09.12.22

Links 12/09/2022: New in KDE Plasma 5.26, Istio Has New Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 8:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • WCCF Tech ☛ AMD Utilizes User-Space Hinting To Achieve Faster EPYC CPU Performance in Linux

        Before the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) session, to be held next week in Dublin, Ireland, AMD will be conducting a seminar on improving the scheduler for split last-level cache, or LLC, architectures. K. Prateek Nayak, an engineer of the Linux server team for AMD, published a patch series focusing on counting user-space hinting at task placement. This new development displays AMD’s intent to improve the Linux kernel’s scheduler for split-LLC CPU plans to aid their EPYC server processors.

    • Applications

      • Make Use Of ☛ 3 Ways to Screenshot Right-Click Context Menus on Linux

        There are many easy-to-use screenshot utilities for Linux, but most of them fail to capture context menus and tooltips if not configured properly.

        If you take a lot of screenshots on your computer, there are several tools that can help you do it effectively. However, most of these screenshot tools don’t allow you to screenshot right-click menus in Linux.

        As such, if you need to take screenshots of right-click/context menus on your computer—perhaps to help someone troubleshoot an issue with their system—you have to look toward other methods.

        If you use Ubuntu, there are a few different ways to do this on your computer. Follow along as we check out these methods to screenshot right-click menus in Linux.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Sonic Battle Rematch on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to install Sonic Battle Rematch 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.

      • Video ☛ How to install Visual Studio Code on Pop!_OS 22.04 – Invidious [Ed: Or don't. It's proprietary software that Microsoft uses for spying.]
      • Linux Hint ☛ How to List Installed Packages in Ubuntu 22.04

        A “package” is a compressed file archive containing all the files that come with a particular application. Several examples of packages are .tgz, .deb, and .rpm.
        Today, we will explore how to display the list of all the packages installed on our system. To do that, we have presented three different methods. We have used Ubuntu 22.04 to demonstrate the procedure. We will run easy-to-follow Linux commands on Ubuntu’s command line (Terminal) to list the packages.

        Without any further ado, let’s get started!

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Open a File With Nano Editor in Linux?

        GNU nano is a text editor for Unix-like computing systems or operating environments using a command line interface.

      • Linux Hint ☛ MySQL JSON Data Type

        You may have often heard about the type of clothes or food a person may like. Just like that, the value in a variable can be of a different type. These types define the class of a variable and to which category it belongs and which operations can be used on them. For a programmer or developer, it’s very common to use many data types every day while coding. Within databases like MySQL database, MySQL works so well with many data types as its open source platform. Our topic is to cover the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) datatype in databases without adding complex examples and unnecessary details. Therefore, you have to log in from your Linux system and open its terminal application further.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • DebugPoint ☛ KDE Plasma 5.26: Top New Features and Release Details

          KDE Plasma 5.26 is about improving the desktop experience, a huge set of bug fixes and some very nice, much-needed changes.

          The majority of the changes in this release revolve around desktop customizations. However, a vast amount of under-the-hood bug fixes and cleanup is a welcome change for the stability of the desktop. This release is based on Qt 5.15.2 and KDE Framework 5.98.

          The most iconic changes are animated wallpaper, resizable kick-off menu, tray widgets and Discover updates related to Flatpak.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • ZDNet ☛ Looking to switch to Linux from Windows? The Feren OS Transfer Tool makes it easy | ZDNET

      Feren OS is a version of the Linux operating system that leans heavily into the KDE Plasma desktop with plenty of tweaks, such as substituting the Nemo file manager in place of Dolphin, to make it as elegant as it is user-friendly.

      I’ve already reviewed Feren OS, but there’s a tool within the desktop distribution that focuses specifically on Windows users to help them make the migration. That is what I want to highlight here.

      [...]

      Anyone looking to adopt Linux as their daily operating system would be remiss if they didn’t at least give Feren OS a try.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Programming/Development

  • Leftovers

    • Proprietary

      • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – VMware pays fine to settle SEC charge of misleading investors

        Multi-cloud services provider VMware has paid a fine of US$8 million (A$11.6 million) following a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission over a charge of misleading investors about its order backlog management practices.

        In a statement issued on Monday, the SEC said these practices meant the company could “push revenue into future quarters by delaying product deliveries to customers, concealing the company’s slowing performance relative to its projections”.

        It found that these practices had begun in fiscal 2019. “VMware began delaying the delivery of licence keys on some sales orders until just after quarter-end so that it could recognise revenue from the corresponding licence sales in the following quarter,” the SEC said.

      • John Gruber ☛ Diffusion Bee 1.0: Easy to Install Stable Diffusion for Apple Silicon Macs [Ed: Apple easy to use? No!]

        It’s been a bit tricky to get running on Apple Silicon Macs, because (among other factors) the Python situation is complex.

      • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Apple fixes 10 bugs including two zero-days under exploit

        Apple has released fixes for 10 bugs in macOS Big Sur, including two zero-days that are being exploited in the wild.

        Both the zero-days, CVE-2022-32894 and CVE-2022-32917, were attributed to an anonymous researcher and affect the kernel of the operating system.

        Apple offered no details about these issues, merely saying, “An application may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited.”

    • Linux Foundation

    • Security

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Environment

      • [Older] Teachers’ Forum Condemns NCERT’s Decision to Remove Chapters on Climate Change | NewsClick

        After widespread outrage, a teacher’s forum has also stepped in to criticise NCERT for removing crucial chapters concerning climate and weather change from students’ syllabus and has urged a rethink on the issue and reintroduction of the chapters.

        In a statement released recently, Teachers Against Climate Crisis (TACC) highlighted said chapters on the greenhouse effect, weather, climate and popular environment movements from syllabi for classes 6th to 12th were crucial and should not have been removed.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • AccessNow ☛ Global Leaders of Digital Human Rights: Marianne Díaz Hernández recognized as international changemaker – Access Now

        Access Now is proud of Marianne Díaz Hernández, #WhyID Campaigner at Access Now, and her global recognition as one of Ouano Foundation’s 2022 Global Leaders of Digital Human Rights.

        “At Access Now, we’re well aware of the significance of Marianne Díaz Hernández’s work in fighting for the rights of people and communities impacted by technology and digital agendas, and we are overjoyed to see her tireless efforts acknowledged on a global scale,” said Carolyn Tackett, Campaigns and Rapid Response Director at Access Now. “We look forward to learning more from this gathering of global leaders, including Marianne, Access Now board members Arzu Geybulla and Nanjala Nyabola, and many others who have been at the heart of our movement for a more rights-respecting digital future.”

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Like Riding a Bike

        I started playing squash again after a five-year break. It wasn’t a voluntary break by any means, just weird life stuff I suppose. Regardless, I got a membership with the local community centre and booked my first court in ages.

        Going into it I knew my stamina was going to be really bad. I’m relatively active, but squash always kicks my ass when I’m returning to it after a while. It probably has to do with the short, intense bursts of movement that get me. However, knowing it had been years since I last picked up a racket, I was really worried my skills would be almost gone.

    • Technical

      • Internet/Gemini

        • My Favourites page from Kristall

          I just published a page on this capsule to list my favourites from Kristall (Gemini Browser). There are some interesting stuff there that you could use as a starting point on your Gemini voyage. :)

      • Programming

        • Real life examples of bad upstream packaging

          The debate between upstream and downstream packaging rages on, especially as of late. I thought I’d express some frustration at some third party repositories I’ve tried to install lately and what went wrong.

          [...]

          Fedora has strict packaging guidelines on what’s allowed in the base repositories. Usually this may be due to patenting issues, but security and quality is another issue. Fedora makes no guarantees about the security or quality of third party repositories. Examples are COPR and RPMFusion. COPR is a build service similar to openSUSE’s Open Build System while RPMFusion works closely with Fedora to provide packages that cannot land in Fedora itself.

          However, increasingly as of late, developers have opted to take over packaging of their own software themselves. Many people argue that this is a good thing as it cuts out the middleman. After all, developers would know their own software best, updates can be delivered faster and it’s better for security right? However, there are some downsides to this approach that I will detail below.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

Links 12/09/2022: LF Does Openwashing for Facebook/GitHub (Microsoft) and GNU/Linux Outperforms Vista 11

Posted in News Roundup at 2:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Linux Links ☛ Saving Money with Linux: Explore the BIOS – LinuxLinks

        Let’s turn our attention to the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). This is firmware used to start the PC system after it is powered on.

        The BIOS in modern PCs initializes and tests the system hardware components (Power-on self-test), and loads a boot loader from a mass storage device which then initializes a kernel. The BIOS stores system hardware settings such as storage device configuration, overclocking settings, advanced power management, and boot device configuration that are needed for system startup in the motherboard CMOS.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • TechRadar ☛ The latest Linux kernel update could play havoc with your VMs | TechRadar

        Computing performance for Linux VMs running the latest kernel update could have seen a decrease of up to 70%, new figures have found.

        Recent research by VMWare performance engineering staffer Manikandan Jagatheesan found running virtual machines with the Linux distro on the ESXi hypervisor, using the latest kernel update version 5.19, could see computing power reduce by more than two-thirds when using a single vCPU.

        Further ripple effects were also found in networking, with a loss of almost one-third, and storage performance, which saw up to a decrease of around one in ten.

      • Bleeping Computer ☛ VMware: 70% drop in Linux ESXi VM performance with Retbleed fixes

        VMware is warning that ESXi VMs running on Linux kernel 5.19 can have up to a 70% performance drop when Retbleed mitigations are enabled compared to the Linux kernel 5.18 release.

        More specifically, the VMware performance team noticed regressions on ESXi virtual machines of up to 70% in computing, 30% in networking, and 13% in storage.

    • Benchmarks

    • Applications

      • Medevel ☛ Wikiwand Boosts Your Wikipedia Readability and Experience

        Wikiwand is a browser extension that improve your Wikipedia readability experience. It is released as an extension for Google Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi and Brave, and as an Add-on for Mozilla Firefox.

        Wikiwand is also available as a mobile application that enable users fast speed, lockup and navigate through Wikipedia pages with improved mobile experience.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • How to Nullify a File in Linux

        Files, like log files, can easily and quickly grow taking up space on your hard drive. Before you realize it, you’re running low on hard drive space. You can easily nullify a file (or remove the content from a file) in Linux to shrink its size if you have limited hard drive space.

        For example, the operating system and some programs may use log files to track activity and issues. These files can grow large over time, and you may not need to keep all the previous content.

        Instead of opening the file and selecting all the content to delete it, you can use various command-line tools to nullify a file quickly and easily.

      • Vitux ☛ Generate SSH Keys in Ubuntu – VITUX

        SSH stands for Secure Shell and it is used widely as a means of accessing remote servers. The usage of SSH is recommended because it is considered a highly secure way of authenticating users remotely. Normally, we use passwords to authenticate users, however, passwords are prone to different security attacks. Therefore, they are not much recommended. A good alternative to the password-based approach for authenticating users is the use of SSH keys. Since these keys are encrypted, that is why they are considered a more secure means of user authentication. Therefore, in this article, we will be learning how to create or generate SSH keys in Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

      • H2S Media ☛ Automatically Update Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using Unattended upgrades

        If you are Ubuntu 22.04, especially the Server edition of it then make sure your system is up to date timely. It is because to patch any security loophole as soon as developers find it and release some patch for that. Keeping the system up to date not only reduces the chances of attack but also ensures the installed packages have their newer versions. Well, who doesn’t want his system to be in its latest state but manually running a command for it every time could be a difficult task especially, if the server is on some remote location and every time you have long it using SSH. In such as situation, we can use the Debian tool called unattended-upgrades that allows users to easily download security updates and upgrades automatically after a set interval of time without any human interaction.

      • Install KVM on Oracle Linux – kifarunix.com

        In this tutorial, you will learn how to install KVM on Oracle Linux. KVM, an acronym for Kernel-based Virtual Machine, is an opensource, full virtualization too for Linux systems with Intel-VT or AMD-V based-processors hardware virtualization extensions.

      • Thunderbird ☛ Thunderbird Tip: Customize Colors In The Spaces Toolbar

        In our last video tip, you learned how to manually sort the order of all your mail and account folders. Let’s keep that theme of customization rolling forward with a quick video guide on customizing the Spaces Toolbar that debuted in Thunderbird 102.

        The Spaces Toolbar is on the left hand side of your Thunderbird client and gives you fast, easy access to your most important activities. With a single click you can navigate between Mail, Address Books, Calendars, Tasks, Chat, settings, and your installed add-ons and themes.

      • The New Stack ☛ Tutorial: Deploy a Full-Stack Application to a Docker Swarm – The New Stack

        If you’re looking to scale Docker app deployments, you’ll want to make sure to cluster a collection of nodes together into a Docker Swarm. I’ve already discussed how to deploy a Docker Swarm (with persistent storage) in “Create a Docker Swarm with Persistent Storage Using GlusterFS.” You don’t necessarily have to deploy the Swarm with persistent storage, but if you want to be able to retain your data (should something happen or you want to migrate the deployment), you’ll want to deploy the Swarm with persistence.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How Can I Select and Delete All Text in Nano?

        “Text selection and deletion is also a very important aspect of text editing. Therefore, every text editor should provide you with the ways in which you can easily perform these tasks. As far as this article is concerned, then we will talk about the method of selecting and deleting all the text in the Nano editor.”

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Install the Gnome Tweak Tool on Ubuntu 22.04

        Text selection and deletion are important aspects of text editing. This article explains the method of selecting and deleting all the text in the Nano editor.

