09.26.22

Links 26/09/2022: GnuCash 4.12 and Microsoft Breaches

Posted in News Roundup at 6:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • 9to5Linux ☛ 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: September 25th, 2022

      This has been a really great week for Linux news and releases. GNOME 43 arrived with a plethora of goodies to enjoy on your desktop, Firefox 105 is out as well with better performance for Linux users, Mesa 22.2 graphics stack brought improvements for Linux gamers, and Ventoy bumps ISO support for over 1000.

      On top of that, we took a look at what’s coming to Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm,” PipwWire, Kdenlive, and Firefox 106, we warm Ubuntu users about new Linux kernel updates that patch multiple vulnerabilities, and we tell you what’s new in the latest versions of Audacity and Avidemux multimedia software. Below, you can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for September 25th, 2022.

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • uni Toronto ☛ Needing xdg-desktop-portal may be in my future (even without Wayland)

        I generally haven’t had particularly positive experiences with xdg-desktop-portal on my custom desktop. At best it appears to do nothing; at worst, it’s been a core element in mysterious problems. Having xdg-desktop-portal installed effectively isn’t optional these days on Fedora (if you try to deinstall it, it takes out a bunch of other things, although in Fedora 36 there’s fewer things than I expected). However, letting the program and its whole portal environment do anything so far seems to be optional unless you use flatpaks.

    • Applications

      • OpenSource.com ☛ The story behind Joplin, the open source note-taking app

        In this interview, I met up with Laurent Cozic, creator of the note-taking app, Joplin. Joplin was a winner of the 20i rewards, so I wanted to find out what makes it such a success, and how he achieved it.

        Could you summarize what Joplin does?

        Joplin is an open source note-taking app. It allows you to capture your thoughts and securely access them from any device.

        Obviously, there are other note-taking apps out there—but apart from it being free to use, what makes it different?

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • TecMint ☛ How to Install Lua Scripting Language in Linux

        Lua is a free and open-source, powerful, robust, minimal, and embeddable scripting language. It’s extensible and interpreted scripting language that is dynamically typed, and run by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine.

        Lua runs on all if not most Unix-like operating systems including Linux and Windows; on mobile operating systems (Android, iOS, BREW, Symbian, Windows Phone); on embedded microprocessors (ARM and Rabbit); on IBM mainframes, and many more.

      • TecMint ☛ 5 Best Practices to Prevent SSH Brute-Force Login Attacks in Linux

        Servers running SSH are usually a soft target for brute-force attacks. Hackers are constantly coming up with innovative software tools and bots for automating brute-force attacks which further increase the risk of intrusion.

        In this guide, we explore some of the tips that you can implement to safeguard your SSH servers from brute-force attacks on RHEL-based Linux distributions and Debian derivatives.

    • WINE or Emulation

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Wine 7.18 rolls out with Unicode 15 support

        Wine, the translation layer that allows you to run applications and games designed for Windows on Linux has a new development release up with Wine 7.18. This is the tech that 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.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • California18 ☛ 6 Best Alternatives to Chrome OS

      Chrome OS is a Linux kernel-based software from Google that uses the Google Chrome web browser as a user interface, supporting various web applications. The so-called Chromebooks are light, cheap and affordable computers for emerging markets, hence the need to have a compatible operating system.

      Although it is on the rise, undergoing constant updates, the OS is far from perfect. You may be looking for an alternative to run on your PC instead of Chrome OS, a Linux distribution or heavy Windows.

      The following list highlights some alternatives to Google’s system. Some are slightly heavier options, but even more versatile than Chrome OS, which is extremely dependent on the search giant’s solutions and an internet connection.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Education

      • When hackers grow old

        You – yes, even you – cannot count on retaining your mental flexibility into middle and old unless you work at it. You have to practice busting out of comfortable mental grooves and regularly checking your assumptions when you’re young, and you have to develop a habit of it that sustains into old age.

        It’s said that the best time for a middle-aged person to start (physically) exercising is thirty years ago. I think the same goes for the habits that might (might!) keep you mentally agile at 56, or 65. Push your envelope. Develop the regular practice of challenging yourself and exiting your comfort zone now so you’ll have it established when you really need it.

        You have to be realistic about this; there’s an optimal-challenge level where you choose an attainable goal and work mentally hard for it. This month I’m going to learn go. Not the game, I already play that (though not very well); the programming language. Not because I really need to for a specific project, but because it’s time to stretch myself.

        Develop that habit. And never let it go.

    • GNU Projects

      • Neowin ☛ GnuCash 4.12

        GnuCash is a personal and small business finance application, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It’s designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible. GnuCash allows you to track your income and expenses, reconcile bank accounts, monitor stock portfolios and manage your small business finances. It is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports.

    • Programming/Development

      • The New Stack ☛ Bryan Cantrill on Rust and the Future of Low-Latency Systems

        In eager anticipation of Cantrill’s return for P99 CONF 2022, let’s take a look back at his talk on “Rust, Wright’s Law and The Future of Low-Latency Systems.” He predicted the coming decade will see two important changes with profound ramifications for low-latency systems: the rise of Rust-based systems, and the ceding of Moore’s Law to Wright’s Law.

        In this talk, he discusses these two trends, and especially their confluence — explaining why he believes the future of low-latency systems will include Rust programs in some surprising places.

      • Want cleaner code? Use the rule of six

        The key is:

        Every line does only one thing

        One line, one task.

        But don’t go crazy with it.

        [...]

        A line of code containing 6+ pieces of information should be simplified.

      • Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.76 released.

        Game of Trees 0.76 was released on September 23rd, 2022.

      • Game Of Trees ☛ Got-portable Changelog

        This file details portable-specific changes to make things work on systems other than OpenBSD.

        All changes are on top of the versioned changes listed in CHANGES.

      • Perl / Raku

        • Perl Basics

          This discussion of Perl Basics is intended to complement, not replace, other Perl resources, such as published texts and reference books or network libraries and discussion groups. How?

          It will try to do two things. First, it will provide a succinct summary of major Perl elements. Second, it will provide perspective and relate features to one another. Thus, it will be a kind of extended and structured checklist, with commentary.

          The discussion will be built around answering two questions:

          What are the things Perl provides you to work with?

          What can you do to those things?

  • Leftovers

    • Hackaday ☛ Epoxy Blob Excised Out Of Broken Multimeter, Replaced With A QFP

      The black blobs on cheap PCBs haunt those of us with a habit of taking things apart when they fail. There’s no part number to look up, no pinout to probe, and if magic smoke is released from the epoxy-buried silicon, the entire PCB is toast. That’s why it matters that [Throbscottle] shared his journey of repairing a vintage multimeter whose epoxy-covered single-chip-multimeter ICL7106 heart developed an internal reference fault. When a multimeter’s internal voltage reference goes, the meter naturally becomes useless. Cheaper multimeters, we bin, but this one arguably was worth reviving.

    • Scheerpost ☛ Horton Hears a Heil

      “Horton Hears a Heil,” a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, reworks the wisdom of Dr. Seuss into something pertinent to our presently polarizing political predicament plainly paining our proposed purpose of prospering peacefully.

    • Scheerpost ☛ Without Culture, Freedom Is Impossible

      Cuba’s socialist approach to culture is unique in that it tries to make art forms available to everyone while balancing the lingering colonial practices.

    • Scheerpost ☛ Peter Richardson: Review of Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL

      Peter Richardson delves into Dave Zirin’s latest project examining the politics behind the NFL.

    • Hackaday ☛ 2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Cyberpack VR

      Feeling confined by the “traditional” cyberdeck form factor, [adam] decided to build something a little bigger with his Cyberpack VR. If you’ve ever dreamed of being a WiFi-equipped porcupine, then this is the cyberdeck you’ve been waiting for.

    • Hackaday ☛ This Found-Sound Organ Was Made With Python And A Laser Cutter

      Certain among our readership will no doubt remember attaching a playing card to the front fork of one’s bicycle so that the spokes flapped the card as the wheel rotated. It was supposed to sound like a motorcycle, which it didn’t, but it was good, clean fun with the bonus of making us even more annoying to the neighborhood retirees than the normal baseline, which was already pretty high.

    • Hackaday ☛ Empty Spools Make Useful Tools, Like Counters

      What’s the deal with getting things done? There’s a Seinfeld anecdote that boils down to this: get a calendar, do a thing, and make a big X on each day that you do the thing. Pretty soon, you’ll thirst for chains of Xs, then you’ll want to black out the month. It’s solid advice.

