remote desktop client written in GTK+, aiming to be useful for system administrators and travelers, who need to work with lots of remote computers in front of either large monitors or tiny netbooks. Remmina works on multiple protocols like RDP, VNC, NX, XDMCP, SPICE, HTTP/HTTPS, SSH, and SFTP protocols.
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 Remmina remote desktop 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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The previously-installed mainstream Linux distributions had installed GRUB2, so I have enhanced Limine Installer to detect this and chainload to it. In the earlier test, these were the detected installations…
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Within the world of open source, there are plenty of enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools available to deploy for free that will help bring your business’s resource planning to new levels of efficiency and reliability. One such platform is Odoo, which happens to be one of the most popular open-source ERP solutions on the market.
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After a brief stint at Tanner AG where I met my friend and then and now colleague, Tanja Roth, I rejoined SUSE to spend the next 8 years writing for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM zSeries, and for what later became SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. The next years were fantastic—writing and fighting alongside as part of the best team of writers in the world ;).
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Games
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It’s been two and a half months since the previous stable Steam Client update and now Valve pushed a new version that brings various bug fixes for Linux gamers, including a fix for an issue where the Steam Overlay “Force Quit” option wasn’t working for some native Linux games.
Also for Linux gamers, the new Steam Client update fixes an issue where some games were unable to create desktop shortcuts, a resource usage issue of the chat and browsers components when the Steam Client is minimized or closed, as well as an issue where the Steam Client triggered “split lock” warnings.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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In an effort so gain more user insight and perspective for the development of the Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP), members of the openSUSE community workgroup will have a MicroOS Desktop install workshop on August 2.
There will be feedback sessions the following weeks during the community workgroup and community meeting.
Users are encouraged to install MicroOS Desktop during the week of August 1. There will be a short Installation Presentation during the ALP Workgroup Meeting at 14:30 UTC on August 2 for those who need a little assistance.
During the next two weeks’ meetings, follow ups will be given with a final Lucid Presentation on August 16 during the regularly scheduled workgroup.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Pop!_OS 22.04 is available for Raspberry Pi users as a technical preview despite being labeled as an “LTS” or Long-Term Support release by the company, according to 9to5Linux. Pop!_OS is a customized version of Ubuntu that uses a special desktop and under-the-hood enhancements tuned for technical and creative work.
The company used the Pop!_OS Twitter feed to announce the technical preview:
While Pop!_OS is tailored to System76′s line of preinstalled Linux PCs, the company has also made it available as a standalone release for anyone to download. System76 does not currently manufacture any version of the single-board Raspberry Pi. The release follows the release of the standard version 22.04 in April 2022, which System76 similarly teased with its own beta release beforehand.
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Ubuntu’s beleaguered Firefox Snap package is tackling another of longstanding criticism of it, namely its lack of native messaging support.
It’s this fancy-sounding feature that allows Firefox add-ons to “exchange messages with a native application, installed on the user’s computer”. This enables things like desktop password managers to function as expected in the browser.
But at last there’s change ahoy.
In a short update on the Snapcraft forum Ubuntu developer Olivier Tilloy says integration of a new WebExtensions XDG portal with the latest beta builds of Mozilla Firefox is ready for wider testing via the Snap store.
The patches mean Ubuntu users should be able, once again, to install GNOME Shell extensions from the GNOME Extensions website using Firefox (with the relevant browser add-on and host connector, though honestly: install gnome-shell-extension-manager instead as it offers a superior experience).
Similarly, other Firefox add-ons like the KeePassXC password manager should also work as intended. The new XDG portal also benefits Flatpak apps. It may also in time, be used by other popular web browsers shipped in sandbox packaging formats, such as Chromium.
