GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Choose the Best Laptop to Install Linux

    It’s never been easier to find a laptop to install Linux. But given the choices available, it’s indeed overwhelming to choose the best of the lot.

    The choice of laptop operating systems can no longer be boiled down to Windows vs. macOS. Linux is growing into a major player in the laptop space and today, there are more laptops than ever that work with Linux. There are even companies that make laptops designed to be Linux exclusives.

    With this new wealth of options, how can you choose the best laptop to install Linux?

• Server

  • The Next Platform ☛ Nutanix For Sale, And The Only Buyer Might Be A Big Cloud [Ed: Clown computing is a bubble and companies go out of business, looking to be salvaged by anyone gullible enough or ambitious enough]

    The word on the street – and that would be Wall Street we are talking about – is that Nutanix is “exploring a sale after receiving takeover interest,” and that private equity and industry players are either poking around or being shopped the idea.

  • Container Journal ☛ Kubecost Adds SaaS Edition to Control Kubernetes Costs – Container Journal

    Kubecost today announced limited availability of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of a Kubernetes cost management platform. The Kubecost Cloud platform is based on the open source OpenCost software originally developed by parent company Stackwatch.

  • Container Journal ☛ Why Kubernetes Would Benefit From a PaaS [Ed: Hype benefiting from buzzwords]

    A recent article explains that Kubernetes is now within reach for SMB adoption, and it got us thinking: What are the primary barriers to adoption for Kubernetes? Given the extraordinary popularity of the project, what are the issues that arise when a software engineering team looks to start using Kubernetes?

  • If you are using ‘kubectl’, you are probably doing it wrong

  • If you are using ‘kubectl’, you are probably doing it wrong

    Don’t ‘push’ files, commands and/or charts to Kubernetes using the CLI. Instead, automate your operations by having ArgoCD ‘pull’ your desired state, and keep your apps up to date and in sync. ArgoCD is a better way.

• Videos/Shows

  • Video ☛ Will Linux Survive After Linus Torvalds Dies? – Invidious

    What is the bus factor of Linux, as in what happens to the project if the project founder and current leader were to suddenly die. Maybe this was a major concern a few years back but nowadays isn’t as much of a concern.

  • Video ☛ Xubuntu 22.10 overview | elegance and ease of use. – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of Xubuntu 22.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.

  • WordPress ☛ WP Briefing: Episode 41: WordPress 6.1 Sneak Peek with Special Guest Nick Diego

    In the forty-first episode of the WordPress Briefing, peek into the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release with our host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and the release’s Editor Triage Lead, Nick Diego.

  • Video ☛ I wrote an Entire Book with Free and Open-Source Software – Invidious

    LibreOffice, an office suite from the Document Foundation contains all the features you’d expect in an office suite, including (but not limited to) the ability to create text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.

  • Video ☛ Alien: Isolation Challenge Missions 1-3 | Live Stream Highlights – Invidious

    Content Warning! Beware of spooky jump scares and Egee actually screaming! This is quite a bit different from the usual videos I make and if you are used to “chill & relaxed” Egee, this will be a trip for you! I really enjoy it when games freak me out like this. I grew up with the Alien moves (basically just 1 & 2 tbh) and I played a lot of early Alien games so Mr Xenomorph, however terrifying he is, is actually rather nostalgic and soothing to me 🤪 So, don’t worry about me when I scream and freak out – I’m having a great time. I promise!

• Kernel Space

  • LWN ☛ Linux 5.10.149

    I'm announcing the release of the 5.10.149 kernel.
    
    
    All users of the 5.10 kernel series must upgrade.
    
    
    The updated 5.10.y git tree can be found at:
            git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.10.y
    and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
    
    https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
    
    thanks,
    
    
    greg k-h
    
    

  • LWN ☛ Linux 5.4.219

  • DebugPoint ☛ Linux Kernel 6.1 RC1 Lands with Initial Rust Support

    Linus Torvalds releases Linux Kernel 6.1 RC1 for everyone to test. And bringing the much-awaited Rust support.