    • Hardware

      • [Old] System76 gets distribution center in Europe and is working on a new keyboard

        System76 will have a distribution center in Europe. The company confirms this in an interview with Tweakers. The manufacturer hopes to start delivering its Launch keyboards from Europe soon. Other products may follow later.

        The company will initially start supplying its mechanical Launch open source keyboard from its European distribution center, as the company says it is relatively easy to do. “Laptops and desktops have a lot of restrictions and the costs are higher, so we will start with our Launch keyboard and sell it from a European distribution center, so that the shipping costs and taxes for that market are lower,” said System76 principal engineer Jeremy Soller to Tweakers.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • MIT Technology Review ☛ The YouTube baker fighting back against deadly “craft hacks”

        “I got comments from young kids going, ‘I thought that I couldn’t cook. I tried that video and it didn’t work and Mum said I can’t cook now because I’ve wasted ingredients,’” Reardon says. She decided to use her undergraduate degree in food science and her postgraduate degree in dietetics to begin debunking more clips—but she quickly realized that many hacks weren’t just fake but actually dangerous.

      • Salon ☛ Unregulated capitalism makes you poor, miserable — and short: New study

        When supporters of capitalism claim that capitalism is an effective economic system, they often will begin by disputing capitalism’s dual legacies of environmental destruction and inefficiency before arguing that capitalism leads to widespread prosperity. To support that last point, capitalists may cite a popular graph developed by the World Bank economist Martin Ravallion. At first glance it seems unremarkable, showing nothing but a straight diagonal line that plummets down. Upon further analysis, however, the Ravallion graph purports to prove that the global percentage of humans living in extreme poverty fell from roughly 90% in 1820 to roughly 10% in the early 21st century.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Life Expectancy: The US and Cuba in the Time of Covid

        This continued through the beginning of Covid, which sharply changed the pattern.  LE in the US suddenly dropped behind that in Cuba.  Bernd Debusmann Jr.of BBC News wrote, LE in the US fell “to the lowest level seen since 1996.  Government data showed LE at birth now stands at 76.1 compared to 79 in 2019. That is the steepest two-year decline in a century.”  From 2019 to 2020, “LE declined in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

    • Proprietary

    • Security

      • IT Wire ☛ Slater and Gordon investigating possible class action against Optus

        Law firm Slater and Gordon is looking at the possibility of initiating a class action suit against Optus over the massive data breach revealed by the telco on 22 September.

        In a statement issued on Monday afternoon, the company’s class actions senior associate Ben Zocco said while specifics of the breach were yet to be made public, the consequences could potentially be significant for some customers.

        Due to this, he said the law firm was assessing possible legal action for those affected. A page has been set up with information for those who are interested in such an action.

        Optus issued an update about the breach this afternoon, offering “the most affected current and former customers” whose information was compromised the option of a 12-month subscription to Equifax Protect, a credit monitoring and identity protection service that can help reduce the risk of identity theft. Such customers would be contacted, Optus added.

      • Neowin ☛ Beware: Microsoft Edge found serving malicious tech support scam ads

        Microsoft seems to be doing a lot to improve the security on Windows 11. The company has also been adding security features like “Enhanced Security” to its Edge browser that is getting more popular according to the latest data. For the unwary out there though, scammers and similar other threat actors and miscreants are lying and waiting.

      • OpenSource.com ☛ OpenSSF: on a mission to improve security of open source software

        Open source software (OSS), once a niche segment of the development landscape, is now ubiquitous. This growth is fantastic for the open source community. However, as the usage of OSS increases, so do concerns about security. Especially in mission-critical applications— think medical devices, automobiles, space flight, and nuclear facilities—securing open source technology is of the utmost priority. No individual entity, whether developers, organizations, or governments, can single-handedly solve this problem. The best outcome is possible when all of them come together to collaborate.

        The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) formed to facilitate this collaboration. OpenSSF is best described in its own words..

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Quillette ☛ China in the Age of Surveillance

          There are now an estimated 540 million CCTV cameras in China. Cameras watch citizens as they shop and dine. Cameras stare at residents as they leave home in the morning and return at night. In the office, cameras spy on workers inside toilet cubicles. And if you, the Chinese citizen, are particularly unfortunate, you may arrive home one day and find that a camera has been installed within your property. Supposedly a quarantine measure, it crouches there on the cabinet wall like a hostile creature that has somehow found its way in—watching as you eat, watching as you watch TV; a silent, unwanted houseguest. Cameras also lurk in the homes of the mentally ill. The state considers them too volatile to live unmonitored, but no apparent thought has been given to the special torment produced by an ever-present eye during periods of psychological distress.

        • Pete Warden ☛ Try OpenAI’s Amazing Whisper Speech Recognition in a Free Web App

          You may have noticed that I’m obsessed with open source speech recognition, so I was very excited when OpenAI released a new voice model. I’m even more excited now I’ve had a chance to play with it, the accuracy is extremely impressive, especially as it’s multi-language. OpenAI have done a great job packaging it, you can install it straight from pip if you’re a Linux shell user, but I wanted to find a way to let anybody try it for themselves from a web browser, even if they’re not developers. I love Google’s Colab service, and luckily somebody had already created a notebook showing the basics of using the Whisper model. I added some documentation and test files, and now you can give it a try for yourself by opening this Colab link – https://colab.research.google.com/github/petewarden/openai-whisper-webapp/blob/main/OpenAI_Whisper_ASR_Demo.ipynb.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • BBC ☛ People smuggler: I get clients to sign a waiver

        The people smuggler is from the Middle East – young and softly spoken, smartly dressed in black. He has agreed to tell me about his business if we do not reveal his identity. His bodyguards discreetly keep watch outside the house.

        [...]

        Already this year, more than 30,000 people have made the crossing in small boats, about as many as the whole of last year.

      • [Old] Repeal resolution granting Muslim school holidays, FFRF urges San Francisco

        The board’s resolution appears to be well intentioned and seeks to foster an inclusive school environment — a laudable goal. However, it goes too far, the national state/church watchdog contends. As a public school system serving students who are nonreligious as well as students from various religions, the San Francisco Unified School District must be careful not to show preference for a particular religion, even if it is a minority religion in the United States, FFRF asserts. And, as a practical matter, parents will be forced to arrange child care or lose work (a serious financial burden) and students will be denied education because of these religious closures.

      • The Telegraph UK ☛ When will the Tories realise that mass migration is making us poor?

        These great rivers of people are flowing into Britain because of conscious policy decisions. Universities are dependent on foreign students for income. The new points-based system is obscenely generous. And so the numbers are unprecedented. This huge movement of people is greater than in the post-war period, and greater even than under Tony Blair, who started the most recent immigration wave in 1997.

        The fall of Boris Johnson might have been an opportunity to restore control. But Liz Truss wants to increase the numbers even further. The Growth Plan 2022, published alongside Kwasi Kwarteng’s Budget on Friday, promised “a plan to ensure the immigration system supports growth whilst maintaining control”.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Australia’s Asian Pivot Towards War

        It’s taken another 10 years — Trump disrupted — but the Asia Pivot is again gathering momentum and the Australian government is slowly gearing up for a fight with China. In January this year the announcement came from the Australian government that its fleet of Taipan helicopters would be retired early and the $3.7b acquisition of US-made Black Hawk helicopters would be completed.  In a January 2022 piece in The National Interest, Marcus Hellyer, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), wrote of the Black Hawk sale:

      • Meduza ☛ In Dagestan, residents protesting the mobilization blocked a federal highway, police fired shots into the air — Meduza

        On September 25, residents of the village of Endirey in the Khasavyurt region of Dagestan blocked the Khasavyurt-Makhachkala federal highway.

      • Meduza ☛ New wave of arsons at military enlistment offices and local administrations unfolds across Russia — Meduza

        After Vladimir Putin announced the Russian mobilization, arsonists started to set fire to military enlistment and administrative buildings (and one office of the United Russia party) with renewed vigor. In the first six months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine at least 20 military commissariats were set on fire; now the frequency of such incidents has increased dramatically. This is a partial list of new instances of arson – more are likely to follow.

      • Meduza ☛ Men of mobilization age will be barred from leaving Russia after ‘referendums’ — Meduza

        Russian authorities plan to close the borders to men of mobilization age, a source close to the Russian presidential administration told Meduza.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Spoils of War: Why Boston is No Longer the “Athens of America”

        Massachusetts has long had a reputation for being one of the most liberal states in the nation. According to an article published in Stacker, Massachusetts has the most liberal voters of any state in the nation ranked by two metrics: the percentage of residents who identify as liberals and the percentage of the state’s voters who voted for President Biden.