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The Web and design team at Canonical runs in two-week iterations building and maintaining all of the Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
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Open Hardware/Modding (modifiable, open-ended modules]
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GPS is perfect for navigating roads, because that doesn’t require much precision. But GPS is only accurate to several meters, which means that it is unsuitable for applications that require more precise positioning. GPS RTK (real-time kinematic) systems can achieve much greater accuracy, but they are complex and require a subscription to a correction service. Viktor Kurusa needed accurate positioning for his robotic lawn mower, but didn’t want to resort to GPS RTK. Instead, he used a few Arduino boards to enable UWB ranging for centimeter-scale positioning.
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Wheeled vehicles are so common because they’re efficient. If a vehicle will drive on a relatively smooth and flat surface, wheels are the most efficient option. But on rough terrain, wheels don’t always cut it. For such terrain, tank tracks and more exotic options often perform better than wheels. Walking machines take that to the extreme, climbing over rough ground in the same way as animals do. But traditional walking machines struggle to turn on the spot without using many motors. To overcome that limitation, James Bruton took inspiration from omni wheels to build a robot that can move in any direction.
Bruton uses omni wheels in many of his projects. Omni wheels have rollers around their circumference, which lets them roll passively in one direction and actively in another. A vehicle equipped with four omni wheels can move in any direction by spinning the individual wheels in opposing directions. This walking robot utilizes a similar concept. In each mechanism’s active direction, it walks forward. But the feet have freely rotating wheels, which lets each mechanism roll passively to either side. The robot has three of these walking mechanisms in a triangular pattern, so it can move in any direction by controlling which mechanisms are active and which are passive at any given time.
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LilyGO T-Display-S3 is an ESP32-S3 WiFi and Bluetooth LE IoT development board with a 1.9-inch color LCD and support for LiPo batteries that follows the company’s T-QT ESP32-S3 board with a tiny 0.85-inch display introduced earlier this month.
The new board offers the same layout as the previous T-Display RP2040 or ES32 boards, but the 1.14-inch display has been replaced with a larger 1.9-inch display that covers most of the board, and thanks to the ESP32-S3 microcontroller, gains proper Bluetooth 5.0 support, as well as vector instructions for AI acceleration.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 103 has arrived and it now includes a feature users have long awaited…sort of.
With the release of Firefox 103, a few new additions aimed at greatly improving the experience of some users. One of the biggest additions to the open-source web browser is two-finger horizontal swipe gesture support for navigating back and forward with a trackpad. This feature has been in the works for some time and is now seeing the light of day. However, there is a caveat to the new addition. The goal of the developers was to have the feature fully supported with version 103, however, upon release, the only way to use the two-finger swipe gesture is to first press and hold the Alt key on your keyboard. Hopefully, somewhere in the next few updates, that requirement will be removed and the feature will work exactly as expected.
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Earlier this month, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) asked stakeholders to contribute to the development of a national strategy for “responsibly harnessing privacy-preserving data sharing and analytics to benefit individuals and society.” This effort offers a much-needed opportunity to advance privacy in online advertising, an industry that has not seen improvement in many years.
In our comments, we set out the work that Mozilla has undertaken over the past decade to shape the evolution of privacy preserving advertising, both in our products, and in how we engage with regulators and standards bodies.
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For our new series Parental Control, we’re digging into the challenges technology poses for parents and exploring all the ways that can empower them. So we looked into digital platforms and found ourselves, as many parents do, in the parental control settings.
These settings, along with services that promise to shield young people away from “inappropriate” content, can give families comfort in the face of the infinite feed. They let adults limit screen time and restrict mature content (although the way platforms identify what that means is far from perfect). But it is not so simple as setting up the parental control settings and walking away. It’s important for parents to both understand their kids’ behaviors, and explain to them why they’re using parental controls.
The capabilities of these tools, as well as their shortcomings, led us to question the very name of our series: In a world where technology’s hold over everything we do seems uncontrollable, what does parental control even mean?
Jenny Radesky, who studies the intersections of child development, parenting and technology at the University of Michigan, takes issue with the phrase itself.