    Following the Linux Kernel 6.0 release, the merge window is now closed for Kernel 6.1. And it’s time to test those new features.

    While releasing, Linus mentioned that this release is fairly small compared to the prior ones. However, some of the major long-pending items eventually merged into this. However, he is not really happy with the late pull requests in the traditional two-weeks merge window.

• Graphics Stack

  • libcamera v0.0.1

    This patch release commences the package release procedures for the
    project.
    
    Initial releases will include a bump to the patch (0.0.x) version
    number, as well as a corresponding increment to the soname.
    

  • VESA Releases DisplayPort 2.1 Specification – VESA – Interface Standards for The Display Industry

    The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA®) announced today that it has released DisplayPort 2.1, the latest version of the DisplayPort specification, which is backward compatible with and supersedes the previous version of DisplayPort (DisplayPort 2.0). VESA has been working closely with member companies to ensure that products supporting DisplayPort 2.0 would actually meet the newer, more demanding DisplayPort 2.1 spec. Due to this effort, all previously certified DisplayPort 2.0 products including UHBR (Ultra-high Bit Rate) capable products – whether GPUs, docking station chips, monitor scalar chips, PHY repeater chips such as re-timers, or DP40/DP80 cables (including both passive and active, and using full-size DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort or USB Type-C connectors) – have already been certified to the stricter DisplayPort 2.1 spec.

  • Simon Ser: Status update, October 2022

    This month I’ve done a lot of cleanup and bugfixing in wlroots, especially in the DRM backend, the Vulkan renderer and screencopy protocol implementation. There are still a few DRM backend bugs which need to be ironed out, but we’re getting there!

• Benchmarks

  • Neowin ☛ Clear Linux extends Linux supremacy over Windows 11 22H2 on AMD Ryzen 7950X – Neowin [Ed: Another Windows-centric site]

    Ever since the original Windows 11,version 21H2, was released last year, we have been following the performance of Microsoft’s new OS and how it compares against its rival Linux. While Windows held the advantage initially, Linux gradually caught up and now generally seems to outperform Windows 11. You can follow the saga in its entirety here.

• Applications

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 10 Free and Open Source Subtitle Editors for Linux in 2022

    What’s the free and open source subtitle editor for Linux? Well, we’ll reveal it to you. A subtitle editor application lets you create and edit video subtitles on your own. Most of those movies and shows come overlaid with primed subtitles. However, some don’t contain any subtitles. For this reason, you need to use a subtitle editor or subtitle software.

    The subtitle editor tool, no doubt, will make adding files to videos much more accessible and enjoyable! But first, let’s find out what the tool actually does.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Apache Guacamole on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Guacamole on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway that supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH and use HTML5 for remote connection. It allows a user to take control of a remote computer or virtual machine via a web browser. The server runs on most Linux distributions and the client runs on any modern web browser.

    This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Apache Guacamole remote desktop application on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

  • Make Tech Easier ☛ How to Check and Control Your CPU Frequency in Ubuntu – Make Tech Easier

    CPU frequency is one of the best indicators of your machine’s overall speed and performance. It determines, along with CPU threads, how fast a program can run its instructions on the silicon die. Your base CPU frequency is also a good indicator of how much power your computer consumes, with a higher base frequency pointing to more electricity consumption.

  • How to Install PostgreSQL 15 on Debian 11 – LinuxTuto

    PostgreSQL also known as Postgres, is a free and open source object-relational database system that runs on Client-Server architecture. It is one of the leading database servers used for production servers. DevOps use it as an alternative to MariaDB.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ Install and Configure Snort 3 Intrusion Detecting System on Ubuntu 22.04

    Snort is an Open Source Intrusion Prevention and Detection System (IDS). In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snort on Ubuntu 22.04.

• Games

  • Godot Engine ☛ Emulating Double Precision on the GPU to Render Large Worlds

    One of the problems with developing games with large game worlds is that objects start to jitter and teleport around as you move away from the world origin. This post is about how we overcame one challenge in particular and what we did.