      • Linux Hint ☛ Docker Image Tags

        Docker tags provide pertinent details about a particular image release or variation. They serve as aliases for the image’s ID. It’s only a means of referencing your appearance. To publish the picture to the Docker Hub, the Docker tag serves to protect the build edition. We may organize images using a name as well as tag groups on the Docker Hub. A single image may have many Docker tags pointing to it. Thus, we have decided to dedicate this article to image tags in docker.

      • Linux.org ☛ LFCS – Turning a System Into a Router | Linux.org

        There are times you may want to set up a system to act as a go between for a network and the Internet.

        This ‘go between’ is a system that acts as a router and is designated as a gateway for the systems on a network.

    • WINE or Emulation

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Windows compatibility layer Wine 7.17 is out now | GamingOnLinux

        This is the compatibility layer that allows you to run various Windows applications and games on Linux (and forms part of Steam Play Proton). Once a year or so, a new stable release is made but the development versions are usually fine to use.

        Wine 7.17 is a quieter release than most with only two new main highlights, plus 18 bug fixes.

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Make Use Of ☛ 9 Hidden KDE Plasma Features You Probably Didn’t Know About

          It doesn’t matter whether you’re new to KDE Plasma or have been using it for years, there are always some hidden features that escape your eyes.

          Even though some Linux desktop environments lack user experience and visual aesthetic appeal, it’s not the case with KDE Plasma. On distros like Kubuntu and KDE Neon, KDE Plasma offers various options for the users to customize their desktop. You can tailor the look and feel of your computer to suit your tastes.

          But what sets Plasma apart from all other desktops is its score of hidden features that add a whole new level of user experience within its environment.

          Here are the top nine hidden features of KDE Plasma that you probably don’t know about, but should explore.

        • KDE Ships Frameworks 5.98.0 – KDE Community

          KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.98.0.

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

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

        • GSOC Update 4 – rojas.run

          My Google Summer of code is about to close! It’s been very educational time working on my project to implement exporting as svg. Now that it’s just about done its time I put my thoughts on how my GSoC project went.

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • This Week in GNOME ☛ #60 Demo Day – This Week in GNOME

          Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 02 to September 09.

        • Linuxiac ☛ Amberol Is a Gorgeous Music Player Aimed At GNOME Users

          Amberol is the ultimate simplified Linux music player tightly integrated with GNOME and does nothing but play your locally stored music files.

          For many years, Linux users have had a wide choice of music players to listen to their favorite music. Many of them compete to give users as many options as possible.

          Amberol, the next rising star in this niche, is the polar opposite of this. It was built using GTK4 and Rust programming language. Named after Thomas Edison’s Blue Amberol Records, it is the ultimate simple Linux music player, with a great look and a single goal – to play music.

        • Tracker 3.x, a retrospect. – Carlos Garnacho

          Time files, for better or for the worst. The last time I bored you with ramblings on this blog was more than 2 years ago already, prepping up for Tracker 3.0. Since I’m sure you don’t need a general catch up about these last 2 years, let’s stay on that same subject.

          Nowadays, we are very close to GNOME 43, and an accompanying 3.4.0 release of Tracker SPARQL library and data miners, that is 4 minor releases ahead! What happened since then? Most immediately after that previous blog post, the 3.0 release did roll in, the uncertainty behind all major structural changes vanished, and the transition could largely be called a success: The overhauled internals for complete SPARQL support stood ground without large regressions; the promises of portals and data isolation delivered and to this day remains unchallenged (except for spare requests to let more pieces of metadata through); the increased genericity and versatility kept fostering further improvements.

          Overall, there’s been no major regrets, and we are now sitting comfortably in 3.x. And that was all good, since we could use all that time not fixing fallout in keeping up with the improvements. Let’s revisit what happened since.

        • Medium ☛ Wrapping up GSoC’22!. My 12+ weeks in the Google Summer of… | by Pooja Patel | Sep, 2022 | Medium

          My 12+ weeks in the Google Summer of Code program have finally come to an end. It’s incredible how quickly time passes and how things develop. It has been a great journey and I have learned a great deal about software web development and design from exploring the project.

          GSoC is a global, online program focused on encouraging budding developers and designers into the world of open-source. GSoC introduced me to the amazing GNOME community. Looking back, a year ago, I was hesitant and apprehensive about even applying to GSoC. But this program has helped me grow and push through the boundaries of my technical and soft skills.

        • Aryan Kaushik: Pitivi GSoC: Final Report

          This project was aimed at porting Pitivi to GTK4, Pitivi used the GTK3+ library and required the change.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Make Use Of ☛ 5 Major Linux OS Distributions That You Can Now Install on Raspberry Pi

      Wondering which operating system to install on your Raspberry Pi? Start with these well-known Linux distros.

      The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer that has become very popular among curious enthusiasts, educators, and professionals. This has brought life to a variety of projects inspired by creative imaginations.

      You can utilize the power of this tiny computer to give life to your model train scenery, learn to code, explore home automation solutions, launch a web server, monitor your home network, or water your plants automatically.

      Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Debian, and Pop! OS now offer an ARM-based version for the Raspberry Pi bringing an affordable everyday desktop solution to your home. Let’s review these options so that you can decide which one is right for your Raspberry Pi.

    • Fedora Beta, Clown Computing, and OpenShift

      • Linux Magazine ☛ Fedora 37 Beta Available – Linux Magazine

        The Fedora development team announced the beta for version 37 of the open-source operating system would be released on time on September 13, 2022.

        The next iteration of the Fedora 37 operating system has finally reached beta and is now available to download and install. This was announced on Fedora Hyperkitty along with the announcement that the final freeze for Fedora 37 would hit Tuesday, October 4.

        As far as features in Fedora 37, you can look for plenty of changes, such as updates to the LLVM 15 compiler, LXQt 1.1, a preview of the new Anaconda Web-based installer, support for Raspberry Pi 4, Linux kernel 5.19 (the latest mainline kernel), GNOME 43 (which includes a revamped Quick Settings), a new GTK4/libadwaita port of Files (which also includes the new adaptive sidebar, icon emblems, and rubberband selection), WebExtension API support in GNOME Web, high-resolution scroll wheel support, direct scanout support (to aid multi-monitor setups), server-side decorations now include essential color support, as well as a reference KVM VM disk image.

      • Red Hat Official ☛ Pipelines for cloud-native network functions (CNFs) Part 1: Pipelines for onboarding CNFs

        Using pipelines to achieve greater automation, improved consistency and enhanced reliability of a process is a well established practice. We can find pipelines within telecommunication and IT processes including Infrastructure as Code (IaC), development and operations (DevOps), development, security and operations (DevSecOps), network operations (NetOps) and GitOps. Some common characteristics among these processes is expressing the intent, or desired state, in a declarative, versioned and immutable manner.

      • Red Hat Official ☛ Integrating SAP with other applications using Red Hat OpenShift [Ed: Red Hat makes case studies out of proprietary software]

        It is well known that SAP landscapes, apart from being critical to how global companies function, tend towards high levels of complexity. This is not only because of the vast array of different applications that constitute the average SAP installation base (like ERP, BW, GRC, SCM, CRM), but also because these products typically interact with many other third-party applications, forming altogether a large ecosystem.

    • Debian Family

      • Barry Kauler ☛ Planning run non-root in containers

        I have been working on syncing Debian package management with the Puppy-format package management, for the past week. However, I had the nagging feeling that I’m going in the wrong direction…

        Have now abandoned apt/dpkg sync’ing with the Puppy-format Package database and PKGget. It just isn’t the way I want to go with EasyOS.

      • Petter Reinholdtsen ☛ Petter Reinholdtsen: Time to translate the Bullseye edition of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook

        Almost two years after the previous Norwegian Bokmål translation of the “The Debian Administrator’s Handbook” was published, a new edition is finally being prepared. The english text is updated, and it is time to start working on the translations. Around 37 percent of the strings have been updated, one way or another, and the translations starting from a complete Debian Buster edition now need to bring their translation up from 63% to 100%. The complete book is licensed using a Creative Commons license, and has been published in several languages over the years. The translations are done by volunteers to bring Linux in their native tongue.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • Ubuntu ☛ Using LXD to host your own ERP, cost-effectively | Ubuntu

        Are you looking to host your own ERP cost-effectively, or perhaps evaluating solutions to host other types of applications for your small business? You’ve landed in the right blog post. Recently, we reached out to the LXD community and asked them to share real-life examples of how they use LXD to solve different kinds of problems. In this post, we will share the first of the stories, illustrating how easy it is to use open-source container management tools like LXD to host your own business applications.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Purism ☛ Thank You For Joining Us – Purism

        It has been a long and difficult journey to build a freedom- and privacy-respecting phone like the Librem 5. While the end of this journey is in sight, we aren’t quite there yet, and I wanted to take some time to do something we should do more often: acknowledge and thank all of you who have joined us in this journey, some since the beginning. I also wanted to give some tangible examples of what your support has allowed us to do. But first, to all of you who have backed the Librem 5 project, however long you have been with us: thank you for joining us.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • FSF ☛ The need for free software education now

      Making the choice to use free software in the classroom helps us create learning environments that foreground questions of value. This can be illustrated by a passage in Confucius’s Analects where the skilled mechanic is illustrated as sharpening their tools before they are able to do their work well. In the 21st century, and in the context of digital learning environments, to sharpen tools would mean to know not just how the tool works but what the tool means with respect to the place of the human in the world. This will be explored by considering the five Ws: what free software education is, who it is for, when and where it takes place, and why our active role as digital makers, not just passive users, is central to the meaning of free software education.

    • Mark J. Wielaard – Blog Archive » Sourceware as Conservancy member project

      Last month the Sourceware overseers started a discussion with the projects hosted on Sourceware and the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) to become a Conservancy member project (which means Conservancy would become the fiscal sponsor of Sourceware). After many positive responses the SFC’s Evaluations Committee has voted to accept Sourceware.

    • OSI Blog ☛ Rising to answer the call: sound public policy for Open Source questions [Ed: Just don’t forgot to disclose the major bribes from Microsoft, which viciously fights against Open Source, creating a conflict of interest at OSI]

    • Events

      • FSF ☛ FSD meeting recap 2022-09-09

        Check out the great work our volunteers accomplished at today’s Free Software Directory (FSD) IRC meeting.

      • Mini GUADEC Berlin 2022 – Julian’s Code Corner

        Last July I have been to Berlin for the second Mini GUADEC Berlin.

        It was great seeing many other GNOME contributors in person after such long time. The conference took place in an awesome location at the c-base.

        During the event I worked on an offline indicator for Fractal and improving the error handling.

        I also spent some time on the Flatpak CI, adding information on how to get aarch64 builds. I previously added automatic builds of the CI images for aarch64 of the CI images.

      • GNU Hackers’ Meeting 2022: Call for presentations, even remote – 2022-09-12 18:05

        The GNU Hackers’ Meetings or or “GHMs” are a friendly and informal venue to discuss technical topics related to GNU and free software; anybody is welcome to register and attend.

        The GNU Hackers’ Meeting 2022 will take place on October 1st and October 2st in İzmir, Turkey; see the event home page at https://www.gnu.org/ghm/2022/.

        We decided to help students who wish to attend by contributing 50€ out of their 60€ attendance fee (required by the hotel for use of the conference room, coffee and snacks) so that students will need to only pay 10€, upon presenting proof of enrolment to us.

      • Collabora ☛ A busy, open source week in Dublin!

        Mere weeks after the debut of Open Source Summit Latin America, Dublin continues the collaborative momentum with the 2022 hybrid editions of Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) and Open Source Summit Europe!

        Linux Plumbers

        Running from September 12 to 14 at the Clayton Hotel on Burlington Road, LPC is widely recognized as the premier event for developers working at all levels of the Linux kernel’s plumbing layer and beyond. Jam-packed with microconferences, a refereed main track, a Kernel Summit track, a Networking & BPF Summit track, multiple BoFs, and more, the 2022 edition, sponsored by Collabora, promises to be a can’t-miss event. Make sure to come say hello, especially in Kernel Testing & Dependability MC, co-led by Collabora’s Guillaume Tucker.

    • Web Browsers

      • Julia Evans ☛ Why do domain names sometimes end with a dot?

        I once (incorrectly) thought the answer to “why is there a dot at the end?” might be “In a DNS request/response, domain names have a “.” at the end, so we put it in to match what actually gets sent/received by your computer”. But that’s not true at all!

        When a computer sends a DNS request or response, the domain names in it don’t have a trailing dot. Actually, the domain names don’t have any dots.

        Instead, they’re encoded as a series of length/string pairs. For example, the domain example.com is encoded as these 13 bytes:

        7example3com0
        So there are no dots at all. Instead, an ASCII domain name (like “example.com”) gets translated into the format used in a DNS request / response by various DNS software.

        So let’s talk about one place where domain names are translated into DNS responses: zone files.

      • Mozilla

        • ZDNet ☛ Patent troll attacks against open source projects are up 100% since last year. Here’s why | ZDNET

          In open source’s early days, its main intellectual property (IP) enemy was copyright lawsuits from proprietary companies. They wanted to squash open-source projects before they could become deadly rivals. The most famous example of this was with the Microsoft-sponsored SCO vs IBM and related companies’ Linux lawsuits. Linux’s allies won those lawsuits. And all was peaceful with open-source software. That was then. This is now. Today, patent trolls are increasingly a threat to open-source software developers.

        • Mozilla ☛ Announcing Carlos Torres, Mozilla’s new Chief Legal Officer [Ed: Mozilla is lawyering up instead of doing technical work and defending users]

          I am pleased to announce that starting today, September 12, Carlos Torres has joined Mozilla as our Chief Legal Officer. In this role Carlos will be responsible for leading our global legal and public policy teams, developing legal, regulatory and policy strategies that support Mozilla’s mission. He will also manage all regulatory issues and serve as a strategic business partner helping us accelerate our growth and evolution. Carlos will also serve as Corporate Secretary. He will report to me and join our steering committee.