      • Counter Punch ☛ In Ukraine, Any Accident Could Turn a Crisis Into a Catastrophe

        The gas vaporised and mixed with clouds of smoke that drifted over Bari, poisoning soldiers and civilians alike. The presence of chemical weapons on the allied side was a closely held secret, so doctors did not understand what was killing their patients. The American and British political and military leadership at first tried to keep the disaster a secret, with British soldiers killed by the mustard gas being officially described as having died as a result of “burns due to enemy action”.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: In the Terrain of Word War III

        Patrick Lawrence writes the tide of this war has turned as the Russian army is on the way to defeat, and President Vladimir Putin could go down with it.

      • Scheerpost ☛ What Do Americans Care About? Not a Cold War With Russia and China

        Americans’ top security concerns include safety at home and protecting jobs.

      • Meduza ☛ Women in Dagestan and other regions protest mobilization ‘Our children are not fertilizer!’ — Meduza

        On September 25, residents of Dagestan carried out several actions protesting mobilization, the largest of which was in Makhachkala. Starting around 3:00pm Moscow time residents, mostly women, gathered in the center of the city. The Telegram channel “Morning Dagestan,” which had more than 30,000 subscribers before the action, published a call to come out to a demonstration. By 4:00pm about 100 people had come out, reports Dagestan outlet Chernovik: “mothers and children gathered, and representatives of older generations, and youth.” Judging by witnesses’ videos, a few hundred people were at the protest in Makhachkala. They chanted “No to war!” “No to mobilization” and “Our children are not fertilizer!”

      • Meduza ☛ Russian security services count more than 260,000 men fleeing Russia — Meduza

        Russia security services report that after the “partial” mobilization, 261,000 men have left Russia. A source in the presidential administration discussed the FSB’s report with Novaya Gazeta Europe. 

      • Meduza ☛ In Kherson, former MP Oleksiy Zhuravko dies following missile strike — Meduza

        Two people, including former Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Zhuravko, were killed in a missile strike in the center of Kherson on the morning of September 25, reports Interfax, citing Russian-controlled emergency services in the region.

      • Counter Punch ☛ US Hypocrisy Knows No Limits

        Not under that Charter, which is a formal treaty signed and adopted by both the United States and the Soviet Union and its successor Russia, President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal and a “Crime against Peace” under the UN Charter, but the US, of all nations on the UN Security Council, is that last country, and Biden, as president of the US, is the last world leader of such nations to be making that accusation.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Inside Putin’s Mobilization

        • Types of resistance to Putin’s mobilization • Some regions banning freedom of movement as draft-dodging grows • Russia’s miners and oil workers going to war • Chechnya’s Kadyrov exempts Chechnya from new mobilization • Zelensky speaks to Russians in Russian • Reports from Buryatia & Tuva regions on disproportionate deaths • Russia to strip Central Asian migrants of naturalized citizenship for refusing to fight • Conflicts between Russia and Uzbekistan/Kyrgyzstan/Kazakhstan

      • Meduza ☛ ‘Now is the time to decide whether your life will end.’ Zelensky addresses Russians about the mobilization — Meduza

        Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky once again addressed citizens of the Russian Federation concerning the mobilization, calling on them to refuse summonses, to hide, or to surrender to Ukrainian troops. He made these statements in a video address concerning results of the 213th day of the war:

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance

        Maintain is notably missing from the triplet, perhaps because it’s difficult to reconcile with sustainability’s implicit emphasis on reduction and restraint. By contrast, maintenance is about keeping things — sometimes large, intensively built things like skyscrapers and subway cars that might be difficult to imagine in the biodegradable utopias of the most gung-ho environmentalists. Ultimately, reduction is prioritized. We must not hold onto things. We must let go like good Buddhists, as industrial civilization becomes merely a painful, transient phase in human history, passing out of us like bad karma.

    • Environment

      • TruthOut ☛ Historic Tropical Storm Fiona Swept Homes Into Ocean in Eastern Canada
      • Common Dreams ☛ Historic Tropical Storm Fiona Sweeps Homes Into Ocean in Eastern Canada

        After knocking out power in Puerto Rico last week when it hit the U.S. territory as a Category 1 hurricane and intensifying to a Category 4 storm as it approached Bermuda, Fiona made landfall in Nova Scotia, where it caused “very extensive damage” at an airport in Sydney and cut off power for more than 415,000 of the province’s 500,000 customers.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | A Carbon Tax Will Only Go So Far

        As the world’s media finally allows people to remove their sad masks – replete with frowns and pouting lips: following the burial of Queen Elizabeth II, we are being asked to replace them with masks showing raised eyebrows of fear amidst Putin’s threat of nuclear war. While Russians attempt to flee a terrifying military call up, all global citizens should be equally frightened of being called up to take part in the largest experiment ever conducted on planet Earth.

      • Common Dreams ☛ EPA’s Environmental Justice Office ‘Won’t Make Up for’ Manchin Deal, Campaigner Says

        “We’ve seen a lot of structural changes on environmental justice in the Biden, Obama and Clinton administrations, but we need to see the results,” Wes Gobar, an organizer with the Movement for Black Lives, told The New York Times.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | We Can Solve the Climate Crisis Without Worrying About Population

        I am working on a book that argues that the world has enough for everyone. To get to that world of enough, we need better ways to organize society such that the politics of profit aren’t driving social, economic, and political decision making. One of the reviews I received on my manuscript took me to task for supposing that we could have enough for everyone without radically reducing the size of the human population. I had not engaged the topic because thought that worry about population had been put to rest. But apparently, I was wrong.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | A Rapid Green Energy Transition to Save $12 Trillion and Avoid Catastrophic Tipping Points

        Set aside for a moment the fact that our profligate use of coal, oil and gas and rampant destruction of green spaces are heating the planet to a point where human life will become increasingly uncomfortable, if not impossible. Climate change costs are also mounting, and pollution, habitat destruction and consumerism are profoundly affecting global human health and survival.

    • Finance

      • TruthOut ☛ 80 Percent of US Voters Want Government to Enact Paid Family and Medical Leave
      • Craig Murray ☛ The Tories Declare Class War

        The “cap” on bankers bonuses that the Tories have just removed had been set at double their annual salary. Yes, double their annual salary. So a banker on £320,000 a year could only get an annual bonus of £640,000. That has now been lifted so they will be able to get annual bonuses of millions again.

      • Counter Punch ☛ How Will the Fed’s Interest Hikes Help the Poor?

        In fact, the story could well go into reverse. Over the last four decades, wage gains for the bottom half of the wage distribution trailed average wage growth, this is especially true during periods of high unemployment. In fairness, if the unemployment rate stays under 5.0 percent, this would still qualify as a period of relatively low unemployment, but there is no guarantee that workers at the bottom would be seeing wage gains equal to the average pace of wage growth.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Anti-Poverty Measures Work—The Proof Is in the Census

        Shailly Gupta Barnes reviews the lessons learned from the recent U.S. census data regarding poverty.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Youth Despair: End of the American Dream?

        Despair has become an endemic feature of postmodern American life and signals the end of what has long the called “the American Dream.” “One of the defining features of the ‘American Dream’ is the ideal that children have a higher standard of living than their parents,” notes Harvard’s Opportunity Insights group.  It then adds:

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Uganda’s Most Popular Musician Is Being Banned Because He Criticized the Government

        Wine’s outspokenness and popularity have made him a target of Museveni’s ruling party, the National Resistance Movement (NRM). Since 2017, Wine has witnessed the killing of his driver as well as his bodyguard, and he has been placed under house arrest twice — once during the 2021 election, and both times illegally. He has also been arrested at least four times, on one occasion being brutally tortured.

      • What’s happening to arts censorship in the age of cancel culture?

        In free democracies like Australia and Great Britain, we assume artists can express what they want in their work without fear of persecution.

        Unlike in some countries where they could be imprisoned for art that challenges political or moral standards, democracies are usually far more supportive of artists’ free speech.

        Though in recent years, some artists have detected complex new pressures that are threatening to curtail what they feel they can say in their work.

        ArtsHub spoke to one established artist who described how ‘it feels like you have to be more careful now,’ when dealing with morally challenging subjects, and that they ‘would think twice about doing that kind of [extreme] work now.’

      • New York Times ☛ Sundance Liked Her Documentary on Terrorism, Until Muslim Critics Didn’t

        “In the independent film world there is a lot of weaponizing of identity politics,” Ms. Ali said in an interview. “The film took pains to understand the culture these men came from and molded them. It does a disservice to throw away a film that a lot of people should see.”