    The Problem

    By default Godot uses single-precision floating point numbers to store things like object positions. While GDScript typically allows users to do user-space calculations with double precision, those calculations get truncated as soon as they are stored in Godot internal objects (like Vector3’s).

    This has been a problem for users who want to do things like make games that take place in a to-scale solar system. Users quickly hit floating point precision errors and noticed that movement becomes jittery and objects become scattered.

    As an example, take a look at this simple scene, we have a bunch of Godot’s scattered randomly and a person running back and forth across the screen.

  • Release Notes for Open 3D Engine 22.10.0 – Open 3D Engine

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Kdenlive ☛ Kdenlive 22.08.2 released – Kdenlive

      The second maintenance release of the 22.08 series is out with many usability and bug fixes. Some highlights include fixed pasted “ghost” keyframes, effects overlay now properly scale on monitor zoom, loopable image sequence clips are working again and VP8 alpha renders don’t crash anymore. This version also comes with some quality of life improvements like when pasting a clip the cursor moves to the last frame and remembering the effect’s keyframe status. We’ve also added Pixabay videos to the online resources module.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Debian Family

  • LWN ☛ Tails 5.5 released [LWN.net]

    Version 5.5 of the Tor-centered Tails distribution is out. The biggest change appears to be a significant update to the Thunderbird email client.

• Devices/Embedded

  • The Register UK ☛ Juno offering Linux-powered tablet PC • The Register

    Linux kit shifter, Juno, has a new gadget available for pre-order: a $425 x86-64 tablet with a choice of Linux distros on it. In the UK, that’s £449 including VAT.

    The promised device looks decent. It will have a quad-core “Jasper Lake” Celeron N5100, a 1920 x 1200 10.1-inch touchscreen, 8GB of non-upgradable RAM and a choice of SSD capacities: 256GB, 512GB or a terabyte. The CPU runs at a not-too-rapid 1.1GHz, but can turbo-boost up to 2.8GHz. The basic tablet is all you get, the stylus is an optional extra.

  • Linux Magazine ☛ Juno Computers Announces New Tablet Available For Pre-Order – Linux Magazine

    Juno Computers brings to market one of the first commercial Linux tablets that could be consumer-friendly and a viable option for those wanting an open source mobile device.

    The promise of a Linux tablet has been one so many in the community have been holding their breath over. Every so often a company will make a promise, only to fail on the delivery. If Juno Computers has anything to say about it, that all changes with a Debian-based, Mobian Linux/KDE Plasma device.

    The new tablet has a 10.1″, full HD touchscreen that also has an optional stylus pen, which is an extra $22. The new tablet is powered by an Intel Celeron N5100 4 Core CPU that runs at 1.1 GHz and includes a 2.8GHz turbo and 8GB LPDDR4 RAM. Internal storage is 256 GB and is upgradeable to 1TB. The display features a 60HZ refresh rate and an FHD IPS touchscreen at 1920 x1200.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • New Samsung Galaxy phone suddenly sounds like the smart Android buy | T3

  • CNET ☛ Here’s How to Protect Your Data From Invasive Android App Permissions – CNET

  • Business Insider ☛ How to Update the Google Play Store on Android

  • The Sun ☛ Urgent Android privacy warning – four types of app to delete now | The US Sun

  • SamMobile ☛ Why bother with the new Google Pixel when Samsung is the Android king? – SamMobile

  • Android Police ☛ Pixel 6 series receives some shiny Topaz from Paranoid Android

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The Register UK ☛ Google reveals another experimental operating system: KataOS • The Register

  Google, one of very few tech companies willing to experiment with new operating systems, has unveiled KataOS for embedded machine learning devices.

  KataOS was announced along with Sparrow on the Google Open Source blog. KataOS is the operating system design and Sparrow is the reference implementation, as the Weston display server is the reference implementation of Wayland.

  The plan is that KataOS will be “a provably secure platform that’s optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications.” Google is working with Antmicro, which created the seL4-sys crate. Currently the OS is being developed on the Arm64 instruction set, but the plan is to run it on openTitan, which uses RISC-V.