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FSF
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The voting members of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) have released and signed a voting member Code of Ethics as the FSF prepares to solicit nominations for its board of directors from FSF associate members.
The new voting member Code of Ethics parallels the Code of Ethics adopted by the FSF board of directors in December. It lays out ten principles that should guide decision-making for voting members as they exercise their duties, which include electing FSF board members and voting members.
Provisions of the Code include an acknowledgement of an unwavering commitment to software freedom and affirmations to act in good faith, uphold privacy, and not engage in harassment or discrimination when acting on behalf of the organization.
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Phreakers and hackers alike united for the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was there to spread the message of free software and do outreach to the local community. As any hacker gathering is a prime place to find free software activists, HOPE was also the occasion for an FSF member meetup at a nearby restaurant.
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Standards/Consortia
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So much of the content we experience on the modern internet appears in video format, whether as a pre-downloaded clip or, more commonly, though a streaming interface. And while modern standards have somewhat made the discussion around the “best” video format somewhat moot, the side effect of that is that it left a a whole bunch of dead or decaying formats in its wake. As you know about us over at Tedium HQ, we love things that didn’t make it, and with that in mind, whether we’re talking codecs, container formats, or the technologies that delivered those things, today’s Tedium discusses the video tech that didn’t see its way through to the modern day. (Have complaints? See the disclaimer.)
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Leftovers
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Hardware
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If you are an HPC center in Europe, and particularly one that is funded by public funds, you are thinking about Arm-based CPUs in your supercomputers. And that is despite Arm Holdings being a British company and all of the issues with the United Kingdom and its Brexit separation from the European Union.
Arm is still the closest thing to a European architecture that companies can deploy, and it is a licensable architecture – even if it is not an open one in the strictest sense – and that standard in stark contrast to the X86 architecture that has dominated HPC compute for three decades now.
This is particularly true given the A64FX processor designed by Fujitsu, with its fat SVE vector engines, and used in the “Fugaku” supercomputer at RIKEN Lab in Japan and the intent by Arm Holdings to add substantial vector processing performance in its upcoming “Zeus” V1 core, which has already been added to the 64-core Graviton3 (code-name unknown) processor from Amazon Web Services.
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Smartphone sales in China have fallen to a fresh low in the second quarter of 2022, dropping 14.2% year-on-year, the technology analyst firm Counterpoint Research says.
No sales figures were provided, but going by the figures published by Counterpoint for the second quarter of 2021 — which was 75 million units — the 2Q 2022 figure would have been close to 64.4 million units.
The firm said the second quarter figure was less than half the peak reached in the fourth quarter of 2016, adding that the last time sales were this low was in the final quarter of 2012 when the iPhone 5 made its debut.
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Security (For-Profit FUD Attacks on ‘Linux’ Wrapped Up as Advice or News)
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Make Use Of ☛ Linux Malware Found To Be at an All-Time High in 2022 [Ed: A totally meaningless measure; unlike Windows, there aren't known back doors and malware needs some way to get in. This seems like commercially-motivated misinformation from a private company peddling VPNs]
It has been found by AtlasVPN that new Linux malware rose exponentially in the first half of 2022, reaching an all-time high with nearly 1.7 million samples discovered.
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LinuxSecurity ☛ Your Linux Firewall Can’t Stop These 3 Attacks! [Ed: The domain linuxsecurity.com actively pushes anti-Linux FUD to make sales; this is misuse of a domain]
Nowadays, Linux systems are considered fairly secure, as people think that Linux rarely gets infected with malware such as viruses, rootkits, worms, etc. You might also see that we hardly ever come across Antivirus software being sold for Linux, giving the illusion that Linux is an ultimately secure Operating System.
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CSO ☛ 8 top SBOM tools to consider [Ed: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols became LF-sponsored LF salesperson; he attacks the founder of GNU with defamatory articles and belittles Microsoft as a threat. Now this SBOM canard.]