        • Mozilla ☛ IRL (podcast): The AI Medicine Cabinet [Ed: What on Earth happened to Mozilla?]

          Life, death and data. AI’s capacity to support research on human health is real. But so are the harms of biased datasets and misdiagnoses. How can AI developers build healthier systems? We take a look at a new dataset for Black skin health, a Covid chatbot in Rwanda, AI diagnostics in rural India, and more.

    • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

      • Document Foundation ☛ 10,000 followers on Mastodon! [Ed: A truly meaningless milestone; social control media is a waste of time and it is full of bots]

    • Programming/Development

  • Leftovers

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

    • Technical

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Back at posting!

          Hello, everyone! It’s really been almost a year since I last wrote in my blog and gemlog. Last time I wrote was in November 2021, and we’re not far from November 2022. You probably forgot about me, didn’t you? If so, then you never wondered what happened in my life all this time, but I’m telling you anyway.

        • Greetings, fellow patrons

          I’m ender, and about a few weeks ago, I discovered Gemini. This protocol pricked my curiosity and I researched it further, finding my way onto a link aggregator called spacewalk, which lead me here. Hopefully I’ll get along with everyone else here.

        • Musings on SmolZINE

          I’m currently away from home. Vacation time! But I have brought my notebook with me — which might turn against me … I can even be online, but so far I have only checked gemini space and little else (wikipedia, online dictionary).

        • Musings on Exploration in Gemini Space

          The list of gemini sites extracted from SmolZINE issues 1..33 has 203 entries. No, it is not an index yet (pointing to the particular SmolZINE issue). Nor is it an automatically generated list including the descriptions. Such a commented index list might seem desireable, however, it is going to be a lot of work to generate it and (more importantly) to keep it up to date.

          [...]

          There are, of course, other lists. The most exhaustive list to my knowledge is the list of Stephane Bortzmeyers Lupa crawler, currently listing a bit more than 2100 entries. I have used this list to navigate unknown-to-me territories.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

Links 12/09/2022: Linux 6.0 RC5 and Qt 6.3.2

Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • 9to5Linux ☛ 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: September 11th, 2022

      This week has been a bit slow in Linux news and releases, but we still got a new major Blender release with lots of goodies for graphics artists, a new Raspberry Pi OS update with a bunch of improvements and bug fixes for fans of the tiny computer, and a new release of Salix Linux for lazy Slackers.

      On top of that, I take a first look at the Arch Linux-based Crystal Linux, and tell you all about the new updates of KDE Plasma, KDE Gear, LibreOffice, and GNOME Shell on mobile. Below, you can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for September 11th, 2022.

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • OpenSource.com ☛ How I recovered my Linux system using a Live USB device | Opensource.com

        I have a dozen or so physical computers in my home lab and even more VMs. I use most of these systems for testing and experimentation. I frequently write about using automation to make sysadmin tasks easier. I have also written in multiple places that I learn more from my own mistakes than I do in almost any other way.

        I have learned a lot during the last couple of weeks.

        I created a major problem for myself. Having been a sysadmin for years and written hundreds of articles and five books about Linux, I really should have known better. Then again, we all make mistakes, which is an important lesson: You’re never too experienced to make a mistake.

        I’m not going to discuss the details of my error. It’s enough to tell you that it was a mistake and that I should have put a lot more thought into what I was doing before I did it. Besides, the details aren’t really the point. Experience can’t save you from every mistake you’re going to make, but it can help you in recovery. And that’s literally what this article is about: Using a Live USB distribution to boot and enter a recovery mode.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • LKML: Linus Torvalds: Linux 6.0-rc5
        It's Sunday afternoon, time for another -rc release.

Things look fairly normal for the rc5 timeframe, at least in number of
commits, and in the diffstat.

A bit over half the diff is drivers: GPU, rdma, iommu, networking,
sound, scsi... A little bit of everything.

The rest is the usual random fixes, with i2c doc updates standing out,
but also various DT updates, a few filesystem fixes (btrfs and erofs),
some core networking, and some tooling (perf and selftests).

Nothing looks particularly scary, so jump right in.

               Linus
      • LWN ☛ Kernel prepatch 6.0-rc5 [LWN.net]

        Linus has released 6.0-rc5 for testing. “Nothing looks particularly scary, so jump right in”.

      • The Register UK ☛ Retbleed fix slugs Linux VM performance by up to 70 percent • The Register

        VMware engineers have tested the Linux kernel’s fix for the Retbleed speculative execution bug, and report it can impact compute performance by a whopping 70 percent.

        In a post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List titled “Performance Regression in Linux Kernel 5.19″, VMware performance engineering staffer Manikandan Jagatheesan reports the virtualization giant’s internal testing found that running Linux VMs on the ESXi hypervisor using version 5.19 of the Linux kernel saw compute performance dip by up to 70 percent when using single vCPU, networking fall by 30 percent and storage performance dip by up to 13 percent.

        Jagatheesan said VMware’s testers turned off the Retbleed remediation in version 5.19 of the kernel and ESXi performance returned to levels experienced under version 5.18.

      • WCCF Tech ☛ AMD readies additional RDNA 3 Code, GPU Reset Mode created for Radeon RX 6000 Series in Linux 6.1

        AMD has added a significantly important AMDGPU kernel graphics driver update to the DRM-Next before the Linux 6.1 merge window closes.

    • Applications

      • Linux Shell Tips ☛ 6 Best To-Do List Managers for Linux Command Line

        As you grow your Linux operating system experience and become imprinted on its command-line environment, you start having more and more exciting tasks to do. With time, it might become impossible to keep track of what computing task or project milestone you have successfully accomplished.

        Such a scenario might reduce your Linux OS productivity. However, with every problem associated with a Linux operating system, there is always a Linux-oriented solution. The best way of keeping track of your Linux OS activities/objectives is via a to-do list manager.

        In this article guide, we will walk you through the analysis and installation of some recommended to-do list managers for your Linux command-line environment.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • H2S Media ☛ How to install VSFTPD to Setup FTP Server on Ubuntu 22.04

        This tutorial is to know how we can install, config, set up and use the VSFTPD FTP server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish using the command terminal.

        Vsftpd is an FTP server that is very consciously designed for security. For example, the program checks its configuration and the rights of all files it is to access before starting and refuses to start if it is configured incorrectly.

        Furthermore, Vsftpd is the only FTP server in the “main” branch of the Ubuntu distribution, i.e. it is guaranteed to be maintained and provided with security updates. This does not have to be the case with other FTP servers from the “universe/multiverse” branches.

        Last but not least, Vsftpd is very easy to set up. Without cumbersome configuration files, you can let the local users access their home directory or set up anonymous FTP access. Apart from this open source FTP server; PureFTPd and ProFTPD are some other popular names in the category.

      • Daniel Stenberg ☛ convert a curl cmdline to libcurl source code | daniel.haxx.se

        The dash-dash-libcurl is the sometimes missed curl gem that you might want to know about and occasionally maybe even use.

      • Linux Hint ☛ Redis XTRIM

        Redis streams are an append-only data structure that provides a set of highly efficient read and insert operations with a memory-efficient storage mechanism. Internally, the Redis streams use a Radix tree data structure which is a space-optimized tree with high memory efficiency.

        Redis streams store data as a list of entries where each entry consists of key-value pairs. At a low level, these entries are packed into macro-nodes, as shown in the following.

      • Own HowTo ☛ How to Burn ISOs with Balena Etcher on Linux

        In this tutorial you will learn how to burn an ISO image to your USB flash drive or harddisk. Balena etcher is a cross platform app that allows you to create bootable devices in a matter of seconds, it is very easy to use and doesn’t require any technical knowledge, so feel free to try balena etcher.

        Since balena etcher is a cross platform app, you can run in Linux, Windows and MacOS. However, in this tutorial we’re going to explain how to use it on Linux.

      • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Install Fish Shell with Starship on Linux distributions – TREND OCEANS

        In our previous posts, we already discussed that bash is not the only shell to use in a Linux system, and for this reason, we have come up with the zsh shell, but on the internet, the fish shell is highly appreciated for its simplicity.

        When I say simplicity, then I mean it because when you install the fish shell on your system, most of the basic functionality of the shell takes place automatically, like tab completion, which is one of the prime features of this shell. Not only that, but you will also find syntax highlighting, which will alert you that you are typing the wrong program name in the “red” color. If it’s a valid program, then the colour will turn blue.

        Moreover, you can use some of the built-in commands and keybindings which take the fish shells to different levels in terms of flexibility, like my favourite options for navigating around previous and next directories using prevd and nextd, or I can use the shortcut Alt + Left arrow and Alt + Right arrow for the same.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Inkscape on Linux Mint 21 LTS

        Inkscape is a fantastic vector graphics editor that is free and open-source. It is primarily used to create Scalable Vector Graphics, but it can also import and export other formats. Inkscape is great for anyone who wants to get creative with their artwork, as it has many features that bring any design to life. These features include scalability and the ability to import/export so the artwork can be used in any vector graphics program. Inkscape can also render primitive vector shapes and text, making it even more versatile. Thanks to its wide range of capabilities, Inkscape is a potent tool for anyone looking to create unique vector graphics.

        In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Inkscape on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series using two installation methods of APT or Flatpak to install the graphics editor using the command terminal.

      • Red Hat Official ☛ How to reconfigure Ceph storage in OpenShift Data Foundation | Enable Sysadmin

        Installing OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) with external Ceph storage is pretty straightforward: some clicks on the OpenShift console, execute a script inside the Ceph cluster, and you are ready to go. Changing those configurations is not as clear.

      • ID Root ☛ How To Install Neovim on Linux Mint 21 – idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Neovim on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim such as improving the codebase, allowing for easier implementation of APIs, improved user experience, and plugin implementation.

        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 Neovim text editor on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

      • Linux Hint ☛ How Much Space Does Ubuntu Require?

        Ubuntu is one of the widely used Linux distributions as it is properly being managed by Canonical. Canonical releases a new version of Ubuntu every six months and each update of Ubuntu comes with new features and improvements. And every update needs some space from your hard drive. So, it is better to have a rough estimate of how much space Ubuntu requires with its all-upcoming updates.

      • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Disable ‘su’ Access for Sudo Users in Linux – TREND OCEANS

        The su (aka substitute user) command is used by Linux users to transition from the current user to another user or super user (root account) without changing the current working directory or user environment.

        A standard user with sudo access has extra privileges while using the su command. For instance, if a user with sudo access uses the su command to try to switch to the root account, they are required to supply their own password.

      • Linux Handbook ☛ How to Check Crontab logs in Linux

        As a Linux user, you are probably already familiar with crontab. You can automate tasks by running commands and scripts at a predefined schedule. Want to automatically take backups? Crontab is your friend.

        I am not going into the usage of crontab here. My focus is on showing you the different ways to check crontab logs.

        It helps investigate whether your cronjobs ran as scheduled or not.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ JBoss EAP on Podman

        JBoss EAP is an open-source platform for highly transactional, web-scale Java applications. JBoss EAP combines the familiar and popular Jakarta EE specifications with the latest technologies, like Eclipse MicroProfile, to modernize your applications from traditional Java EE into the new world of DevOps, cloud, containers, and microservices.

        JBoss EAP includes everything needed to build, run, deploy, and manage enterprise Java applications in various environments, including on-premise, virtual, private, public, and hybrid clouds. JBoss EAP is based upon the popular open-source project WildFly.

      • [Older] Initial Steps to Secure Rocky Linux 8

        Rocky Linux is a downstream, binary-compatible Linux distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was founded by a co-founder of CentOS Linux after Red Hat announced that CentOS will no longer be developed in its current format. I wrote this article back in May of this year for Vultr to show how to improve the security posture of a Rocky Linux 8 server.

      • Digital Ocean ☛ [Older] How To Install Cassandra and Run a Multi-Node Cluster on Ubuntu 22.04

        Apache Cassandra is an open-source, masterless, and distributed NoSQL database system. Cassandra is suited for mission-critical applications and multi-node setups because it’s scalable, elastic, and fault-tolerant. Cassandra database management works through a node system, and nodes are held within a cluster.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install Appwrite with Docker on Ubuntu 22.04 & Debian 9

        In this post, you will learn How to install Appwrite with Docker on Ubuntu 22.04 & Debian 9

        Appwrite is a free, open-source back-end server that offers main APIs required to develop and build applications bundled together as a set of easy-to-use Docker Containers. It offers a simple yet modern user-friendly interface that can be used to keep a track of APIs, Users, Resources and other more. It allows you to run your backend code in a secure environment to easily customize your app. It also has GEO & Localization features and fetch GEO data according to the users.

      • TecMint ☛ How to Install Universal Media Server in Ubuntu Linux

        Universal Media Server (UMS) is a cross-platform and free DLNA-compliant, HTTP(s) PnP Media server, which provides a number of capabilities such as sharing multimedia files such as images, videos, and audio between modern devices such as game consoles, smart TVs, Blu-ray players, Roku devices, and smartphones. UMS was originally based on a PS3 Media Server in order to ensure greater stability and file compatibility.

        UMS streams a wide range of media formats with little or absolutely no configuration. It is powered by a number of multimedia tools such as VLC media player, FFmpeg, AviSynth, MEncoder, tsMuxeR, MediaInfo, and many more.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install Gedit on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

        In this guide, we will show you how to install Gedit on Ubuntu systems

        gedit is the default text editor of the GNOME desktop environment and part of the GNOME Core Applications. Designed as a general-purpose text editor, gedit emphasizes simplicity and ease of use, with a clean and simple GUI, according to the philosophy of the GNOME project. It includes tools for editing source code and structured text such as markup languages.