      • [Old] FFRF celebrates the release of Saudi activist Raif Badawi

        The Freedom From Religion Foundation is cheering the release of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, whose 10-year sentence and barbaric 2015 whipping for “insulting Islam online” caused global outrage.

        Badawi, now 38, was originally sentenced to 600 lashes and seven years in prison, a sentence which an appeals court soon increased to an unthinkable 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison, also imposing a fine of $267,000. After he was subjected to the first 50 lashes in 2015, the Saudi government, responding to the worldwide outcry, did not carry out the rest, and recently ended flogging as a form of punishment.

        Badawi was able to call his family in Canada on Friday upon his release, but is subject to a 10-year travel ban, which the press freedom watchdog group Reporters Without Borders has pledged to fight.

      • [Old] BBC ☛ Raif Badawi: Saudi blogger freed after decade in prison

        His sentence ended on 1 March. However, he is subject to a 10-year-travel ban and it is unclear whether he will face other restrictions.

      • [Old] Humanists International ☛ Cases of Concern: Raif Badawi

        In 2006 Badawi created a website called the Saudi Liberal Network, with the intention of encouraging free political and social debate in Saudi Arabia – one of the only such fora for free communication in the country. In his writings, Badawi advocated for principles of secular thought and liberalism in his writing.

        Badawi was convicted in 2013 of “insulting Islam through electronic channels”. He was initially sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes. The following year, his sentence was increased to 10 years and 1,000 lashes. He received 50 of those lashes in January 2015, while the remaining 950 were postponed due to a combination of his deteriorating health and international public outcry.

        The authorities have consistently hidden information about his conditions in detention, and his contact with the outside world has been infrequent.

      • Times Higher Education ☛ Researchers are wounded in academia’s gender wars

        More than two years ago, I set out to find whether the warnings about entering this domain were justified, or, as others suggest, spurious claims made by those keen to spark a phoney “culture war”. It led me to interview 50 gender studies academics across many disciplines, including sociology, psychology and education, most of whom worked at English universities, to learn about their views and experiences of the dispute.

        Having approached the topic with an open mind, however, my discussions left me in no doubt that a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold across universities in England, and many countries beyond.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

      • Counter Punch ☛ Journalism: “Objectivity” and “Neutrality” Aren’t the Same Thing

        Like many, Turley seems to long for a return to some Golden Age of journalism when journalists merely provided facts in a “neutral” manner, giving readers the necessary evidence to reach their own conclusions instead of inserting their own biases and opinions into the matter.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • NBC ☛ Wave of protests in Iran reflects seething anger over how its regime treats women

        As Iran’s hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi met world leaders in New York for the United Nations General Assembly this week, extraordinary scenes have unfolded in his country, with women removing their headscarves and even burning them in front of cheering crowds, according to videos posted online.

        The combination of viral videos and pent-up anger represent a potential “George Floyd” moment for Iran, Ghaemi said, with the regime now “forced into a corner given how innocent this woman was and there was no grounds for having treated her so violently.”

        Iran’s U.N. mission did not respond to a request for comment.

      • VOA News ☛ Tehran Rebukes Britain, Norway Over Commentary on Protests

        Jake Sullivan, U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, told ABC’s “This Week” show on Sunday that the Iranian protests “reflect a widespread belief that [the demonstrators] deserve their dignity and rights” and that the U.S. supports them.

        He said the U.S. supports people “who stand up for their rights.”

      • New York Times ☛ Iran Protests Surge to Dozens of Cities

        The videos posted online and the scale of the response from the authorities are difficult to independently verify, but video and photographs sent by witnesses known to The New York Times were broadly in line with the images being posted widely online.

        Deep resentments and anger have been building for months, analysts say, particularly among young Iranians, in response to a crackdown ordered by the country’s hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, that has targeted women.

        That comes on top of a litany of complaints over the years over corruption, mismanagement of the economy, inept handling of Covid and widespread political repression. The problems have persisted under Mr. Raisi, who came to power in an election in which any potential contenders were eliminated before the vote, particularly those from the reformist faction.

      • TruthOut ☛ Ableism Organizes Most Social Life. How Do We Dismantle It?
      • TruthOut ☛ Bloated Police Budgets Won’t Stop Sexual Violence

    • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

      • Hollywood Reporter ☛ Back to the Future: Netflix Ad Push Has Echoes of Its DVD-by-Mail Era

        Netflix’s plan to get into advertising was unorthodox. It was seeking unusually high CPMs (the cost to reach 1,000 consumers), and targeting and tracking were nearly nonexistent.

        The year was 2005. And Netflix decided the time was right to get into the ad business via slips placed in its iconic red DVD envelopes.

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Daniel Janus ☛ How to pay for books

          I bring that example up because it illustrates pretty clearly that merely making a copy of digital connect (whether legally or not) is not a particularly meaningful act in and of itself. An USB stick filled with thirty thousand ebooks is not automatically worth $100,000. If I just read four of them, then only those four will present any value to me. The book brings value for the reader not when bought, but in the process of reading.

          Thus, I think it would make sense to tie the payment for the book (or more precisely, for its content) to that very process.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV Operator Faces Prison Following Organized Crime Investigation

          Following an investigation carried out by a regional police organized crime unit, a UK man is due to appear in court next month charged with copyright and proceeds of crime offenses . Sources familiar with the case say the man is the alleged operator of Marvel Streams, a pirate IPTV service that shut down suddenly earlier this year.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Kim Dotcom Took on a Pro-Ukraine Meme Group & Got Utterly Shitposted

          Kim Dotcom’s hatred for United States policies is an integral part of his online persona and the reason for his current placement on the anti-American side of the Ukraine conflict. But while Dotcom has held off the US Government for more than a decade, he proved no match for anti-Russian propaganda shitposting meme group NAFO.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Lopped to Pieces

        It’s morning in Logroño. For a Logroño morning for me, habitually, it is an early morning. During dim epochs, I’d fall back to slumber for at least an hour after Marisa awakened, arose and began to prepare for her working day. Well, not today, sonny! My time in Seminole was an inspiration in this way. I was truly content with the morning routine that I created. I want to in part duplicated it in Logroño. Perhaps *duplicate* isn’t the best word. I want to *interpret* it in a Logroño context. The process begins today with a half complete morning exercise, ear training and this *scribbling*. I laughingly call it *scribbling*, as Robert Calvert laughingly called one of his songs a *composition* or some such. Which reminds me.

      • i’ve been away

        Well it’s definitely been a minute. It’s crazy how a quick break to focus on life can turn into months away from the smallweb.

    • Technical

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

Microsoft LinkedIn “Experimented” on Over 20 Million People Over Five Years and May Have Stopped Some of Them From Getting a Job

Posted in Microsoft at 2:28 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reprinted with permission from Ryan

Microsoft LinkedIn “experimented” on over 20 million people over five years and may have stopped some of them from getting a job. -New York Times (archived from NewsWaffle)

[Microsoft] LinkedIn ran experiments on more than 20 million users over five years that, while intended to improve how the platform worked for members, could have affected some people’s livelihoods, according to a new study. […]

LinkedIn’s algorithmic experiments may come as a surprise to millions of people because the company did not inform users that the tests were underway. […]

LinkedIn[…]routinely run[s] large-scale experiments in which they try out different versions of app features, web designs and algorithms on different people. The longstanding practice, called A/B testing, is intended to […] keep them engaged, which helps the [company] make money through premium membership fees or advertising. Users often have no idea that companies are running the tests on them.

But the changes made by LinkedIn are indicative of how such tweaks to widely used algorithms can become social engineering experiments with potentially life-altering consequences for many people.[…]

“The findings suggest that some users had better access to job opportunities or a meaningful difference in access to job opportunities,” said Michael Zimmer, an associate professor of computer science and the director of the Center for Data, Ethics and Society at Marquette University.[…]

LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, did not directly answer a question about how the company had considered the potential long-term consequences of its experiments on users’ employment and economic status.

Basically, LinkedIn is there to make Microsoft money (duh) by running skeevy tests on people, who probably didn’t even read the EULA, which might have caused them to miss employment opportunities.

When Microsoft was reached for comment, they had none.

What are you going to say when you’ve been outed as ruining someone’s hopes and dreams for career advancement (or even finding a job at all in a bad economy), in the pursuit of a better algorithm to bring in ad money from people who haven’t stopped to consider why this is all “free”?

As a separate issue, LinkedIn is not doing as well as the obsequious Gates-Funded New York Times would suggest.

The New York Times runs hundreds of Gates propaganda articles and even softens what they do when their LinkedIn division screws people who have accounts there.