To really secure software, you need to know what’s inside its code. That’s why a software bill of materials is essential today. It used to be that we didn’t worry that much about our code’s security. Bad binaries, sure. The code itself? Not so much. We were so foolish.
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FOSSLife ☛ Cyber Safety Report Outlines Software Security Best Practices [Ed: Biased, FOSS-hostile, self-serving FUD from the SBOM profiteers. We're entered a time when FOSS-hostile entities are 'lecturing' us on the risks and threats of FOSS. This is what happens when organisations like LF and OSI sell out.]
The recent (and persistent) Log4j incident highlighted the need for standardized practices that “lead to software that is secure by design,” says the new report from the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB). In this article, we’ll look at some of the report’s recommendations for securing software and managing vulnerabilities.
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Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ CRob on Software Security Education and SIRTs [Ed: Anti-Linux people like Alan Shimel are used by the so-called ‘Linux’ Foundation to promote FUD; this is despicable, but it’s what happens when Microsoft pays the bills]
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Open-source Linux distributions maintain your privacy better than proprietary operating systems. But how?
You may have heard that Linux is the operating system to use if you care about privacy. But why is that? Is your data suddenly safe just because you use Linux?
Well, yes and no. Once you open up a web browser, you can give all of your data away just like you do on other platforms. But up until that point, no one has any insight into what you’re doing on your Linux-powered PC. Let’s go through some of the reasons why.
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On July 27, 2022, Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton was asked to appear before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was invited to provide expert testimony on a hearing devoted to combating threats to U.S. national security from the proliferation of foreign commercial spyware. What follows is the written submission of that testimony.
[...]
This testimony is developed from a body of evidence assembled by my colleagues and peers, and a field of talented researchers in academia, industry, and non-profit organizations. Many more groups have helped with victim outreach, collecting cases, and collaborating in investigations. Investigative journalists and reporting collectives have also played a significant role in shedding light on this secretive world. I cannot speak for anyone else in this growing ecosystem of accountability, but without their critical work, this conversation would not be happening. I would also like to acknowledge the colleagues that helped me prepare this testimony, as well as Dr. Bill Marczak, whose work developing techniques for scanning for various mercenary spyware families has led to many of our recent discoveries.
It is also very meaningful to me that Carine Kanimba has been invited to testify. As a victim of Pegasus spyware, she will be able to tell you about the impact of being targeted during her efforts to secure the release of her father, Paul Rusesabagina, from jail in Rwanda. Much of what we know about mercenary spyware abuses come from brave victims stepping forward, despite the risks. We owe them a great debt.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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It’s been two years — 20 months and counting — since Tigrayans were cut off from the internet. Ever since conflict broke out in November 2020, they have been plunged into digital darkness that puts their lives at risk, disconnects them from their families, hampers their access to emergency medical and humanitarian aid, and cuts them off from the rest of the world. Here, we share their stories and ask you to join us in the call for urgent action.
One thing is clear from the stories collected through our partners in Tigray for the Shutdown Stories project: the internet shutdown is hurting people. It is exacerbating violence, sowing fear and confusion, and shrouding heinous crimes against humanity. That includes murder, rape, and sexual assault.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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n the United States, high speed Internet service providers are like drug dealers that agree not to operate in each other’s territory.
That way they can set prices as high as they want.
Comcast is getting even fatter off of the FCC’s “Emergency Broadband Benefit” which gives out “free” (taxpayer-subsidized) Internet to people on government benefits or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Line.
They also cut their Customer Support to the bone, making people spend hours dealing with “chat robots” and Interactive Voice Response systems before they can get through to an agent, which is often in another country, and can’t do anything except schedule a lineman.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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I was raised christian, Baptist specifically, but as I got older I began to question my religion. It is hard to ignore all the good things that christians do for people. Charities, compassion, morals, hope in hard times, community support. Living in Bible-belt America sometimes christianity doesn’t just seem beneficial, but straight up necessary. Churches dot the landscape often outnumbering many other types of business and organizations. Avoiding church is like avoiding society in general. How do you get to know people? How do you become part of the community if you aren’t active in a church?