• Programming/Development

  • Dima Kogan: gnuplot output in an FLTK widget

    I make a lot of plots, and the fragmentation of tools in this space really bugs me. People writing Python code mostly use matplotlib, R people use ggplot2. MS people use the internal Excel thing. I’ve seen people use gtkdatabox for GTK widgets, rrdtool for logging, qcustomplot for qt. And so on. This is really unhelpful, and it would benefit everybody if there was a single solid plotting backend with lots of bindings to different languages and tools.

  • WCCF Tech ☛ GCC Compiler Patches Arrive For Intel Meteor Lake – Sierra Forest CPUs

    Intel has published new patches for the GNU Compiler Collection or GCC, that will assist with support for upcoming Meteor Lake and Sierra Forest CPUs.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Rakulang ☛ 2022.42 Grep no Fear – Rakudo Weekly News

      Elizabeth Mattijsen has published an introduction into the Raku Programming Language by means of the grep functionality, called Don’t fear the grepper! (Part 1), the first of hopefully a long series of easy to read, yet in-depth exposition of Raku features. And they also published the second instalment of the It’s time to rak! series, about the rak utility.

Leftovers

• Security

  • Linux Kernel IPv4 FIB Out-Of-Bounds Read Information Disclosure Vulnerability

  • ZDNet ☛ Linux dodges serious Wi-Fi security exploits | ZDNET

    What appeared to be one simple Linux Wi-Fi networking security problem was soon revealed to be five different nasty Wi-Fi security problems. Fortunately, the patches are on their way.

  • Aviation Analysis ☛ Vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel enable code to be smuggled over WLAN

    Attackers can use tampered WLAN packets to insert malicious code into a vulnerable Linux kernel. This pops up from an email from SUSE employee Marcus Meissner. So Sönke Huster of TU Darmstadt discovered one of the gaps.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Medibank says access to some systems restored after breach [Ed: Microsoft TCO]

    Medibank says access to some systems restored after breach
    The Medibank Group, which announced on Thursday it had suffered a data breach, says it has now restored access to its ahm and international student policy systems.

    In an update, the company said on Friday an investigation into the incident was still going on.

    In its initial announcement, the company said it had isolated some customer-facing systems after it discovered a breach of its systems.

    Medibank chief executive David Koczkar said: “We apologise for the disruption this incident caused some of our customers yesterday, but we have made good progress with our systems overnight.

    [...]

    Medibank was initially hosted by Telstra, first on Linux and Apache, and later moved to Microsoft’s Internet Information Server.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Hacking Automobile Keyless Entry Systems – Schneier on Security

    The article doesn’t say how the hacking tool got installed into cars. Were there crooked auto mechanics, dealers, or something else?

  • LWN ☛ GnuPG 2.3.8 released [LWN.net]

    Version 2.3.8 of the GNU Privacy Guard is out. It contains a few new features but the real purpose is to fix CVE-2022-3515, an integer overflow vulnerability that can be exploited remotely for code execution via a, for example, malicious S/MIME attachment. Note that the actual vulnerability is in the libksba library, which is normally packaged separately on Linux systems.

  • IPFire Official Blog ☛ blog.ipfire.org – Global PKI considered harmful: A plaidoyer for using DANE

    If you have been following the IT security news, you might have come across these headlines: Earlier this year, Russia creates its own TLS certificate authority to bypass sanctions, entering production in September. On July 6th, digital security giant and root CA operator Entrust informed its customers about having been breached by a ransomware gang. Both news have seen a decent amount of attention, but one thing they tell us in common has received considerable less coverage: That the global PKI ecosystem, which virtually all internet users (have to) trust, is actually not trustworthy at all.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Looking to the next thing

    Ok, so, I’ve basically resolved myself to quit this job and do something else. There’s nothing for me here, and I’m not interested in dealing with my boss anymore.