        It is free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.

      • Digital Ocean ☛ [Older] How To Set Up Shiny Server on Ubuntu 20.04

        While many people turn to the open-source programming language R for statistical and graphics applications, Shiny is an R package that allows you to convert your R code into interactive webpages. With Shiny, you can use Shiny Server (available in both a free, open-source format and a paid, professional format) to host and manage Shiny applications and interactive R markdown documents.

      • Digital Ocean ☛ [Older] How To Set Up MinIO Object Storage Server in Standalone Mode on Ubuntu 20.04

        The ability to store unstructured blobs of object data and make them accessible through HTTP APIs, known as object storage, is integral to the modern technology landscape, especially with cloud-based backup solutions and high-availability content delivery networks (CDNs).

        MinIO is an open-source object storage server compatible with the Amazon S3 cloud storage service. Applications configured to interface with Amazon S3 can also be configured to interface with MinIO, which means you can use MinIO as a viable alternative to S3 for more control over your object storage server. The service stores unstructured data such as photos, videos, log files, backups, and container/VM images and can provide a single object storage server that pools multiple drives spread across many servers.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install Ionic Framework on Ubuntu & Debian Servers

        In this post, you will learn How to install Ionic Framework on Ubuntu & Debian Servers

        Ionic Framework is an open-source, cross-platform mobile development framework that can be used to initiate, develop and maintain Vue, React, Angular etc application easily on compatible system. It uses web core technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript for development. Ionic is designed to work beautifully on all current platforms and mobile devices. It uses NodsJS as it backend. It is a pretty straight-forward application which uses a command-line utility.

      • Digital Ocean ☛ [Older] How To Install Cassandra and Run a Single-Node Cluster on Ubuntu 22.04

        Apache Cassandra is an open-source, masterless, and distributed NoSQL database system. Cassandra is considered highly suited for mission-critical applications and multi-node setups because it’s scalable, elastic, and fault-tolerant. Cassandra database management works through a node system, and nodes are held within a cluster.

      • How To Play Epic Games On Linux | IWMBuzz

        With some exclusive titles and alluring deals for PC players, Epic Games Store is attracting more attention than ever. While the Epic Games Store (or EGS) has a better client, I still prefer Steam because it is officially supported on Linux and runs without any hacks. Unfortunately, Steam does not have titles like Immortals Fenix Rising and Kena: Bridge of Spirits. Even while some titles, like Hitman 3, are timed exclusives, the Epic Games Store still boasts a wide selection of fun games.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • 9to5Linux ☛ KDE Frameworks 5.98 Makes File Transfers Faster in KDE Apps, Brings More New Features

          The monthly KDE Framework releases continue and KDE Frameworks 5.98 is here with more new features for your favorite KDE apps and the KDE Plasma desktop environment, starting with support for relative paths in path bars of various KDE apps, such as Dolphin and Gwenview, and the ability to generate thumbnail previews for .arw RAW image files.

          Also new is support for various mouse-based methods of adding more cursors using the multi cursor feature in Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps, support for the Kate text editor to allow font customization of documents in the Print dialog, as well as the ability to clear the Command Bar’s history.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Programming/Development

      • Qt 6.3.2 Released

        I am happy to announce we have released the Qt 6.3.2 today.

        The Qt 6.3.2 will be the last release from Qt 6.3 series. As a patch release Qt 6.3.2 does not add any new functionality but It contains more than 330 bug fixes, security updates and other improvements to the top of Qt 6.3.1 release. See more information about the most important changes and bug fixes from the Qt 6.3.2 release note.

      • Qt ☛ Qt WebAssembly Q-A, Part 1

        WebAssembly is a bytecode representation that is meant to be targeted by high-level programming languages such as C++ and to be executed inside a virtual machine in a browser. It will change the way you design your embedded devices, applications, and other software. Qt for WebAssembly allows you to run your C++ applications on popular web browsers, such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox – and our efforts to support more browsers are continuous.

      • Perl / Raku

        • Perl ☛ Saving Perl packages through local

          In Perl there is an expression local. It substitutes the specified value with undef until the end of the block. The values can be global hashes, arrays and scalars, as well as elements or slices of hashes and scalars. The problem is that package hashes are not saved by local. By package hashes I mean a hash with a colon at the end (%Package::) which stores the package symbols (GLOB).

      • Python

        • Linux Hint ☛ Pandas Dataframe Unique

          The most popular Python library which is utilized in data science is called Pandas. It offers Python programmers high-performance, user-friendly, and data analysis tools. Once you understand the fundamental functions and how to utilize them, Pandas is a potent tool for altering data. In “pandas” the standard methods for storing data in a tabular form are the DataFrames. We can utilize some “pandas” methods for getting the unique values in the “pandas” DataFrame’s column. When we need to get unique values in the DataFrame’s columns and don’t want duplication of values in the “pandas” DataFrame’s column, we can use the methods that “pandas” provides for doing this. Let’s look at such methods in this guide, along with some examples and output to get unique values in the DataFrame’s column of “pandas”.

        • Linux Hint ☛ Pandas DatetimeIndex

          Pandas contribute to one of the rapid, adaptable packages which is popularly used as a machine learning tool that honors to be an open-source package by python. It is being built after Numpy for making the data import, analysis, and cleaning much easier.

          Pandas’ dataframe datetime column contains all the information of the specific recorded data in years, months, dates & times (in hours, minutes & seconds). DatetimeIndex is the method that converts this datetime column into an index column and attributes the output date as an index in the dataframe. It also allows access or analyze the data at that specific date, year, month, and time (in hours, minutes, and seconds) or range of dates for further operations instead of going through all the dataframe. In this article, we’ll get to know how we can convert the datetime column of the dataframe (pandas) into an index column using the python programming language or python script.

        • Linux Hint ☛ Pandas Display Max Rows

          Pandas are among the most popular tools used today by data scientists to analyze tabular data. To deal with tabular content, it offers a quicker and more effective API. Whenever we view data frames during analysis, Pandas automatically sets various display behaviors to default values. These display behaviors include how many rows and columns to show, the accuracy of floats in each data frame, column sizes, etc. Depending on the requirements, we may occasionally need to modify these defaults. Pandas have a variety of approaches for altering default behavior. Leveraging the “options” attribute of pandas enabled us to change this behavior.

        • Linux Hint ☛ Pandas Insert Row

          “A Python framework for working with data frames is called Pandas. It may be used for a variety of purposes, including reading, exporting CSV files, and converting NumPy arrays to dataFrames. Three parameters make up the Pandas dataFrame. DataFrames are quite helpful since they offer a simple way to print a table view and then modify it as needed. You might need to establish a new data frame and add rows selectively when using the dataFrame for data analysis to generate a data frame with particular records.

          Unless you assign names to each row, the index will be the integer starting at zero for the associated row. Additionally, it is simple to refer to a column by its name, such as “Data,” or by its location within the DataFrame.”

        • Linux Hint ☛ Pandas Insert() Column

          “Python provides a wide range of data structures and operations for handling numerical and time series data. The DataFrame we have created or imported in Pandas can be used for a variety of purposes. The columns in the data frame can also be adjusted, along with the data source. Pandas make many of the tedious, time-consuming tasks associated with working the data simple. There are four ways to add a column to a DataFrame in Pandas, but in this article, we are using the panda’s column “insert()” function.

          Once we have built or loaded our dataFrame in Pandas, there are a variety of things we could want to accomplish. For example, we might keep manipulating data, for instance, by changing the columns in the data frame. Next, we must understand how to include columns in a data frame If the majority of the data are coming from one data provider, but some data are coming from another. A column can be easily added to a Pandas dataFrame.”

        • Linux Hint ☛ Pandas isna

          “Pandas is one of the packages of python language that makes the data analysis much better and easier to go on with. In the domain of computer science, analyzing the data and preprocessing is almost at every step, and in which the missing data is a whole lot time-consuming and crucial process to do. So, here comes the “pandas isna,” which is a function that is used to detect the missing values from the data. It works in a way that returns a boolean similar size object, which indicates the values in the given data are “NA”, which means none, and the characters such as strings that are empty declared.

          The missing values show as the “nan” or “none,” as explained. Pandas isna method does not have any parameters involved. The return type is a dataframe with a boolean. The “NaN” indicates the “true” values. Otherwise, every other data is mapped as “false”. For the implementation of the codes, we will be using the tool “spyder,” which is in infused “python” language. The pandas isna is a new object of panda whose input object is of the same size.”

      • Java

        • Linux Hint ☛ Java File Input Stream in Ubuntu 20.04

          “In this article, we will be discussing different ways to read data from files into a byte array by using the Java Input Stream class. This class represents a sorted stream of bytes from a file. There are multiple functions in the Java Input Stream class that are commonly used and will be discussed in this article, like the read(), available(), skip(), and close() methods. These methods are used to read files of different extensions like bin or txt files and can be altered to get information from any point in the file. We will be implementing these methods in the Ubuntu 20.04 environment in this article.

          There are many more methods of File Input Stream class which are also very helpful in getting data from a file; some of them are int read(byte[] b), this function reads data from the input stream up to b.length bytes in length. File Channel gets the channel(): The specific File Channel object connected to the file input stream is returned using it. Finalize() is used to ensure that the close() function is invoked when there is no longer reference to the file input stream.”

        • Linux Hint ☛ Java File List Files in Ubuntu 22.04

          “In this article, we will be focusing on the list files function in the File class in the Java programming language. The list files function returns the name of the files in the form of an array and is usually called in the File[] data type variable. The files class object is used for getting the directory name for the list files function so that it knows where to look for the files. We will be implementing several examples of this function in our article.”

        • Linux Hint ☛ Java ObjectInputStream

          “Information written via the object of an ObjectOutputStream is primarily accessed using the ObjectInputStream class. The main objective of the ObjectInputStream class would be to reconstruct the basic data and entities that are produced by employing ObjectOutputStream class. By making use of a SocketStream, ObjectInputStream may also be employed to transfer objects across different hosts. Therefore, we have decided to write a helpful guide for our Ubuntu 20.04 system to cast off the objectinputstream class object to read data from the file input stream. Let’s start with the opening of a console.”

        • Linux Hint ☛ Java ReadFields

          “To read objects that have previously been written by ObjectOutputStream, we use the ObjectInputStream class of the java.io package and the java.io.ObjectOutputStream package that has the readFields() function. The persistent fields are read from the stream and made available by name using the java.io.ObjectInputStream.readFields() function. The Readfields() function is a non-static function that can only be accessed through the class object; if we attempt to get the method directly by class name, we will encounter an error. When reading fields, the readFields() function may raise an exception.”

        • Linux Hint ☛ PrintWriter Class

          “This class offers text-output stream object representations that are formatted for printing. It uses every print technique available in PrintStream. It lacks ways for writing unencoded byte streams, which a program should utilize instead of writing raw bytes. Unlike the PrintStream class, which does automatic flushing anytime a newline character is output, this class only performs flushing whenever the println, printf, or format operations are called. These techniques substitute the platform’s internal line separator with the newline character.

          Despite several of its constructors being capable of doing so, this class’s methods never throw I/O exceptions. The client can verify if any errors have been encountered by using the checkError() call.”

  • Leftovers

    • Counter Punch ☛ It’s All Gonna Break

      Every time I see a Gen X critic declare pop culture dead, I remember all of the columns and cover stories that asked “Is Irony Dead?” after 9/11. To be sure, a survey of American media right now wouldn’t exactly be encouraging, or particularly exciting: the highest grossing movie of the year, Top Gun: Maverick, is a sequel to a 36-year-old movie featuring another performance from Tom Cruise where he refuses to pass the torch and mature up on the mantle. No: this man must live, he must win, and he must get the shirtless volleyball montage exactly right, otherwise the movie would be a failure. Say what you will about his scary religion, the man knows what will make him a lot of money. I liked Top Gun: Maverick more than Tony Scott’s admittedly much better looking 1986 original, but Joseph Kosinski’s actually did feel like an elegy for the art form of popular cinema.

    • Science

      • Hackaday ☛ If The Blade Sees Its Shadow, It’s Another 64th Of Accuracy

        If you’ve bought a miter saw in the past few years, you might have noticed the LED “laser” that came with it. The goal was to show where on the piece the saw was going to cut. But over a year or two, you might have found the laser to have drifted or skewed into a crooked line. [Fisher] decided that his after-market laser wasn’t entirely accurate enough and added a shadow line instead. (Video, embedded below the break.)

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ Engraving A Puzzle Box? Here’s A Collection Of Single-Line Cryptex Fonts

        Here’s a neat resource from [MSRaynsford] that is worth bookmarking for anyone who gets creative with laser engravers, CNC routers, or drawing robots: SVGFonts are single-line symbol fonts that [MSRaynsford] created for his laser-cut and engraved cryptex puzzle boxes. They provide an easy way to engrave text as symbols.

      • Hackaday ☛ Full Transparency: Stronger FDM Prints

        We always look forward to [Stefan’s] CNC Kitchen videos. They are usually useful, but always carefully thought out and backed with experimental data. His latest is about creating transparent and strong FDM prints. You normally don’t associate the FDM process with clear prints even with clear filament. The problem is the filament doesn’t lay down in a particular structure, so light scatters producing a sort of white color. However, [Stefan] found a post on Printables called “How to Print Glass” which changes the structure of the part and, of course, [Stefan] wanted to see if the process also led to stronger parts.