LinkedIn itself, like the rest of Microsoft, laid of thousands already in staggered layoffs and is on a hiring freeze. (Scroll through the results and you can see that LinkedIn itself has fired thousands and is turning into a ghost town.)

LinkedIn also gets used like “another Facebook” by people who shouldn’t be anywhere near it.

People such as my sister-in-law, who we joke about in #Techrights because she’s such a materialistic megalomaniac, make “LinkedIn” accounts as a temple to themselves, not thinking about how they’re being manipulated and experimented upon by Microsoft.

Another person I know who is on LinkedIn is an ex of mine who got blacklisted from government employment in Wisconsin after he faked a back injury to file a fraudulent worker’s comp case. He has an arrest warrant in Illinois, and his profile currently says he works as a DoorDash driver.

Like many “social” (control) media sites, many LinkedIn profiles I’ve seen accidentally reveal some things the “used” (of Microsoft) probably doesn’t want a job interviewer (or stalker) to know, such as they fact that they’ve had a string of jobs they weren’t at for very long, which signals that they’ll probably bring problems to your company if you hire them.

Most people should look for jobs some other way than resorting to LinkedIn.

Most companies still accept paper job applications or at least applications submitted directly to their hiring people. Most people don’t need to be on a “social network” to find a job.

Maybe that’s why Microsoft is firing so many LinkedIn employees? █

Links 26/09/2022: GNUnet 0.17.6 and Science News

Posted in News Roundup at 2:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Linux Made Simple ☛ Linux Weekly Roundup #201

      Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup.

      We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux releases with the releases of MX Linux 21.2.1, ExTiX Linux 22.9, and Debian Edu 11.5.0.

      Application wise, Audacity 3.2.0 has been released.

    • Server

      • Managing Linux servers from iOS/iPadOS [Ed: Apple's operating systems are not secure; this is bad practice]

        Whilst my main machines all run Apple operating systems, I still love the free, open source operating system - Linux. If you have been following my articles, you’d know that I maintain several Linux servers, both at home (RaspberryOS) and on the cloud (Ubuntu).

      • Data Swamp ☛ Using Arion to use NixOS modules in containers

        NixOS is cool, but it’s super cool because it has modules for many services, so you don’t have to learn how to manage them (except if you want them in production), and you don’t need to update them like a container image.

        But it’s specific to NixOS, while the modules are defined in the nix nixpkgs repository, you can’t use them if you are not using NixOS.

        But there is a trick, it’s called arion and is able to generate containers to leverage NixOS modules power in them, without being on NixOS. You just need to have Nix installed locally.

      • Kubernetes Blog ☛ Kubernetes 1.25: Kubernetes In-Tree to CSI Volume Migration Status Update

        The Kubernetes in-tree storage plugin to Container Storage Interface (CSI) migration infrastructure has already been beta since v1.17. CSI migration was introduced as alpha in Kubernetes v1.14. Since then, SIG Storage and other Kubernetes special interest groups are working to ensure feature stability and compatibility in preparation for CSI Migration feature to go GA.

        SIG Storage is excited to announce that the core CSI Migration feature is generally available in Kubernetes v1.25 release!

        SIG Storage wrote a blog post in v1.23 for CSI Migration status update which discussed the CSI migration status for each storage driver. It has been a while and this article is intended to give a latest status update on each storage driver for their CSI Migration status in Kubernetes v1.25.

      • Sergio Talens-Oliag: Kubernetes Static Content Server

        This post describes how I’ve put together a simple static content server for kubernetes clusters using a Pod with a persistent volume and multiple containers: an sftp server to manage contents, a web server to publish them with optional access control and another one to run scripts which need access to the volume filesystem.

        The sftp server runs using MySecureShell, the web server is nginx and the script runner uses the webhook tool to publish endpoints to call them (the calls will come from other Pods that run backend servers or are executed from Jobs or CronJobs).

    • Videos/Shows

      • Video ☛ Flatpak Is Going To Take Over The Linux Desktop – Invidious

        Over the next couple of years Flatpah has a great chance to shine, there are a lot of confounding variables that are going to continue to make them more compelling for both the user and the developer alike.

      • Tux Digital ☛ 296: Jill’s Treasure Hunt Hits The Bigscreen – Destination Linux – TuxDigital

        This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re digging deep into Jill’s museum of computers to bring you something really special. Then we will be discussing KDE on the big screen! Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

      • The BSD Now Podcast ☛ BSD Now 473: Rusty Kernel Modules

        Writing FreeBSD kernel modules in Rust, Details behind the FreeBSD aio LPE, Linux subsystem for FreeBSD, FreeBSD Journal: Science, Systems, and FreeBSD, NetBSD improves Amiga support, OpenBSD on Scaleway Elastic Metal, and more

      • Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Episode 342 – Programming languages are the new operating system – Open Source Security

        Josh and Kurt talk about programming language ecosystems tracking and publishing security advisory details. We are at a point in the language ecosystems where they are giving us services that have historically been reserved for operating systems.

    • Kernel Space

      • LWN ☛ Kernel prepatch 6.0-rc7 [LWN.net]

        The 6.0-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

      • The Register UK ☛ Linus Torvalds predicts Linux Kernel 6.0 debut next week • The Register [Ed: Simon Sharwood not with a false and hostile headline for a change?]

        Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has offered the community an optimistic prediction that version 6.0 of the project will debut next week.

        Last week Torvalds felt that might not be the case.

        In his September 18 State of the Kernel update, Torvalds announced release candidate six and mentioned that the 2022 Maintainers’ Summit in Dublin had seen a lot of influential penguinistas spend time away from their desks.

        “I am expecting rc7 to be larger than usual due to pull requests having shifted one week later, and in the worst case that might mean that I might feel like we need an extra rc8,” he wrote, adding “but for now I’m going to assume it’s not going to be _that_ noticeable and hope we’ll just keep to the regular schedule.”

        His assumption has proven correct.

    • Applications

      • 9to5Linux ☛ Avidemux 2.8.1 Released with 8-Bit VP9 VDPAU Hardware Decoding, New Filters, and More

        Avidemux 2.8.1 is here nine months after Avidemux 2.8.0 and introduces several new features like a 3-band equalizer, new downmix options, namely stereo headphone and headphone virtual surround, the ability to configure up to 32 audio tracks, and three new filters, namely 3D LUT, Arbitrary Rotate, and Decimate.

        This release also implements custom frame rate change (audio stretch with pitch control), a configurable compressor (DRC), independent channel gain and delay options, channel remap options, and a new option in the “Resize”, “Fit to size”, and “Zoom” filters to force the app to remember the selected resize method.

      • Linux Hint ☛ Best PDF Editors for Linux Mint

        “Have you encountered a file with text or images in it, and you see messed up format when you open it one way or another? This could be unpleasant, especially when you are in a meeting and your document is not formatted correctly, so this is where PDF comes up.

        Portable Documents Format or PDF is one of the most widely used file formats because of the presentation of data you can only see in it. Almost all organizations use it because it lets users easily edit, merge, and split files efficiently.”

        Today we will get through the features of what are the best PDF editors currently available on Linux Mint 21.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Make Use Of ☛ 10 Linux Command-Line Operators and What They Do

        Command-chaining operators are special characters used to write miniature shell scripts in the command line. They are generally used to execute commands in a certain sequence, defined by the placement of operators between the commands. This is incredibly useful in automating tasks.

      • Video ☛ How to install WPS Office 2019 on Linux Mint 21 – Invidious

        In this video, we are looking at how to install WPS Office 2019 on Linux Mint 21.

      • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Audacity 3.2.0 on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to install Audacity 3.2.0 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.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Install and Use Nmap on Linux Mint 21

        As the name defines, the Network map (nmap) is used to manage networks in a system. It is an open-source utility used by network administrators to monitor network tasks.

        The first release of Nmap was introduced in September 1997 by Gordon Lyon. Network administrators find this network scanning tool useful as it determines the network and handles it with security. Some of the features of Nmap are port scanning, exploit vulnerabilities in the network, version detection, host discovery, network inventory, handling services update scheduling and many more. Moreover, it is free, reliable, secure, flexible, and portable and has a well-documented man page for user’s help.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Find Kernel Version on Linux Mint 21

        There might be several reasons that users should know about kernel details as it is the vital component of the operating system. It provides interface between system hardware and processes and gives them access to other major components like CPU, networking, and I/O units.