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These are the books that I’m reading, have read, or haven’t read. You may find many of them on Gutenberg and/or Standard Ebooks, and some of them in the care list. If I don’t forget, I’ll link to their sources. Though less common, if I have a page dedicated to a book of this list I’ll link to it instead, like I did with How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
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We moved to a new spot in West Philly! The new place is _slightly_ bigger indoors, but I love that we now have a porch to hang out in and a backyard to do some gardening. I’m excited, but also super tired. Moving isn’t pleasant to begin with and we ended up moving during a heat wave! We’re also not done yet. We have a lot of unpacking to do over the next few weeks. Look at all this mess!
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Thoughts on Hard Determinism, as described in Philosophy 101, by Paul Kleinman.
Hard determinism, as described in the book, states that everything is determined by past events. It is not clear from the book if it’s meant to be applied only to the physical world, beings’ behaviour, or both, but it treats only human behaviour.
Applied to human behaviour, the idea holds that we have no effect in future events, because we cannot do anything other than what we’re predetermined to do, essentially meaning that we have no free will.
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Politics
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I have no intention of making politics a regular feature of this gemlog – however, I felt the need to comment on an issue that has been on my mind for several months: namely, SCOTUS’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Research has shown that abortion prohibition does not actually reduce abortion, but drives it underground – and into the realm of unsafe procedures that can result in the death of the woman involved. Regardless of one’s personal opinion on the morality of abortion itself, abortion bans are directly harmful to women’s safety and health. A compassionate society is one that trusts people to make their own decisions on reproductive healthcare.
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There is this vibe among the Swedish mainstream rightwing politicians that climate change is real, but, “isn’t gonna be a problem once we have enough nuclear plants”.
As with all optimism, I sure hope they’re right, but it’s scary because I don’t see it as that credible since it’s such a slow and expensive solution compared to faster tracks like sun and wind. The recency bias of market capitalism put us in this mess but might benefit us if it steers us away from nukes.
A lot of the same battery and motor tech that’s useful for nuclear in the distant future is useful for sun and wind now, so people should really get off the “lol, we’ll just wait for nuclear, and burn gasoline until then” crazy train and start switching to electric (and frugality) right now. Whether as a stepping stone or as the be-all, end-all.
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Technical
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The early 2000s were an interesting era – they marked a widespread die-off of legacy high-end RISCs and an exciting new entrant in the form of the joint Intel/HP Itanium family. I decided to throw together some graphs of performance by family over time, drawn from SPECint and SPECfp base results.
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My electronics projects seem to consist mostly of writing clocks. I have made one for an Arduino Nano, an STM32, an ESP32, and a Raspberry Pi 0. I am rather jealous of people who can make purely-electronic projects. Other people make this seem so easy, but I think they have a lot internalised knowledge that they don’t present when they make YouTube videos. I feel that I lack the kind of foundational knowledge to bring their projects to fruition. One outstanding project was a guy who made a digital clock using resistors, capacitors, etc., but no microcontroller. He got the timing to work based on the fact that the British electrical supply worked on 50Hz. I’d be too scared that I’d electrocute my sorry arse.
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The CHIP-8 looks to be much more primitive than the aforementioned offerings. I haven’t used it. I think there was a guy on YouTube that showed how to create an emulator and assembler, probably in Rust.
The CHIP-8 has variants that improve it in various ways. I think that there was one university professor who taught historical game development, and used CHIP-8 on one of his courses.
I had toyed with the idea of learning about CHIP-8, and maybe incorporating it in my up-and-coming BBS. Might be a little selling point to stir up a bit of interest. Maybe. We’ll see.