      • Hackaday ☛ A Crowned Pulley Keeps Robot’s Treads On Track

        [Angus] at Maker’s Muse recently created a new and tiny antweight combat robot (video, embedded below) and it has some wonderfully clever design elements we’d like to highlight. In particular: how to keep a tracked robot’s wheel belt where it belongs, and prevent it from slipping or becoming dislodged. In a way, this problem was elegantly solved during the era of the steam engine and industrial revolution. The solution? A crowned pulley.

    • Security

      • Kubernetes Blog ☛ Announcing the Auto-refreshing Official Kubernetes CVE Feed | Kubernetes

        A long-standing request from the Kubernetes community has been to have a programmatic way for end users to keep track of Kubernetes security issues (also called “CVEs”, after the database that tracks public security issues across different products and vendors). Accompanying the release of Kubernetes v1.25, we are excited to announce availability of such a feed as an alpha feature. This blog will cover the background and scope of this new service.

      • LWN ☛ Security updates for Monday [LWN.net]

        Security updates have been issued by Debian (gdk-pixbuf, libxslt, linux-5.10, paramiko, and zlib), Fedora (webkit2gtk3), Mageia (gstreamer1.0-plugins-good, jupyter-notebook, kernel, and rpm), Slackware (vim), SUSE (bluez, clamav, freetype2, frr, gdk-pixbuf, keepalived, libyang, nodejs16, python-PyYAML, qpdf, samba, and vim), and Ubuntu (linux-azure-fde and tiff).

      • Qt ☛ Security advisory: zlib in Qt

        zlib through 1.2.12 has a heap-based buffer over-read or buffer overflow in inflate in inflate.c via a large gzip header extra field and has been assigned the CVE id CVE-2022-37434.

      • 10 Best Email Security Practices to Avoid Data Breach

        Never assume that your email security is adequate. Since the invention of the telephone, communication between individuals has advanced significantly. Letters, payphones, cordless calls, and electronic mail are just a few examples.

        If you are finding yourself wondering what email breach security is, you have come to the right place.

        Email is used by most firms, and they even rank among the most crucial channels for business communication. Its adaptability in conveying information from future events, clients, team memos, and a few more renders it a unique corporate weapon.

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Environment

      • Energy

        • Hackaday ☛ Renewable Hydrogen Sucked From Thinish Air

          Stored hydrogen is often touted as the ultimate green energy solution, provided the hydrogen is produced from genuinely green power sources. But there are technical problems to be overcome before your average house will be heated with pumped or tank-stored hydrogen. One problem is that the locations that have lots of scope for renewable energy, don’t always have access to plenty of pure water, and for electrolysis you do need both. A team from Melbourne University have come up with a interesting way to produce hydrogen by electrolysis directly from the air.

    • Finance

      • TruthOut ☛ Private Equity and Hedge Fund Industries Pour Over $347 Million Into Midterms
      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Barbara Ehrenreich Showed Us the Need for Socialist Policies

        In 2009, as a deep recession triggered an epidemic of layoffs and foreclosures, The New York Times asked Barbara Ehrenreich to write a series of articles about poverty in the United States. She visited Los Angeles, where I introduced her to community, tenants’ rights, and union organizers. She also traveled to Detroit, Dallas, Baltimore, Saint Louis, Racine, Wisconsin, Wilmington, Delaware, and New York, talking with low-income people as well as with poverty researchers and activists. When she got back to her home in Virginia, she emailed me, “I’m ready to look over my notes and see where I’ve gotten to. It’s a bit overwhelming, but I’m feeling my anger level rising, so I better figure something out.”

      • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Austrac says probe ongoing into betting firm Entain Group

        The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, the agency tasked with preventing, detecting and responding to criminal abuse of the financial system, has launched an investigation into sports betting and gaming company Entain Group.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Torrent Freak ☛ Kiwi Farms: The Slippery Slope of Curating the Web

        Despite broad public protests, Cloudflare initially declined to cut its ties with Kiwi Farms. When death threats came into play, the company quickly changed its position. The removal of Kiwi Farms will likely increase calls for voluntary curation of the web, and may reach way beyond Cloudflare. Domain registrars, registries, and ISPs may actually be better targets. What could possibly go wrong?

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Technical

      • Science

        • Moving tons

          How stupid is it to move around by (mainstream) motorized vehicles? Can we make up a scale?

          Sorry in advance to physicists: I used weight and mass interchangeably. If it helps make up for it, I do know the difference!

          I found online some numbers that I’ll present next. I didn’t include any trains because the weights I found varied too much to be reliable to me since I don’t understand much about them (e.g. one page said between 4t and 20t). For the coach bus, since they didn’t vary that much (relatively), I even picked the lightest. Some pages showed weights in pounds, which I assumed to be avoirdupois pounds and converted to kg with the unitconv CHICKEN egg

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

[Meme] Let’s Pretend It’s Secure

Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Security at 6:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Even scam sites can get a ‘free’ certificate; that does not make them safe, no matter what the Web browser says

Thank you for using let's encrypt

Summary: The ‘free’ certificates cartel (a few questionable CAs that do not even assure security, they just urge everyone to outsource “trust” to them) for TLS over the World Wide Web isn’t much better than so-called ‘secure’ boot, except this one isn’t controlled solely by Microsoft; see more details below

The Fundamentally Broken Browser Model
Source | Direct

Mozilla Is Not to Be Trusted and Firefox is Becoming a Mass Censorship Tool

Posted in Deception at 6:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 5194f5214bea4d043556ecc70e79a75c
Mozilla for Oppression
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Free software aficionados have long promoted and used Mozilla Firefox, but even though the brands are still the same the company and the product are not; we need to talk about what Mozilla and Firefox are becoming

THE Mozilla Corporation (not Foundation) is unprincipled; it misuses its funds like the Linux Foundation and it is sponsored by the things it claims to be against, including mass surveillance.

The above-mentioned Mozilla wiki already covers many things that are wrong with today’s Mozilla and as a Firefox and Thunderbird user since the early year/s (I’ve been a user since 2004) it’s frustrating to witness all this. Last year I installed LibreWolf as a replacement for Firefox and Thunderbird is only getting worse over time; it has removed a lot of useful functionality and even some forms of encryption are no longer possible in Thunderbird.

“People who value what the Web stands for can recognise that Mozilla, a company that once fought for the open Web and standards anyone can adopt (not DRM, which also harms disabled people), is an entirely different entity these days.”We wrote 3 posts this past Saturday [1, 2] about Mozilla, noting that it is not only hiring top-level managers from mass surveillance companies but also from the CIA. Whose idea was it? This won’t end well. These people view the world from the lenses of spooks. They not only abhor privacy (contempt for the concept except when it’s their own privacy) but also free press. It’s about propaganda and domination by brainwash. Currently, free speech on the Web is under attack (that’s typically disguised as “protecting” us) and we expect Mozilla to keep publishing blog posts glorifying this agenda, as it has done several times this past week. See the annotated screenshot at the bottom.

People who value what the Web stands for can recognise that Mozilla, a company that once fought for the open Web and standards anyone can adopt (not DRM, which also harms disabled people), is an entirely different entity these days. It feels like a part-time satellite of Google and sometimes Microsoft and the state, too. We need to move away from that; failing that, we might need to move away from the Web (as it’s becoming dominated by one or at most two browser families, both of which block/discourage access to sites which have not outsourced “trust” — that in itself is a MitM-style threat [1, 2]). █

Product Management, Design and Research in Facebook
The latest posts in the official blog. All those with blue circles around them are calls for censorship (usually spun as protecting children and combating “misinformation”)

IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 11, 2022

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:19 am by Needs Sunlight

Also available via the Gemini protocol at:

Over HTTP:

HTML5 logs

HTML5 logs

#techrights log as HTML5

#boycottnovell log as HTML5

HTML5 logs

HTML5 logs

#boycottnovell-social log as HTML5

#techbytes log as HTML5

text logs

text logs

#techrights log as text

#boycottnovell log as text

text logs

text logs

#boycottnovell-social log as text

#techbytes log as text

Enter the IRC channels now

IPFS Mirrors

CID Description Object type
 QmfJENueHMGjCW15T1WLKjReHraEFLV1wkdYFay8a83Qah IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmQbvdYk7zWGbePxD5wtjxEfRuF5MzptfnVsxExfLjuXDJ IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmTam8RMfa5gLst6Qs7pFGa5738ZefGpLd7bd2qVVzAeBF IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 Qmcayph4tKMccMPTmADFkrbAmBNHs7c8312k85rX8hTxrK IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmRNpyDAmzqNWJ4QeVdcB1rSH9qpLd2utGgR83U5jPUceL IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmaHxvxvuwMviVsNWN6k9gyrqLisBJhy5v5FBrA2E959YV IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmNdR5F3RvvFT7bieswQyWgf2UGHnUxe9DvvKrRysWN7J8 IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmS1pXjNtFpLCtcmwuf8eaurkCY1nTFqd3Jvgunaj6WR8A IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs

IPFS logo

Bulletin for Yesterday

Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmSSVivjsb74DwAwvNFUWiXAExS8esEHiJBzykMK9Da4BW

Links 12/09/2022: rpki-client 8.0 and Game of Trees 0.75

Posted in News Roundup at 1:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Linux Made Simple ☛ Linux Weekly Roundup #199

      Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup. We had a good week in the world of Linux releases with OpenMandriva 5.0-candidate, Debian 11.5, and Bluestar Linux 5.19.7.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Video ☛ How to install Viber on Pop!_OS 22.04 – Invidious

        In this video, we are looking at how to install Viber on Pop!_OS 22.04.

      • Michał Woźniak ☛ Dealing with SEO Link Spam E-mails

        Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I am not your lawyer. None of this is legal advice. All of this might also be a horribly bad idea.

        Ah, SEO link spam e-mails. If you have a blog that’s been online longer than, say, three years, you know what I’m talking about: [...]

      • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Blender 3.3.0 on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to install Blender 3.3.0 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

        This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

      • MakeTech Easier ☛ 5 Ways to Hide Desktop Icons in Ubuntu – Make Tech Easier

        If hiding the top bar and side panel isn’t enough, and you want everything removed from your Ubuntu desktop, then you’d probably also like to get rid of those pesky icons on its surface. Read on to learn how you can hide desktop icons in Ubuntu.

      • Setting up your own Shiny and RStudio Server on a Raspberry Pi

        This article was originally published back in 2018 and a lot has changed since then, so I have completely re-write it to take into account the most recent advancements in support for the arm64 architecture within the R ecosystem.

        Back in 2018, I participated in a forum topic at Community RStudio where @jladata was asking if a Raspberry Pi 3B+ could make it as a viable Shiny server. I actually use a Raspberry Pi for that very purpose so I decided to share with the R community, my experience setting up Shiny and Rstudio Server natively on a Raspberry Pi.

    • Games

      • Vice ☛ Forensic Analysts Accuse Billy Mitchell of Cheating for Donkey Kong Record

        The controversy revolves around Billy Mitchell, a well-known player who holds several records on classic arcade games such as Donkey Kong and Pac-Man, and the main character in the documentary King of Kong. For years, some people in the retro arcade game community have accused Mitchell of lying about his Donkey Kong records, prompting Twin Galaxies, an arcade game community that keeps track of high scores (among other things) and the Guinness World Records to strip Mitchell of its recognition, though the organization later reversed its decision.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • BSD

      • Mailing list ARChives ☛ rpki-client 8.0 released

        rpki-client is a FREE, easy-to-use implementation of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) for Relying Parties (RP) to facilitate validation of BGP announcements. The program queries the global RPKI repository system and validates untrusted network inputs. The program outputs validated ROA payloads, BGPsec Router keys, and ASPA payloads in configuration formats suitable for OpenBGPD and BIRD, and supports emitting CSV and JSON for consumption by other routing stacks.

        See RFC 6480 and RFC 6811 for a description of how RPKI and BGP Prefix Origin Validation help secure the global Internet routing system.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • NBC ☛ Nurse’s vehicle hit 130 mph in collision that killed 5 in L.A. County, prosecutors say

        Data from the Mercedes-Benz E-Class Coupe that Nicole Linton was driving show she accelerated in the 5 seconds before the multi-vehicle Aug. 4 crash, going from 122 mph to 130 mph, according to a motion filed by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office and obtained by NBC Los Angeles.

        The document, filed to oppose pretrial release and bail for Linton, 37, a traveling nurse, also alleged that data showed she did not try to brake or slow down before impact.

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Web Browsers

      • Chromium

        • [Old] Brave Browser ☛ Comparing the Network Behavior of Popular Browsers on First-Run

          This effort compared the first-run experiences of five popular browsers: Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera. Each of these readings were conducted on an updated Windows 10 (Version 20H2, Build 19042.804) desktop computer, with an authenticated Microsoft account.

    • Programming/Development

      • Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.75 released

        Stefan Sperling (stsp@) noted the release of version 0.75 of Game of Trees: [...]

      • Armin Ronacher ☛ You Can’t Do That: Abstracting over Ownership in Rust with Higher-Rank Type Bounds. Or Can You?

        Let’s set the stage first: The problem I’m talking about relates to abstracting over borrows and owned values when combined with functions or something that uses higher-kinded trait bounds. In other words: one wants to create an API where it’s possible to either borrow or clone out of some input value. Think of a generic function that can produce both a String and a &str.

      • Terence Eden ☛ Running a Shortest Splitline Algorithm on the UK – and other mapping adventures

        The Splitline Algorithm is, conceptually, very simple:

        1) Divide the entire map in half based on population.

        2) Repeat (1) for each half.

        3) Once you have reached the target number of voters in each segment, stop.