        While working with the operations, the user must have knowledge about the kernel system. One of the main reasons why we should have details is when installing the application to the system, it is necessary to know if our kernel system can support the application or not. Or if there’s some issue in the hardware, then you might be interested to get kernel’s details. You would have known better after getting the kernel version if it needs to be upgraded or not.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Find Raspberry Pi on Network?

        For recognizing a device over a network there are multiple ways and the two most popular ones are by either searching the name of the device or by searching the IP address of that respective device Since Raspberry Pi is a computer it also has an IP address and a preset device name that can be changed.

        To find Raspberry Pi from a list of devices connected to the same network one must know the IP address and the name of the Raspberry Pi and there are multiple ways to access the list of devices connected to a certain network. If you are looking for ways to find the Raspberry Pi from the list of devices connected to any network, then read this guide.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Create Multiboot SD Card Raspberry Pi

        A multiboot feature in a system is an efficient way to use multiple operating systems on a single device. This feature can easily be used on a laptop or PC; however, on a Raspberry Pi device, it’s considered to be a tough task because the device doesn’t directly enable the multiboot option.

        Since Raspberry Pi uses an SD card as its primary storage for installing different operating systems, the users are looking for a solution to use multiple operating systems on a single Raspberry Pi SD card.

        This guide will show you how you can create a multiboot SD card on Raspberry Pi and easily use multiple operating systems simultaneously.

      • Linux Hint ☛ Does Arduino Have Internal Hardware Clock

        Arduino is a microcontroller-based platform designed for executing different instructions according to project requirements. To synchronize all this operation a clock is used with microcontrollers. Clock is like the heartbeat of Arduino boards required to generate clock pulses. These clock pulses synchronize all the internal and hardware operations. Microcontrollers are reliant upon clock. The clock determines how efficient and fast a microcontroller is to execute instructions. Now we will highlight clock sources used inside Arduino boards.

      • DebugPoint ☛ How to Setup Internet in CentOS, RHEL, Rocky Linux Minimal Install

        Setting up the internet or network is super easy in a minimal server install.

        Once you install the minimal install of any server distributions, you will not have any GUI or desktop environment to setup your network or internet. Hence it is essential to know how you can setup internet when you only have access to the terminal. The NetworkManager utility provides necessary tools armed with systemd services to do the job. Here’s how.

      • Linux Handbook ☛ How to Search and Replace (Substitute) Text in Nano Editor?

        Any text editor that you might have used must have had the functionality to search for text and also replace the searched text with something else – often called text substitution.

        And just like any other text editor, GNU nano has the functionality to search for text, and even replace the text you searched for.

      • Linux Hint ☛ Important Things To Do After Installing Linux Mint 21

        “Linux Mint 21 is a free and open-source operating system that is light, user-friendly, and fully packed with your required features since it is community-driven. You can contribute to its development by sharing your ideas. Unlike the Windows system, this requires very much less maintenance. Still, there are certain things that you need to do after installing it, as this will bring out the best it has to offer.”

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

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Avidemux on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering, and encoding tasks, also supports files of various types and codecs including AVI, DVD-compatible MPEG files, MP4, and ASF. If you are looking for an easy-to-use video editor with all the features you need, then Avidemux is the right choice for you.

        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 an Avidemux on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

      • Linux Shell Tips ☛ Useful Linux Terminal Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet

        While working on the Linux command-line environment, there is more to using this OS interface than just keying in and executing various commands with respect to the computing objective you wish to accomplish.

        There are a variety of Linux command line keyboard shortcuts that will help you as a user in mastering command editing, command control, command recall, and other helpful command tweaks.

      • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Install the Latest Mainline Kernel Version on Ubuntu 22.04 – TREND OCEANS

        As you know, the kernel is the core of the operating system. Without a kernel, your favourite Linux distribution is of no use. It is a completely dumb machine that doesn’t know how to perform low-level activities like memory management, process management, disk management, and many other crucial tasks that are necessary for computation.

      • Linux Hint ☛ snmpwalk Command in Linux

        Linux operating system is a free, easy to use, and open-source operating system available for everyone. It directly manages the resources and hardware of the system, like storage, memory, CPU, etc. The Linux operating system creates a connection between hardware and applications on the system that perform several operations. While working with Linux operating systems, you will come across several different types of commands. These commands will help you operate with Linux OS. This article is a quick overview of snmpwalk commands in the Linux operating system. Here, we will guide you on the snmpwalk command and how it works in the Linux operating system. So let us begin!

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to go to Line X in Nano in Linux Mint 21?

        Whenever you are working with unreasonably large files, you might want to navigate from one line to another quite frequently. In that case, it gets quite troublesome to manually scroll the file up or down. Instead of this, there should be a way with which you can directly jump to the desired line. Therefore, today we will share with you two methods of going to the line X in the Nano editor on a Linux Mint 21 system.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Reviews

      • Distro Watch ☛ Review: openSUSE’s MicroOS

        I want to acknowledge the MicroOS documentation does warn that the desktop roles of the distribution are still in development. We shouldn’t expect an entirely polished experience. Still, despite this warning, I was surprised at how poorly the MicroOS system functioned. I could understand some things not working smoothly, such as Discover not adding application launchers to the menu automatically. However, getting pestered with checksum errors (15 or more of them) during the initial install seems excessive. It was all the more frustrating that the installer doesn’t respect the “don’t ask me again” option after it shows the checksum errors.

        The login screen blanks and causes the system to stop responding if we don’t login fast enough, the first window that greets the user upon logging in isn’t a welcome window, but a crash report. There is very little software on the system and the Discover software centre crashes after almost every transaction.

        With all of these things going wrong, the only theoretical benefit appears to be that we can install (and rollback) software updates, making for a more stable rolling release experience. Which is a good idea and I’m not knocking it, but we can already enjoy this with openSUSE Tumbleweed and its automatic Btrfs snapshots without any of the hassles which come from running MicroOS. The Tumbleweed edition will even let us use Zypper and includes more desktop software out of the box.

        MicroOS has some appealing ideas, like snapshots, a read-only root filesystem, and roles we can select at install time. However, it’s a lot less polished than openSUSE’s other editions and, from a practical point of view, doesn’t offer much benefit over the Btrfs snapshots of the other editions.

    • Arch Family

      • [From Arch] Removing python2 from the repositories

        Python 2 went end of life January 2020. Since then Arch has been actively cutting down the number of projects depending on python2 in their repositories, and they have finally been able to drop it from our distribution, making it disappear from Parabola too. If you still have python2 installed on your system consider removing it and any python2 package.

        If you still require the python2 package you can keep it around, but please be aware that there will be no security updates.

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • GNU Projects

      • GNUnet ☛ GNUnet 0.17.6

        This is a bugfix release for gnunet 0.17.5.

    • Programming/Development

      • Guru: Beware of SQL Precompiler Variables – IT Jungle

        In a famous Henny Youngman joke, a patient says, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this,” to which the doctor replies, “Then don’t do that.” Corny jokes aside, I have spent decades trying to identify programming practices that hurt when I do them, and having identified them, cease to do them. A case in point is the misuse of the variables that the SQL precompiler defines in my RPG programs, variables such as SQLCODE, SQLSTATE, and SQLER3.

        “So what,” I hear you ask, “is the problem with these variables? ” Well, they’re global, and global variables are evil. Global variables are sneaky and will change their value when you least expect it. Thanks to global variables, I have spent hours debugging when I’d rather been doing something more enjoyable. I’ve seen programs run for weeks or months or years without problem and suddenly go haywire because of a global variable.

      • Qt ☛ Does WebAssembly Matter for Embedded System Makers?

        WebAssembly is an emerging technology that allows high-performance apps programmed with languages like C++ to run in web browsers. These applications are compiled into binary format and then executed in the browser in a sandboxed environment. This is excellent news for developers that create resource-intensive desktop applications such as image processing or gaming. But how is WebAssembly relevant for embedded device makers?

      • Linux Hint ☛ Data Types in C

        “In most programming languages, we use the declaration method for the variables that we define for our code; likewise, “programming language C” has its declaration method for the defined variables; this declaration is known as a data type. We use data type in C whenever we define a variable in our code. This is done to define what is the type of data that we’ll be using or storing information for in this data. Also, the data type defines the size of the variables in terms of bytes. Every data type has a different memory associated with it, and we can perform the different operations on different data types accordingly. Each data type possesses different ranges of numbers that it can store in it and these ranges also vary differently depending upon the compilers.”