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A lot of code density claims I see online – “RISC-V code density is best in class”, “x86 code density is better than any RISC”, – have always struck me as unlikely and inconsistent with what I’ve seen in the trenches. After I tried and failed to find a modern comparison with a broad range of instruction sets, I decided to run my own. The cool-kid approach to this would be to use SPEC or similar, and look at density alongside dynamic and static instruction counts, but I have a deep-seated loathing of both SPECtools and the subtests themselves and had no desire to try to make them build for m68k or Xtensa. (nb: SPEC is actually a great benchmark – the best available. It just isn’t always much fun.) Instead, I did it the janky way: do a buildroot run, with -Os and as few changes to default settings as possible, and count the bytes in the busybox executable. The results were unsurprising in places – Thumb2 being excellent, for instance – but I was surprised to see just how terrible the density of the “classic” RISCs is.
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Pico-8 was my introduction to fantasy consoles like these and it came through the PocketCHIP handheld computer. Every PocketCHIP came with a copy of Pico 8 installed and it was a really fun way to play some retro-style games on that rad geeky portable computer. It wasn’t until quite a bit later that I learned about other fantasy consoles but they are something I find really cool and fun even as someone who just likes playing games and doesn’t program anything. The result of the hard artificial limits is that there is a pretty rapid supply of all kinds of creative, silly, fun and occasionally impressively well done games to play. There are quite a few different fantasy consoles now but Pico-8 is still the top of the heap and I would estimate that TIC-80 is second most popular.
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This post is inspired by a 3 month blogpost[1] suggesting you disable SELinux (and the comments within and on the orange site) as well as the Nobara project. For the uninitiated, Nobara is a gaming focused Fedora remix designed to work “out of the box” for gamers. However, one of the things it does is set SELinux to permissive mode which I do not recommend at all.
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Games
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Two years ago I stumbled into the website of Warpspawn Games, and a few days ago (no… a few months ago, as I did not get around to complete this post until now) a thread on Boardgamegeek reminded me that they exist. Or existed. Warpspawn Games was mainly the work of a Lloyd Krassner, who passed away in 2020. I have no idea who he was, but I am fascinated by what he achieved. BGG lists 924 games designed by him. Warpspawn as publisher of 1032 games (a few others contributed games as well). From what I can tell those were all created from 1997 to 2017, and posted as free print’n’play downloads.
Unfortunately the full catalogue of Warpspawn is no longer available. A total of five Yahoo Groups and Google Groups existed for hosting some of the files, and both those sites are long gone now. Some fan-made(!) materials posted by others are also no longer available or can only be found via archive.org.
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Internet/Gemini
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I never tried to post on S.p via my phone. But that is what I am doing now. Seems to being working just fine 
I didn’t have a pre-determined entry in mind when I started though. So this is impromptu text entry.
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The only data type in Whitespace is “arbitrarily large integer” which can represent a character or a heap address or a plain old integer. It’s easy to get it wrong. You want to do arithmetic on a heap value, but you forget that you have an address, not the number. You still have an integer waiting for the next instruction, but it won’t be the one you wanted. Thank heaven I have a debugger.
I implemented a reverse Polish calculater, and it was pleasing to write something moderately useful. But with only integers, it was not *that* useful. Then I thought I could represnt a float as two integers, Value and Scale, which represent V×10^S. So I implemented a bunch of floating point arithmetic macros, and now I have a floating point calculator in a language that doesn’t support floats.
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Programming
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Minor update to Pangamebook again. Version 1.3.0 makes it possible to disable numbering of gamebook sections by setting metadata gamebook-numbers to false (similar to how shuffling could already be disabled by setting gamebook-shuffle to false).
This is intended for debugging. Leave shuffling enabled, but disable numbering, and it is easier to see where all sections ended up.
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I am still working on the I2C driver project during my lunch breaks, to utilize the built-in circuitry for I2C communication on my Rpi Pico, for Mecrisp Stellaris Forth.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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