      • Matt Rickard ☛ Recursive-length Prefix (RLP)/Simple Serialize (SSZ)

        The problem: data needs to be encoded/decoded over the wire, but also for hash verification (a transaction is signed by signing the RLP hash of the transaction data, blocks are identified by the RLP hash of their header). Additionally, for some cases, there should be support for efficient encoding of the merkle tree data structure.

      • Perl ☛ How does SPVM resolve the problems of Perl numeric operations? | Yuki Kimoto Perl Blog – Perl Club [blogs.perl.org]

        How does SPVM resolve the problems of Perl numeric operations?

        I hear Perl have the problems of numeric operation.

        I realized this problems, and try to resolve them using SPVM. (SPVM is yet experimental release).

      • Tales Tips and Tricks: GSoC 2022 Final Report

        So here we have it, the end of my Google Summer of Code journey. A few more than a hundred days have passed, and I can already tell that the seeds have been sown for me to keep collaborating with open source software from here on out.

        My project’s primary goal was to create unit tests using KUnit for the AMDGPU driver focusing on code used by GPUs from the same generation of the GPU “RX 580” (DCE 11.2). We predicted that KUnit would have some limitations in regards to testing GPU’s drivers, so we expected to see some collaboration in that sense. Finally, we knew that I would be working in parallel with people writing tests for newer generations of GPUs (DCN). I planned to keep track of my weekly progress in my blog, trying to create an introductory material that could help future newcomers.

        For starters, this project was completely different from what I had in mind, given that it was far from an individual experience with the Linux Kernel community; it was actually a team effort to introduce unit testing to the AMD display driver in a way that would encourage the community to spread KUnit into other GPU drivers.

      • R

        • RObservations #38: Visualizing Average Delay Times On TTC Subway Stations | bensstats

          Any Torontonian who has commuted regularly on the TTC has probably experienced their fair share of delays on the subway. Having experienced a few recently I was inspired to visualize the average delay times across all stops on the subway. What are the stations with the longest delays on average this past year? Could we make a nice visual with it?

        • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.11.2.4.0 on CRAN: Bugfix and Deprecation

          Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1016 packages other packages on CRAN, downloaded 26.2 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 493 times according to Google Scholar.

        • Finnstats ☛ Assess Performance of the Classification Model – finnstats

          Assess Performance of the Classification Model, We can evaluate a classification model’s effectiveness using a metric called the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC).

        • Professional Shiny App UI and Layouts with imola and shiny.fluent – R programming

          Shiny as a web framework is known for its combination of power, simplicity, and flexibility. It’s a convenient tool for app development at all levels, from proof of concept to production-grade Shiny apps. With additional packages like {imola} and {shiny.fluent}, anyone can create professional Shiny app UIs with custom layout options.

          These characteristics make Shiny an easy-to-pick-up technology, helping teams and R users – without web development experience – to create applications and automate tasks fast. But soon we realize that this simplicity comes with a cost: boilerplate applications that look basic and monotonous.

        • How to Concatenate Strings in R

          We can perform string concatenation in R language using the paste() and cat() methods.

        • Notes of a Dabbler – Exploring OMPR with HiGHS solver

          There is a class of software for modeling optimization problems referred to as algebraic modeling systems which provide a unified interface to formulate optimization problems in a manner that is close to mathematical depiction and have the ability to link to different types of solvers (sparing the user from solver specific ways of formulating the problem). Both commercial and open source options are available. GAMS and AMPL are examples of commercial options. The popular open source options are JuMP in Julia and Pyomo in python. I have typically used Pyomo in Python but have explored using it from R. I recently became aware of algebraic modeling system in R provided by OMPR package developed by Dirk Schumacher.

        • Finnstats ☛ How to Apply AI to Small Data Sets? – finnstats

          How to Apply AI to Small Data Sets? Data science and artificial intelligence collaborate to better gather, classify, analyze, and interpret data.

          But all we constantly hear about is employing AI to comprehend huge data sets.

          This is because individuals can typically understand small data sets, therefore using AI to analyze and interpret them is not necessary.

        • Medium ☛ Visualizing OLS Linear Regression Assumptions in R | by Trevor French | Trevor French | Sep, 2022 | Medium

          While most of the time it’s sufficient to programmatically validate your model assumptions, sometimes it’s helpful to visualize them. Here are a few quick ways you can do just that.

        • Medium ☛ Global vs. local assignment operators in R (‘<<-’ vs. ‘<-’) | by Trevor French | Trevor French | Sep, 2022 | Medium

          Understanding the difference between local and global assignment operators in R can be tricky to get your head around. Here’s an example which should clear things up.

        • How to Find Optimal Clusters in R? – Data Science Tutorials

          How to Find Optimal Clusters in R, K-means clustering is one of the most widely used clustering techniques in machine learning.

          With the K-means clustering technique, each observation in a dataset is assigned to one of K clusters.

          The ultimate goal is to have K clusters in which the observations are relatively similar to one another within each cluster and considerably dissimilar from one another within different clusters.

      • Python

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Vice ☛ Google Is Begging Apple to Make Life Better for Green Bubbles

        Lately, Google and Apple are openly at war about the iMessage versus not-iMessage controversy. During Vox Media’s Code 2022 event on Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook fielded a question about whether Apple would ever adopt the Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard for iMessage, which would improve the quality of images and videos between Android and Apple users, and, in theory, end the green versus blue war. Predictably, he said no.

  • Leftovers

    • 42 of the most annoying buzzwords and what to do about them. | PerfectIt™ | Proofreading Software for Professionals.

      Let’s put it this way: At the end of the day, ditching buzzwords would be a win-win

      [...]

      You’re not always going to be able to remove all buzzwords, of course—for one thing, your boss might be a big fan of them. For another, some of them are truly relevant: KPIs, when used properly, are an important part of business strategy. And beyond that, to a certain extent they can be proof of membership in the business community. But at least you have a sense of what you can do about them when you notice them.

      Which, however, still leaves the challenge of noticing them. When you’re in a business environment, you can be so surrounded by buzzwords that sometimes they sail past you. That’s where PerfectIt comes in. PerfectIt is an easy-to-use add-in to Microsoft Word, and you can make it your buzzword hunter. You can build in the buzzwords and buzzphrases you want to watch out for, and you can put in advice for what to do with it. PerfectIt will let you know about every instance it finds, show your recommended handling of it, and then leave it up to you and your professional judgment. You can even share your PerfectIt style with your colleagues so that they can reduce their buzzwords too.

      So if you want to leverage technology for new synergies in buzzword elimination—in other words, use your computer to help you notice and deal with buzzwords—you don’t need a perfect storm. You just need PerfectIt. If you don’t already have PerfectIt, click to get a free trial.

    • RoseHosting ☛ What is a CDN and Why You Need It? [Ed: No, CDNs have become an outsourcing thing (risk), as few people bother making their own (w.g. varnish for caching or HA)]

      Google indicated that they emphasize page load speed in their SEO rankings. What’s more, a site that loads in 1 second has a 5x higher conversion rate than a site that loads in 10 seconds.

    • Hardware

      • Ruben Schade ☛ Rubenerd: Discovering 850 watt SFX power supplies exist

        Small form-factor computer enthusiasts have to accept compromises to save space. Tall air coolers for dense CPUs might protrude too far, and liquid radiators might be too wide. Larger graphics cards might be too long to fit, take up too many PCI slots, or need additional physical support. But even if our smaller cases could accommodate all this, our power supplies might not.

        My current desktop power supply is a Corsair 750 W Platinum SFX. I’ve used Corsair power supplies for more than a decade; they’re quiet, well constructed, easy to cable up, and have outlived other components by years. They’re also packaged thoughtfully; something you don’t realise is nice until you get it.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • France24 ☛ Venice film festival: US opioid crisis documentary wins top prize

        A documentary tracing an artist’s campaign against the family behind the US opioid drug epidemic scooped the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, on Saturday.

      • HRW ☛ Air Pollution Kills Millions Every Year: Action Needed

        Air pollution is a global issue. The World Health Organization calls air pollution the “single biggest environmental threat to human health and estimates that 99 percent of the world’s population live in locations that are above WHO thresholds designed to protect human health. Ambient (or outdoor) air pollution is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, forest fires, waste burning, other industrial activities and natural factors.

        An estimated seven million people die every year from indoor and outdoor air pollution. That’s more than died from Covid-19 over the last two years. Often invisible, air pollution receives little attention compared with other public health emergencies, but the threats to health are every bit as real. In fact, 94 percent of air pollution deaths are due to noncommunicable diseases – notably cardiovascular disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer. And nine out of ten of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.

      • Salon ☛ This president was shot in the back, but the doctors are the ones who killed him

        The underlying issue is that the doctors who probed Garfield’s body refused to wash their hands. Even though doctors had known about hand-washing since the 1840s, many American physicians were put off by the idea that a doctor’s hands could ever be unclean, or were simply unaware of the strong evidence that hand-washing works. The doctors who attended to Garfield, led by a former Civil War surgeon named Dr. D. Willard Bliss (the first ‘D’ actually stood for ‘Doctor,’ his given name), insisted on probing the bullet wound in the president’s back without first washing their hands. Dozens of medical professionals — not one of them washing their hands — poked and prodded Garfield’s open wound. Even their instruments were not sterilized, despite British surgeon Joseph Lister proving by the mid-1860s that sterilization was important. (These ideas had also either not reached American doctors or, when that happened, been rejected by them.) To add figurative salt to the wound, Garfield’s doctors declined to use ether as anesthetic (this practice had existed since the 1840s), meaning the president was in horrible pain every day as they gradually expanded his three-inch bullet wound into a 1 foot, 8 inch long incision that oozed pus.

    • Proprietary

      • RTE ☛ RTÉ and Twitter partnership to bring Irish football fans to the sidelines of World Cup 2022

        Through Twitter Amplify, advertisers will be able to align their ads with premium video content and utilise the most engaging moments from the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™, posted directly from @RTESport, enabling them to run branded pre-roll video during the world’s biggest sporting tournament.

      • [Old] RNZ ☛ Three waters IT system project could top $500m, warns National

        He said the department was in “commercial conversations” aiming for the “high tens of millions” on the low end, but his officials said utility projects of this type and size typically cost in the range of between $300 million and $500m.

      • [Old] Dave Lane ☛ Fixing government IT procurement

        Government procurement officers mistakenly attribute the cost penalty of being “incompatible” to the incoming supplier rather than attributing the cost of migration to an incompatible solution to the business practices of the incumbent which was previously granted a monopoly on that particular service. This is a form of “lock-in” which seems almost entirely unacknowledged.

        It is also extremely prone to abuse by powerful suppliers (the largest of whom individually have market capitalisation in excess of New Zealand’s GDP, effectively rendering them “above the law” here) who actively exploit their advantage through monopoly rents, and who quite deliberately use the perceived high cost of switching to other suppliers to maintain their lucrative positions.

    • Security

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • CNET ☛ Passkeys, the No-Password Login Tech, Come to iOS 16 on Monday

          It’s a new type of login credential consisting of a little bit of digital data your PC or phone uses when logging onto a server. You approve each use of that data with an authentication step, such as fingerprint check, face recognition, a PIN code or the login swipe pattern familiar to Android phone owners.

          Here’s the catch: You’ll have to have your phone or computer with you to use passkeys. You can’t log onto a passkey-secured account from a friend’s computer without a device of your own.

        • CNET ☛ Beware, That VPN May Not Be What You Think It Is

          To save you time, here are a few of the biggest red flags to watch out for when taking your new VPN out for a test drive. And on the flip side, here are three things to look for in a VPN.

        • New Scientist ☛ Your smartphone could recognise you just by the way you hold it | New Scientist

          Your phone may be able to recognise you just from the vibrations in your hand. An algorithm trained to identify people this way did so with more than 90 per cent accuracy.

          Gentian Jakllari at the Toulouse Institute of Computer Science Research in France and his colleagues trained an artificially intelligent algorithm to identify an individual based on patterns in their hand vibrations when holding a smartphone.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Salon ☛ Trump judge’s ruling in Mar-a-Lago case proves Biden was right: MAGA is fascism

        There’s been, for good reason, a lot of interest in exactly what Trump wants all these classified documents for. Is it for selling them? Or perhaps exchanging them to hostile foreign leaders for political favors? It’s hard to say, but even without knowing his purpose, it’s alarming that Trump is going to such lengths to hang onto the documents, and that his supporters are going to such lengths to defend his illegal behavior. This is all about putting Trump above the law. By issuing this ruling, Cannon has blessed Trumpism’s basic premise: Donald Trump has powers that not only above those of the elected president but powers that exceed those of the office itself. This ruling proves that Biden was right to warn Americans: Trump is a fascist and a threat to democracy.

      • NBC ☛ Why our 14th Amendment lawsuit against a Trump fanatic sets a key American precedent

        This week’s court decision is the first case in which any judge, at any level, has ruled that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was an insurrection as defined by the Constitution. It reaffirms our basic American commitment to a democratic system with its finding that those who seek to undermine the rule of law and the peaceful transition of power have no place in government.

        The disqualification clause states that anyone who swears an oath to the Constitution and then participates in an insurrection is disqualified from holding state or federal office. As the North Carolina Supreme Court found in 1869, the last year one of these cases previously went to trial: “The oath to support the Constitution is the test. The idea being that one who had taken an oath to support the Constitution and violated it, ought to be excluded from taking it again, until relieved by Congress.”

      • Deutsche Welle ☛ French terror trial: Survivors of Nice attack are hoping for answers

        The perpetrator, a 31-year-old Tunisian national, killed 86 people that day. More than 400 were injured. He himself won’t be on trial. The police shot him dead that night. Investigators believe he became radicalized without being in direct contact with the “Islamic State” terror group who claimed responsibility shortly after the attack.