      • Towards Data Science ☛ 3 Reasons Why You Need Low-code Platforms For Data Science Solutions

        Low-code ML applications help address the challenges of model maintenance, time-to-market, and talent shortage

      • Linux Hint ☛ Strncat Function in C

        We use the strncat function for the concatenation of two strings. Concatenation is the concept of appending two strings together. We append one string and can add another string to the end of the string and make them one string using the strncat function. For the string concatenation, we generally use two strings – the first string represents the source string that we want to combine and the other string is the target or destination string where we store the combination of the earlier string as per our requirement. The size of the target is always kept greater than the source string. For example, if we have string 1 with memory size as “4” that has the characters stored in it as “hi” and a second string with size “12” that contains the characters “people”, if we want these strings together, we will use strncat() function. Hence, the combination “hi people“ is stored in the target string that has memory size “12” more as compared to the earlier string1.

      • Paul E. McKenney ☛ Parallel Programming: September 2022 Update – Paul E. McKenney’s Journal — LiveJournal

        The v2022.09.25a release of Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? is now available!

        This version boasts an expanded index and API index, and also adds a number of improvements, perhaps most notably boldface for the most pertinent pages for a given index entry, courtesy of Akira Yokosawa. Akira also further improved the new ebook-friendly PDFs, expanded the list of acronyms, updated the build system to allow different perfbook formats to be built concurrently, adjusted for Ghostscript changes, carried out per-Linux-version updates, and did a great deal of formatting and other cleanup.

      • Python

        • Didier Stevens ☛ Update: My Python Templates Version 0.0.8
        • Wrlach ☛ Using Sphinx in a Monorepo

          Just wanted to type up a couple of notes about working with Sphinx (the python documentation generator) inside a monorepo, an issue I’ve been struggling with (off and on) at Voltus since I started. I haven’t seen much written about this topic despite (I suspect) it being a reasonably frequent problem.

          In general, there’s a lot to like about Sphinx: it’s great at handling deeply nested trees of detailed documentation with cross-references inside a version control system. It has local search that works pretty well and some themes (like readthedocs) scale pretty nicely to hundreds of documents. The directives and roles system is pretty flexible and covers most of the common things one might want to express in technical documentation. And if the built-in set of functionality isn’t enough, there’s a wealth of third party extension modules. My only major complaint is that it uses the somewhat obscure restructuredText file format by default, but you can get around that by using the excellent MyST extension.

  • Leftovers

    • Ruben Schade ☛ If you want to understand reality, don’t be pedantic

      This is another reason I no longer read sites like Hacker News. Once you recognise this pattern of pedantry and obtuseness, it’s impossible not to see it in many of the comments, even if the authors aren’t aware they’re doing it.

      [...]

      You also realise how routinely this happens when you’re on the receiving end of it. I can’t tell you the number of times a post of mine appears on a social news site, and I get drive-by comments predicated on baseless assumptions that distort the meaning of what I wrote. My favourite is when people assume I’m American because I write in English. Don’t get me wrong, I have lots of American friends and have loved my US travels, but you can pry my redundant vowels and SI units from my… frustrated hands.

      That’s the ultimate irony here. Attempting to score Internet points in pedantry blinds one to broader reality, and in doing so results in a larger error. It’s much easier to catch and handle that exception early on, rather than have it snowball into a mental stack trace so long you need less(1).

    • Science

      • Mimicking Termites to Generate New Materials | www.caltech.edu

        Inspired by the way termites build their nests, researchers at Caltech have developed a framework to design new materials that mimic the fundamental rules hidden in nature’s growth patterns. The researchers showed that, using these rules, it is possible to create materials designed with specific programmable properties.

      • Stanford engineers develop new wearable device to monitor tumor size

        Engineers at Stanford University have created a small, autonomous device with a stretchable and flexible sensor that can be adhered to the skin to measure the changing size of tumors below. The non-invasive, battery-operated device is sensitive to one-hundredth of a millimeter (10 micrometers) and can beam results to a smartphone app wirelessly in real time with the press of a button.

      • Digital Trends ☛ I pitched my ridiculous startup idea to a robot VC

        It was the pitch for my new startup, a company that promised to deliver one of the world’s most popular resources in the most high-tech way imaginable: an on-demand drone delivery service for bottled water. In my mind I was already picking out my Gulfstream private jet, bumping fists with Apple’s Tim Cook, and staging hostile takeovers of Twitter. I just needed to convince a panel of venture capitalists that I (and they) were onto a good thing.

      • New Scientist ☛ Liquid robot can split into tiny droplets and reform into a blob

        A soft robot made from droplets of a magnetic fluid can break itself up and reconstitute itself later when it encounters obstacles or narrow passages. Researchers say it could be used for targeted drug delivery in the future.

        Xinjian Fan at Soochow University in Taiwan and his colleagues used droplets of a ferrofluid, in this case magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles suspended in oil, to make a soft robot about a centimetre in size. A set of controllable magnets can direct the robot to move or change shape, as needed, by acting on the nanoparticles.

      • ACM ☛ Bring the Laboratory With You

        For decades, laboratory procedures have been a popular target for automation; sequencing the human genome, for instance, would not have been feasible without it. Now the scale of automation is being reduced to individual laboratories on a chip by virtue of micron-level manipulation of fluid droplets (microfluidics)—not for complete genome sequencing (yet), but for the myriad of simpler medical procedures today performed by human technicians in full-sized laboratories worldwide.

        The main contribution of the lab on a chip, so far, has been the development of medical point-of-care devices that can diagnose specific maladies in minutes, rather than requiring the capture of a blood (or other bodily fluid) sample and its transportation to a lab for analysis.

        “Point-of-care diagnostic devices have proved incredibly useful in the last 20 years, in particular delivering much-needed rapid HIV and tuberculosis diagnosis to the developing world [where traditional labs are often not available],” said Maïwenn Kersaudy-Kerh, a professor in Heriot-Watt University’s School of Engineering and Physical Sciences and in Scotland’s Institute of Biological Chemistry, Biophysics, and Bioengineering, as well as an Honorary Lecturer in the Deanery of Biomedical Sciences of Scotland’s University of Edinburgh.

        A microfluidic lab on a chip consists of pipe-like micron-sized channels and reservoirs to hold droplet samples—usually blood or other body fluids—to be processed by mixing them with reagents and other chemicals needed to identify a malady. Such a lab on a chip also requires closely integrated electronics to control the processing steps.

      • Christopher Manning: Linguistics and the Development of NLP

        A conversation with Christopher Manning, Director of the Stanford AI Lab.

      • IEEE ☛ NASA’s DART Mission Aims to Save the World

        A robotic probe has been sent to crash into an asteroid in a test of planetary defense

      • IEEE ☛ We Can Now Train Big Neural Networks on Small Devices

        The gadgets around us are constantly learning about our lives. Smartwatches pick up on our vital signs to track our health. Home speakers listen to our conversations to recognize our voices. Smartphones play grammarian, watching what we write in order to fix our idiosyncratic typos. We appreciate these conveniences, but the information we share with our gadgets isn’t always kept between us and our electronic minders. Machine learning can require heavy hardware, so “edge” devices like phones often send raw data to central servers, which then return trained algorithms. Some people would like that training to happen locally. A new AI training method expands the training capabilities of smaller devices, potentially helping to preserve privacy.

      • A Note on “Industrial Policy”, & [Ed: Nice spin you got there on bailing out companies that stockpile billions in offshore accounts to evade tax]

        The not-quite-surprise passage of the CHIPS Act and the surprise passage of the IRA have brought the idea that the United States should consciously pursue “industrial policy” back to the front burner of politics, and of political economy.

      • China’s Factories Accelerate Robotics Push as Workforce Shrinks

        China installed almost as many robots in its factories last year as the rest of the world, accelerating a rush to automate and consolidate its manufacturing dominance even as its working-age population shrinks.

      • AAAS ☛ NIH’s BRAIN Initiative puts $500 million into creating most detailed ever human brain atlas

        Neuroscientists will build on census of mouse brain as massive program moves into new phase

        • “Researchers from the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology Develop a New Method for Denoising Images” https://www.gist.ac.kr/en/html/sub06/060208.html?mode=V&no=206590

      • Researchers from the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology Develop a New Method for Denoising Images
      • Electric planes take off

        The potential for short-haul electric flight is energizing aviation’s newest startups.

      • ACM ☛ Applied AI Teaches Handwriting

        Researchers from Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and pen-maker Stabilo are collaborating on an artificial intelligence (AI)-based pen to teach schoolchildren what is becoming a lost art in an increasingly digital world: handwriting.

        The joint project—Kaligo-based Intelligent Handwriting Teacher (KIHT)—is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

        German children are taught to write by redrawing the shape of letters, which requires them to think about writing, explains Tanja Harbaum, a researcher at KIT who is involved with the project. “We want them to be able to write without having to think about writing. That’s what we as adults do.”