      • RFI ☛ Appeal to start in French court over Charlie Hebdo attack

        Those shot dead in the Charlie Hebdo office included some of France’s most celebrated cartoonists including Jean Cabut, known as Cabu, 76, Georges Wolinski, 80, and Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier, 47.

      • New York Times ☛ Trial Over 2016 Terror Attack in Nice Opens in Paris

        The third high-profile terrorism trial in France in two years opened on Monday in Paris, with eight defendants facing charges in a 2016 attack in the Mediterranean city of Nice that left more than 80 people dead and hundreds more injured or traumatized.

        It comes on the heels of monthslong trials in the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Paris attacks. The three mass killings shook France to its core in the mid-2010s and left unhealed wounds, turning the proceedings into moments of catharsis as much as fact-finding.

      • France24 ☛ Appeal to start in French court over Charlie Hebdo attack

        The first trial was held in 2020 with 14 defendants — some tried in their absence — accused of helping the gunmen prepare and organise the attacks in the French capital.

      • RTL ☛ Appeal to start in French court over Charlie Hebdo attack

        Twelve people were killed at the magazine’s Paris office by brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, who said they were acting on behalf of Al-Qaeda to avenge Charlie Hebdo’s decision to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

        The killings signalled the start of a deadly wave of Islamist attacks around Europe.

      • Ahval ☛ Turkey pushing migrants in ‘brutal weaponization’ against Greece – Athens

        Turkey is steering the flow of thousands into Greece, it cited Theodorikakos as telling Skai TV, in a “brutal and immoral weaponization” of undocumented migrants.

      • Turkey pushing migrants into Greece, says minister

        Greek Citizens’ Protection Minister Takis Theodorikakos accused Turkey on Saturday of the “brutal and immoral weaponization” of undocumented migrants.

        Speaking to Skai TV, Theodorikakos said that in August alone, 40,000 irregular migrants attempted to cross into Greece at the Evros border, and since the beginning of the year this number has reached 150,000.

      • Medforth ☛ Austria: Graz mosque as a hub for terror recruitment

        The accused, aged between 23 and 56 – mostly Bosnians and Austrians – were all active in the Furkan mosque in Graz and held various management positions in the association founded for this purpose, such as chairman, treasurer or secretary. In the course of their activities, they allegedly persuaded young people to go to Syria as IS fighters or prepared them for this. They are charged with membership of a terrorist organisation, membership of a criminal organisation, financing of terrorism and anti-state connections, which is why they have now been tried before a jury. The 400-page case from Graz was delegated to Vienna because Facebook postings were decisive. Thus, it is a media content offence and the Supreme Court decided that the Vienna Regional Court for Criminal Matters has jurisdiction. The defendants, who are all at large, pleaded not guilty.

      • Ahval ☛ Christians in Turkey say threatened by ultra-nationalist planning murders

        Malatya is notorious for a hideous murder of Christians who belonged to the Salvation Church of which Serin is a member. Two Turkish converts from Islam and a German citizen were attacked, tortured and murdered in a publishing house by five ultranationalists assailants on April 18, 2007. The murders became known as the missionary massacres in the Turkish media.

        After the killings, the publishing house was shut down and some Christians left the city or Turkey.

      • Axios ☛ Harris says internal threats to democracy fuel questions of U.S. values

        Why it matters: The deadly Jan. 6 Capitol Riot and increasing threats against members of Congress in recent years have shone a greater spotlight on the dangers of domestic extremism.

      • Rolling Stone ☛ Pro-MAGA D.C. Cop Secretly Worked to Undermine Seth Rich Investigation

        But the Rich investigation would test Sines like no other before it. She would have to wade through a morass of online lies and political chicanery in search of Rich’s killer. She didn’t yet know that someone on the inside was leaking information about the investigation itself.

      • Medforth ☛ Apple promotes the Islamic veil at the launch of its new iPhone

    • Environment

      • US Navy Times ☛ Magnet fishers fined after pulling 86 rockets from Fort Stewart river

        No good deed goes unpunished.

        In the case of some magnet fishers who cleared 86 rockets, a tank tracer round, and .50 caliber ammo belts from a river on Fort Stewart, the toll was a number of fines from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

        The group, led by treasure hunter Bryce Nachtwey, called the bomb squad after their magnet fishing dredged up the ammunition and 86 rockets in a Delta Airlines duffel bag, saying they were just trying to do the right thing.

      • NBC ☛ An intense marine heat wave is setting ocean temperature records in the North Atlantic

        Sea surface temperatures in these regions hit record levels this summer, said Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Physical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. Parts of the Pacific and North Atlantic have been anywhere from 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) to 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) warmer than average at times, conditions that have not been observed since record keeping began roughly six decades ago.

      • Didier Stevens ☛ Quickpost: Sun Drying Biodegradable Waste | Didier Stevens

        As biodegradable waste contains a lot of water, I was wondering how much mass reduction I can achieve by exposing it to the sun (by evaporating some of the contained water).

      • Energy

        • Rlang ☛ Graphing California Electricity Supply using ggplot2

          Graphing California Electricity Supply using ggplot2 during record temperatures 9/05/2022 – 09/09/2022

          Raw data from CA ISO. Data is available in 5 minute increments for each 24 hour period.

        • Reason ☛ Cryptocurrency’s Structural Security Problem

          I explore the remarkable number of failures in cryptocurrency security for Lawfare. I argue that security really is worse for cryptocurrency, because the decentralization that proponents treasure makes it hard to safely disclose and fix security holes: [...]

        • IDA ☛ Light is Energy: Estimating the Impact of Light Pollution on Climate Change

          All of this wasted light adds up. Globally we spend at least $50 billion in energy costs each year to produce light that escapes into space. In the United States, a conservative estimate of savings by completing the transition to LED lights and using lighting control systems is at least $15.4 billion annually by 2035.

        • YLE ☛ Tampere to launch regular robot bus operations this year

          During the initial phase of operations, there will be a driver on board, but in the future, the aim is for drivers to handle the monitoring remotely. In addition to safety driver skills, students will be trained to drive a traditional minibus, which may be used to replace a robot vehicle in exceptional situations.

          After a two-month trial period early this year, Tampere Regional Transport (Nysse) plans to start using robobuses in regular traffic before year’s end. The kilometre-long route connects the tram line’s Hervanta terminus with the Lintuhytti residential area.

        • Michael West Media ☛ Why corporate ’green-washing’ causing stir – Michael West

          Progressive, climate-savvy Australians have driven so-called responsible investment to new highs.

          But they expect more than a tick and flick by companies when it comes to backing up their claims on environmental values, gender and racial inclusion or stamping out slavery.

          Environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria are used to screen investments and encourage companies to act responsibly.

      • Wildlife/Nature

        • Russell Graves ☛ Golden Spike National Historic Park

          Last post, I promised a lot more steam locomotives – so, here you go! This was our stop on the way into Utah, and is well worth a stop if you’re in the area!

      • Overpopulation

        • NPR ☛ Whatever happened to the ‘No Sex for Fish’ women after the flood? Hint: It’s ‘amazing’

          Eventually the waters of the Lake receded and the Nduru Beach women came up with a plan that seemed risky but made sense to them: Let’s go back to fishing.

          Here’s the story of the unexpected revival of No Sex for Fish.

        • California ☛ Map shows California’s current drought status as record heat bakes the region

          On Tuesday, downtown Sacramento broke an almost century old record with an all-time high temperature of 116 degrees. Throughout California, power grids are straining as energy usage soars, teetering towards potential blackouts.

        • India Today ☛ Overpopulation, concrete jungle, altered landscape: Decoding Bengaluru’s urban flood woes

          The city’s population, which stood at 1.6 lakh in 1901, is estimated to be more than one crore today. This rapid and extreme growth has triggered a massive demand for land and the city began sprawling out. Ignoring the topography of the land, construction began in the valleys and ridges, which in turn altered the original topography, with minor drains disappearing.

          The new structures not only impacted water infiltration into the soil but also began obstructing the movement of water in the valleys. Most of the drains on private properties disappeared, while public ownership drains proved insufficient to carry water during heavy rainfall days. These existing canals, which were not created for inundation requirements, proved inadequate to the task of carrying excess rainwater. Extreme amounts of engineering, sewage flow and clogging further hampered flow in the canals.

        • BBC ☛ How many people can Earth handle?

          Others, meanwhile – including the British broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough – have labelled our swarming masses a “plague on the Earth”. In this view, nearly every environmental problem we’re currently facing, from climate change to biodiversity loss, water stresses and conflicts over land, can be traced back to our rampant reproduction over the last few centuries. Back in 1994 – when the global population was a mere 5.5 billion – a team of researchers from Stanford University, in California, calculated that the ideal size of our species would be between 1.5 and 2 billion people.

          So is the world overpopulated currently? And what might the future hold for the global dominance of humanity? The debate over the ideal number of people on the planet is as fractured and emotionally charged as ever – but time is running out to decide which is the best direction.

    • Finance

      • The Wall Street Journal ☛ U.S. Recovers Over $30 Million in Cryptocurrency Stolen by North Korean Hackers

        U.S. authorities have seized more than $30 million in cryptocurrency plundered from an online game this year by hackers linked to North Korea, one of the largest successes clawing back digital revenue from Pyongyang, investigators said.

      • Scoop News Group ☛ Patreon security team layoffs cause backlash in creator community

        Patreon, which boasts as many as 8 million monthly users on its platform for fans to support creators and artists, suffered a major breach in 2015. Hackers broke into the company’s user database and released several gigabytes of internal data including usernames, email address and mail addresses. No credit-card numbers or Social Security numbers were accessed in the breach, the company said at the time.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Michael West Media ☛ God save the Governor-General? – Michael West

        The Labor government announced that the $18m charity endorsed by the Governor-General, funded by the taxpayer, headed by a low-profile businessman, and with only the vaguest mandate, would be scrapped. But will David Hurley survive this?

      • Michael West Media ☛ Elizabeth’s legacy: the enduring Australian monarchy – Michael West

        King Charles III presents a vexed dilemma for the Albanese government as it proceeds with the referendum to enshrine an Indigenous voice in the constitution, writes Mark Sawyer.

      • Michael West Media ☛ The man who won’t lie down: Australian ice hockey still getting snowed

        Despite our climate, Australian hockey has thrived at the grassroots level. But its administration has long been beset with scandal, incompetence and spin, writes Sandi Logan.

        Recruiters and the board of Ice Hockey Australia (IHA) have not ruled out the possibility disgraced businessman Grove Bennett could return to the organisation under a new six-figure contract position as general manager.

        Bennett, who fled Canada in 2017 leaving behind millions of dollars of debt to 62 creditors, was a director on the board and then president of the national ice hockey organisation from September 2021, and was moving to embed himself as its chief executive officer before he was exposed, resigning in disgrace last May following an MWM exposé.

      • Quillette ☛ Reject the Rules of the Social Media Game

        I was not alone in this love affair. According to a 2019 report by ThinkNow, 40 percent of US online users between the ages of 18 and 22 say that they are at least somewhat addicted to social media (this falls only slightly to 37 percent for the demographic aged 23–38). Effects are particularly pronounced amongst the young population, where it has been reported that roughly one-in-five US teens visits YouTube “almost constantly,” while 54 percent of teens say that it would be hard to abstain from social media. In light of these growing levels of dependence, we might reasonably ask how we can forge healthier relationships with the social media machine. What emerges when we dig deeper, however, is disenchanting. Invariably, we do not control the machine, the machine controls us.

      • USA ☛ Readout of White House Listening Session on Tech Platform Accountability

        Remove special legal protections for large tech platforms. Tech platforms currently have special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that broadly shield them from liability even when they host or disseminate illegal, violent conduct or materials. The President has long called for fundamental reforms to Section 230.

      • Broadband Breakfast ☛ A White House Event, Biden Administration Seeks Regulation of Big Tech

        “Tech platforms currently have special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that broadly shield them from liability even when they host or disseminate illegal, violent conduct or materials,” argued the White House document.

        Biden’s hostility towards Section 230 is not new. Section 230 protects internet platforms from most legal liability that might otherwise result from third party–generated content. For example, although an online publication may be guilty of libel for a news story it publishes, it cannot be held liable for slanderous reader posts in its comments section.

        Critics of Section 230 say that it unfairly shields rogue social media companies from accountability for their misdeeds. And in addition to Biden and other Democrats, many Republicans are dislike the provision. Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, argue that platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube discriminate against conservative speech and therefore should not benefit from such federal legal protections.

        Section 230’s proponents say that it is the foundation of online free speech.

      • [Old] 47 U.S. Code § 230 – Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material

        (4) Access software provider

        The term “access software provider” means a provider of software (including client or server software), or enabling tools that do any one or more of the following:

        (A) filter, screen, allow, or disallow content;

        (B) pick, choose, analyze, or digest content; or

        (C) transmit, receive, display, forward, cache, search, subset, organize, reorganize, or translate content.

      • The Kent Stater ☛ Kent State to spearhead multimillion dollar Intel microelectronics collaboration

        Kent State is joining forces with 13 other higher education institutions to support the microelectronics industry.

        In March, Intel introduced the Semiconductor Education and Research Program for Ohio as part of the company’s promise to invest $100 million into education collaborations with universities across the country, of which $50 million dollars was allocated to Ohio institutions.

      • Le Monde ☛ Biden inaugurates Intel’s giant chip factory in Ohio

        On Friday, September 9, giant bulldozers surveyed a huge construction site in the countryside near Columbus, Ohio. The entire local economic and political elite was present. The event was the launch of a new construction site by Intel, which will invest 20 billion dollars (19.7 billion euros) to build a huge microprocessor factory that will compete with the Koreans from Samsung and the Taiwanese from TSMC.

      • Muslim world’s intellectual suicide

        When the Asharite school of thought (text over reasoning) won over the Mutazalite school of thought (reasoning over text), the culture of pressure on dissidents and heretics developed, which lead to eventual decay and decline. The Ottoman Caliphate which subsequently absorbed all that was left of the Arab expansionism did its own expansion to Arab lands. Since the Turkic culture was a sequestered one which initially opposed the import of the printing press and had a harem culture, it ended up strengthening the Arab tribal tradition of gender apartheid and enforced an inhuman view of women. That therein is the ‘intellectual suicide’ that the Islamic world committed in the 12th century. The sack of Baghdad by Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, sealed the destruction and the Muslim world has never risen to its former tolerance levels.

      • Frontpage Magazine ☛ Cognitive Dissonance at the Core of Islam

        Here he is reiterating an objective fact – that Islam definitively permits child marriage. He is also providing the predetermined “reasoning” for this viewpoint, which illustrates the depth of the chasm between Islam and the rest of mankind: Mohammed did it so it can’t be wrong.

      • Corporate Wokeness Hurts the Groups It Purports to Help

        Every day, corporate America has launched a new initiative that reasonably could be described as “woke.” At first glance, this wokeness doesn’t seem so bad. Doesn’t America have a history of racism, discrimination and injustice? Don’t these persist? Shouldn’t we seek to remedy them?

        Yes, of course.

        Wokeness, however, especially among corporations, isn’t the answer. It’s fundamentally illiberal, undermining centuries-old principles such as the rule of law, equality under the law, freedom of speech and due process of law. It harms the very communities it purports to help.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation

        • The Economist ☛ Loudspeakers in Vietnam’s capital will blare propaganda once more

          The lao phuong have a long history. During the war they provided warning of American bombing raids, and shared optimistic updates from the front line. When the conflict ended they were put to other purposes. One Hanoi resident remembers hearing neighbours shamed for not paying their taxes. Another recalls a song encouraging people to clean their neighbourhoods and chastising households which had not yet pitched in. One ditty urged the twice-daily brushing of teeth.

          Endless announcements offended the ears as much as they did the spirit. Pham Gia Ngoc, who spent decades broadcasting statements about everything from power cuts to vaccination schedules, told state media that residents often became so incensed by the racket that they cut speakers’ wires or turned them upside down and filled them with water. Loa phuong became slang. A Hanoian bigmouth can be accused of being “as loud as the ward loudspeaker”.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Screen Rant ☛ 10 Banned Movies That Only Got More Famous After Their Bans

        While censorship is a tool that some directors might wish governments didn’t have, it’s a tool nonetheless. With these movies, however, the efforts of governing bodies were all in vain.

        Most notorious in the video nasty era of the ’70s and ’80s, but still continuing to this day, censorship bodies are keen to limit the distribution of movies that they see as “morally corrupting.” Despite their efforts, however, the Streisand Effect often takes effect, making a movie more famous than it ever would’ve been otherwise, all because people were desperate to stop audiences from seeing it.

      • [Old] Reason ☛ Klobuchar’s Media Bill Won’t Save the Press

        But laws like the JCPA could make it more difficult and costly for platforms to provide access and allow users to share this sort of information from small, local news sources. Consumers might end up facing additional paywalls as online platforms will have to pay for sharing news.

      • Mark Nottingham ☛ A Safer, More Centralised Australian Internet

        There are many potential criticisms of the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth)1. While my own concerns are mostly about whether there are appropriate checks and balances on the eSafety Commissioner’s powers, I will give credit where due; the current Commissioner’s implementation of it has – so far – demonstrated nuance and thoughtful balancing of the legislation’s goals with the preservation and enhancement of the unique properties that make the Internet so valuable to society.

      • Reason ☛ Everyone Wants To Ban Certain Content Online. No One Wants To Talk Enforcement.

        In other proposals, it’s all more of the same. The only porn regulation proposal which reliably comes with any discussion of enforcement is increased prosecution of obscenity laws already on the books, as advocated most prominently in a 2019 letter to the Justice Department from several members of Congress. Obscenity, in constitutional jurisprudence, is a far narrower category than the average non-lawyer would suppose. Yet even if this plan had a wider application, it’s still not clear how reviving the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, as the lawmakers seem to want, would work in practice—and that brings us to the crux of the enforcement question.

      • Christian Post ☛ 5 Christian evangelists traveling to plant new church thrown off boat and drowned in Uganda

        Citing Scripture, the evangelists continued affirming the sonship of Christ and, according to Kyakulaga, Bashir told them, “We are giving you one last minute to stop your blasphemy and to convert by confessing the shahada (Islamic creed), or else your lives are at risk.”

        When the five evangelists refused to renounce Christ, the Muslims seized them and pushed them off the boat one by one, Kyakulaga said. While the lake is only 4 to 5.7 meters deep, they were 200 meters from shore, and all five Christians drowned.

      • RAIR Foundation ☛ Ground Breaking: Germany Sentences Islam Critic to Six Months in Muslim-Filled Prison (Exclusive Interview)

        In Germany, Muslims can spread writings and speak openly in mosques about killing non-muslims. However, a non-Muslim German is not allowed to warn against the Islamic killing orders against people of other faiths.

        Stuerzenberger is one of the most courageous men in Europe today. But unfortunately, he is one of the most prosecuted political dissidents in 21st-century Germany. Stuerzenberger has been taken to court for “hate speech” multiple times in Germany and Austria.

        For over a decade, he has been holding popular presentations on Islam and conducting street interviews in Germany. Recently, he had been on tour with former Al-Qaida member turned Islam critic Irfan Peci to educate Germans about the dangers of Islam.

      • Mexico News Daily ☛ The story of Mexico’s national anthem and its banned verses

        Santa Anna, then anthem’s sponsor, would eventually be vilified by many Mexicans as the leader responsible for losing over half of Mexico’s national territory to the United States. By 1943, during the presidency of Manuel Ávila Camacho, a new official version of the anthem was published that excluded several stanzas referring to Santa Anna.

        The verses about Agustín de Iturbide, an Independence-era general and the country’s first emperor, were also removed. According to Mexican law, a singer can be fined a whopping 900,000 pesos for singing the banned stanzas of the anthem or modifying the lyrics.

      • Legislation to force Big Tech to pay publishers for online news ‘blown up’ by censorship amendment

        The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which would temporarily exempt newspapers, broadcasters and other publishers from antitrust laws to collectively negotiate an annual fee from Google and Meta/Facebook, will be held over for a future committee hearing to determine if it moves to the Senate floor for a vote.

        Google and Meta/Facebook, which dominate the nearly $250 billion U.S. digital advertising market, are the only two platforms targeted by the proposed legislation, which seeks to level the online playing field and boost struggling local news media.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • Reuters ☛ Mexico invites relatives of Assange, Guevara to Independence Day

        Leftist Lopez Obrador said the former presidents of Bolivia and Uruguay, Evo Morales and Jose “Pepe” Mujica, had also been invited, along with relatives of Nelson Mandela, U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King and U.S. labor activist Cesar Chavez.

      • RFA ☛ Hong Kong police arrest head of local journalists’ union on public order charges

        He has frequently spoken out against ever-diminishing press freedom in the city.

        He had been planning study journalism on a scholarship at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, and had been scheduled to leave Hong Kong at the end of September.

        The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong said it was “concerned” over Chan’s arrest and was “monitoring the situation very closely.”

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Michael West Media ☛ Spies Like Us: how Timor’s oil and gas delivered justice to Bernard Collaery – Michael West

        The prosecution of Bernard Collaery was dropped after pressure from Timor-Leste and fears of China’s expansion. It’s not great news for other whistleblowers such as David McBride, Richard Boyle or Julian Assange.

      • Reason ☛ 21 Years After 9/11, TSA Still Insists on Grabbing Your Dick When You Fly

        Created just two short months after the 9/11 attacks, the TSA nationalized a largely privatized, decentralized system of airport security that existed previously and replaced it with the federalized behemoth we know today.

        It brought with it many of the things people hate most about airports: long lines, forced shoe removal, and dour government agents giving you the third degree for carrying too much toothpaste.

      • RTE ☛ RTÉ celebrates Irish Sign Language Awareness Week

        RTÉ will mark Irish Sign Language Awareness Week, from Monday 19th – Sunday 25th September, with some special Irish Sign Language (ISL) programming and content across our services throughout the week, highlighting RTÉ’s ongoing commitment to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Community in Ireland

      • teleSUR ☛ European Taxi Drivers Stage ‘Uber Files’ Protest in Brussels

        European taxi associations are now calling for thorough investigations at both European and national levels into leaked Uber data, including more than 124,000 internal files, memos, calendars, WhatsApp messages and other data files from the period 2013-2017.

      • ME Forum ☛ Egyptian Child Forcibly ‘Returned’ to Islam

        The police, the ministry of social affairs, and the family-status court based their decision to seize the child on one thing: because the religious affiliation of Shenouda’s biological parents is unknown, he must be considered Muslim. This is based on Islamic teaching, whereby every human being is born as a sort of prototypical Muslim; they only “lose” their Islam when taught false things or religions (in this case, Christianity).

      • JNS ☛ British leaders ask ‘BBC’ to stop featuring contributor with anti-Jewish history

        The letter, addressed to BBC director-general Tim Davie, was signed by a number of Jewish groups, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, the Community Security Trust, the National Jewish Assembly and the Campaign Against Antisemitism.

        “This man has no place on our television screens and it is shameful that the BBC has yet to recognise that,” a CAM spokesperson told The Jewish Chronicle. “We shall be writing to the BBC and considering legal action over Mr. Atwan’s possible glorification of terrorism.”

      • Turkish Minute ☛ 31 women fell victim to femicide in Turkey in August

        Femicides and violence against women are serious problems in Turkey, where women are killed, raped or beaten every day. Many critics say the main reason behind the situation is the policies of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, which protects violent and abusive men by granting them impunity.

      • Spiegel ☛ Afghanistan One Year After the Takeover

        On August 15, 2021, Kabul’s government center imploded within a matter of hours – faster than the Western intelligence services and even the Taliban themselves had expected. The scenes of tens of thousands of desperate people at the airport, the last area under the control of the United States, reflected the fears of many Afghans, especially Afghan women. For years, the Taliban had waged a murderous war against the Afghan state and its foreign supporters. Sometimes written on small pieces of paper, other times printed on standard-sized sheets with a seal of the “Emirate,” they would threaten all those with death who didn’t stop working for the infidels.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Report of the European Working Team on the Digital Commons [bitmap wrapped as PDF]

        Europe is the birthplace of a free, open, neutral, interoperable and secure Internet, which is also the largest digital commons. These funding principles are at the heart of the European Union’s values, rooted in the European treaties and emphasized in the Delaration on European Digital Rights and Principles. Alongside its Member States, the Union is becomin more and more mature regarding FLOSS and digital commons issues. They have increasingly taken stock of the tremendous opportunities offered by these models.

      • The Verge ☛ Matternet’s delivery drone design has been approved by the FAA

        In a statement, the FAA says Matternet’s Model M2 drone “meets all federal regulations for safe, reliable and controllable operations and provides a level of safety equivalent to existing airworthiness standards applicable to other categories of aircraft.” The four-rotor drone’s been approved to carry four-pound payloads and fly at an altitude of 400 feet or lower with a maximum speed of 45mph.

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Far Out Mag ☛ 50 years on from Mott the Hoople’s masterpiece ‘All the Young Dudes’

          Brian Eno once said, “I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!” Thus, it seems fitting that when David Bowie resurrected Mott the Hoople from the ash heap of history that they opened their soaring phoenix record with a cover of ‘Sweet Jane’.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Technical

      • PinePhone first impressions

        I tried very hard to love Plasma Mobile, as a devout KDE evangelist on the desktop. KDE Connect working out of the box was awesome! Performance was very very bad, but I could deal with that for the time being. Unfortunately, I ran into an absolute showstopping bug: whenever I’d unplug a USB device, the entire UI would just crash and dump me into a tty with no on-screen keyboard, necessitating a reboot. Sometimes this would even happen when unplugging a charging cable.

        I had no love for Manjaro, so tried switching to postmarketOS to see if it was a distro-level bug, but it wasn’t. So I dumped Plasma Mobile and tried out SXMO.

      • about the cli client

        So one of the reason I didn’t post as much is that I thought the cli client no longer works, but as it turns out, after I’m finally bothered to carefully read through the code, the configuration file should be located in ~/.config/.smolpub, in which the smolpub file is a hidden one (a dot before the file name)
        Then I kinda thought it’s my problem all along, but then I read through the manual, and realised it tells us to create the config with the location ~/.config/smolpub, the file is not a hidden one, but the code only regonises one that is hidden, if you don’t modify it.

      • DevLog: Trisquare for SEGA Master System

        I took the day to work in some light stuff for my personal projects. Refactoring the Master System version of my puzzle game. Currently the check for a match is probably big O squared since is just the basic for nested in a for to check every space in the playfield. So I’m adding a list of pieces on the playfield instead.

      • Programming

        • Explaining modern server monitoring stacks for self-hosting

          I’ve set up a Grafana server six years ago, and I was using Munin for my personal servers.

          However, I recently moved my server to a small virtual machine which has CPU and memory constraints (1 core / 1 GB of memory), and Munin didn’t work very well. I was curious to learn if the Grafana stack changed since the last time I used it, and YES.

          There is that project named Prometheus which is used absolutely everywhere, it was time for me to learn about it. And as I like to go against the flow, I tried various changes to the industry standard stack by using VictoriaMetrics.

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