        The eyes of unskilled writers are not able to keep up with writing, and “that’s really a problem because if you force a child to redraw shapes, they won’t be able to practice fluent writing at the same time,” according to Harbaum.

      • AAAS ☛ When AI asks dumb questions, it gets smart fast

        If someone showed you a photo of a crocodile and asked whether it was a bird, you might laugh—and then, if you were patient and kind, help them identify the animal. Such real-world, and sometimes dumb, interactions may be key to helping artificial intelligence learn, according to a new study in which the strategy dramatically improved an AI’s accuracy at interpreting novel images. The approach could help AI researchers more quickly design programs that do everything from diagnose disease to direct robots or other devices around homes on their own.

        “It’s supercool work,” says Natasha Jaques, a computer scientist at Google who studies machine learning but who was not involved with the research.

        Many AI systems become smarter by relying on a brute-force method called machine learning: They find patterns in data to, say, figure out what a chair looks like after analyzing thousands of pictures of furniture. But even huge data sets have gaps. Sure, that object in an image is labeled a chair—but what is it made of? And can you sit on it?

      • Mixing Things Up: Optimizing Fluid Mixing with Machine Learning

        Researchers from Japan adopt a reinforcement learning-based approach to study the process of fluid mixing during laminar flow

        Fluid mixing is an important part of several industrial processes and chemical reactions. However, the process often relies on trial-and-error-based experiments instead of mathematical optimization. While turbulent mixing is effective, it cannot always be sustained and can damage the materials involved. To address this issue, researchers from Japan have now proposed an optimization approach to fluid mixing for laminar flows using machine learning, which can be extended to turbulent mixing as well.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

    • Security

      • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Optus has not covered itself in glory in handling of breach

        Optus has informed me that my personal data has been disclosed in its data breach – data which was submitted to the company last year to obtain a SIM in order to test the company’s 5G services for a smartphone review.

        That account was closed as soon as the review was done and one wonders why Optus is still holding on to the data.

        This is not just my concern; Rachael Falk, chief executive of Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre, says in an op-ed in The Age: “The real issue that Optus will have to stare into is why were they holding such sensitive personal information? So much sensitive data that only had an initial, point-in-time use. This just appears to be data gluttony, and it must stop.”

        Falk makes a further succinct point: “Well-intentioned emails and media releases are one thing, but it is not Optus that is necessarily the ‘victim’. It is the 9 million-plus customers who are the real victims, and may well continue to be for many months or years to come.”

      • Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Holding open source to a higher standard – Open Source Security

        Open source has always been held to a higher standard. It has always surpassed this standard.

        I ran across a story recently about a proposed bill in the US Congress that is meant to “help” open source software. The bill lays out steps CISA should take to help secure open source software. This post isn’t meant to argue if open source needs to be fixed (it doesn’t), but rather let’s consider the standards and expectations open source is held to.

        In the early days of open source, there was an ENORMOUS amount of attention paid to the fact that open source was built by volunteers. It was amateur software, not like the professional companies of Sun, DEC, and Microsoft. The term FUD was used quite a lot by the open source developers to explain what was going on. And even though all the big commercial companies kept changing the reasons open source couldn’t be trusted, open source just kept exceeding every expectation. Now the FUD slingers are either out of business or have embraced open source.

        The events following Log4Shell created whole new industries bent on convincing us open source can’t be trusted.

        [...]

        I don’t expect how open source is judged or measured to change anytime soon. It’s just too easy to blame with one hand, and keep using with the other. Only time will tell if and how governments get involved. I’m sure some ideas will be good and some will be bad. Something about a road paved with good intentions maybe.

        The one thing that gives me the most solace about all of this is how much open source has won. It hasn’t won by a little bit, software ate the world, then open source ate the software. If it uses electricity, it uses open source.

      • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 39

        Another week, another security vulnerability. This one could be a biggie, so pay attention. Security Bulletin: IBM Common Cryptographic Architecture (CCA) is vulnerable to denial of service (CVE-2022-22423), which you can find out more about here.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • CoryDoctorow ☛ How to ditch Facebook without ditching your friends

          Facebook users claim to hate the service, but they keep using it, leading many to describe Facebook as “addictive.” But there’s a simpler explanation: people keep using Facebook though they hate it because they don’t want to lose their connections to the people they love.

        • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Microsoft LinkedIn “experimented” on over 20 million people over five years and may have stopped some of them from getting a job.

          Basically, LinkedIn is there to make Microsoft money (duh) by running skeevy tests on people, who probably didn’t even read the EULA, which might have caused them to miss employment opportunities.

          When Microsoft was reached for comment, they had none.

          What are you going to say when you’ve been outed as ruining someone’s hopes and dreams for career advancement (or even finding a job at all in a bad economy), in the pursuit of a better algorithm to bring in ad money from people who haven’t stopped to consider why this is all “free”?

          As a separate issue, LinkedIn is not doing as well as the obsequious Gates-Funded New York Times would suggest.

          The New York Times runs hundreds of Gates propaganda articles and even softens what they do when their LinkedIn division screws people who have accounts there.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – US senators seek review of Chinese chip firm after Apple hints at use

        Two senators from the US Republican Party are seeking a public analysis and review of the Chinese firm Yangtze Memory Technologies Company after Apple said it was thinking of buying NAND memory chips from the firm for use in future iPhones.

        In a statement, Mark Warner (Virginia) and Marco Rubio (Florida) wrote to the director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, seeking a review of alleged risks that YMTC poses to US national security.

        Over the last few years, the US has sought to cut off Chinese companies’ access to advanced semiconductors. One of the firms affected has been Huawei Technologies, once a leader in the smartphone industry in China, but now reduced to a bit player.

        The letter was also signed by Democrat majority leader in the House, Chuck Schumer of New York, and Senator John Cormyn, a Republican from Texas.

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ The Twisted Logic of Republican migrant busing to ‘Sanctuary States’. | BaronHK’s Rants

        In the news lately, is a lot of stuff about Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, and Governor Greg Abbott of Texas sending migrants to blue states, which spent the Trump years passing “Sanctuary laws”.

        These states and cities (Illinois has one, and so does Chicago, which goes even further.) spent years passing “Sanctuary Laws“, which shield Immigrants from ICE by way of State non-cooperation.

        However, in most of these cases, what’s happened is that the Immigrant in question only came to the attention of the State government because they were arrested for committing a crime, against another Immigrant or even a United States Citizen or Lawful Permanent Resident.

        In other words, it protects the bad ones more than it does the good ones.

        Most countries don’t take kindly to illegal immigration even when it’s relatively benign (migrant farm workers or something), but I presume that they take less kindly to illegal immigrants coming to their country to rape and murder their own citizens, drive drunk, and raise hell, but when Democrats in the United States pass laws to shield these people so that ICE can’t remove them, what happens is they all go to the place they know allows that and crime surges.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Politics

      • C.S. Lewis on Anarchy

        I am an anarchist because I believe in the depravity of the elite (Hello, NSA! Welcome to my Gemlog. :3). I think a lot of people are proponents of democracy for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that it misses the point. Whenever their weakness is exposed, elites who prefer tyranny profit from the exposure. I find that this is true by looking no further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a henroost, much less a nation. Nor do most people: those who believe in advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The reason for anarchism stems from this very issue: humankind cannot be trusted with power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. But I reject slavery because I see no humans fit to be masters.

        The above is modified from the first paragraph of C.S. Lewis’s article called “Equality”. In the original, C.S. Lewis argues that he believes democracy is preferable to hierarchical arrangements of society because humans are inherently evil.

    • Technical

      • When online friendship transcends social media

        Last week, I was on the other side of the world, hanging out with friends I met online. It was nerve-wracking for all sorts of reasons — social anxiety, travel, etc. — but everything went swimmingly and now that I’m home, I’m not showing signs of having picked up any illness.

        Not a moment has passed, since getting off the plane, where I haven’t felt this deep sense of gratitude for what the last month or so has been like.

        I do not miss being on Twitter — the platform where our friendships developed — but I am presently quite cognisant of the practical purposes it serves. My line of work makes good use of that platform, but trying to capitalise on it feels like selling my soul. Even just keeping taggable account on there feels a bit dirty.

      • Devlog: The Yoyo of Zonk

        The last two weeks, I worked with kdx to bring ya some hot and spicy new multiplayer game, “The yoyo of Zonk”. It takes the core concepts of the pretty popular “Player vs Game” and try to put it in a zelda-like topdown dungeon.

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

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