  • There’s No Such Thing as a Rodent

    This ‘QI’-style factum results from the notion that fish do not all belong to the same genus (or ‘family’, or ‘phylum’, or some other Biological category). If we take one genetic branch of fish as the real fish, then we miss out a lot of animals which everyone calls ‘fish’. But if we broaden our definition and include the other fish, we must include foxes in the same gene-line.

    Simply put, fish split early in the genetic line, and now we can’t name them according to their genetic classification.

  • Morning Photos 2022-10-17 (Fairbanks, AK, US)

• Politics

  • Curatorial thinking, free speech

    In a prosperous municipality nearby they have concentrated all art galleries in a small area. While visiting one of the galleries, I overheard a conversation while looking at the paintings, clearly designed for the bourgoise home, some of them reminiscent of Utrillo’s street scences, but with all his quaint charm replaced by fluorescent colours with a hint of street art and abstract expressionism, and another painter with sombre figures in soft grays with a dash of sepia for coloristic highlight, all done in delicate textures and washy semi-transparent layers. A culinary experience, as Adorno would say; something that doesn’t offend the eye as it hangs over the sofa.

• Technical

  • Programming

    • define-er-syntax*

      An explicitly implicitly renaming macro transformer.

      Ok, so this is define-er-syntax*. Pretty much the closest thing we’ve got to the Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp style defmacros.

GNU/Linux

• 9to5Linux ☛ 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: October 16th, 2022

  This week was all about software releases as VirtualBox 7.0 arrived with major changes, followed by the KDE Plasma 5.26 desktop environment, which is already hitting the stable repositories of popular distributions, as well as Ardour 7.0 digital audio workstation with its awesome new features for music production.

  On top of that, we got new maintenance updates of the KDE Gear 22.08 software suite and LibreOffice 7.4 office suite, a new feature-branch NVIDIA graphics driver, and new kernel security vulnerabilities for Ubuntu users.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ As The Web Grows Bigger, It Seems Smaller – Invidious

    In this backyard boomer vlog, I want to talk a little bit about how the early world wide web was better than today’s web. It had more variety and diversity when the web was young. Oddly, as it grew, the web became a much smaller place…

  • Video ☛ Cowsay – Invidious

    Cowsay lolcat fortune espeak linux

  • Going Linux #431 · Welcome to Linux! Pt5 – Adding Software to Ubuntu Mate

    Bill likes his new job. We received a lot of feedback from listeners trying Linux for the first time.

  • JupiterMedia ☛ Taming the Beast | LINUX Unplugged 480

    Linus Tech Tips blows it again, and we clean up. Plus, we push System76′s updated Thelio Workstation to the breaking point.

• Kernel Space

  • The Register UK ☛ Linus Torvalds to kernel devs: Grow up and stop pulling all-nighters just before deadline [Ed: The typical malicious clickbait from Simon Sharwood]

    Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for version 6.1 of the project and added an appeal for developers to make his life easier by adding code earlier in the development cycle.

    Work on each new cut of the kernel commences with a two week “merge window” during which developers are encouraged to add whatever it is they want included in the next version.

    In his weekly state of the kernel update Torvalds declared version 6.1 “isn’t actually shaping up to be a particularly large release: we ‘only’ have 11.5k non-merge commits during this merge window, compared to 13.5k last time around.”

    He therefore rated version 6.1 “not exactly tiny, but smaller than the last few releases. At least in number of commits.”

  • Linux 6.0 released, Bootlin contributions – Bootlin’s blog

    Linux 6.0 has been released two weeks ago, and Linux 6.1-rc1 is already out of the door, but we didn’t get the chance to look at the contributions made by Bootlin to the Linux 6.0 release. Before we do that, let’s provide our usual must-read articles on Linux 6.0: the Linux 6.0 merge window part 1 and Linux 6.0 merge window part 2 LWN.net articles and the KernelNewbies.org article.

• Benchmarks

  • LinuxConfig ☛ USB Drive benchmark test on Linux

    If you want to perform a benchmark test on a USB thumb drive or other external USB hard drive, the procedure is quite similar to doing a benchmark test on an ordinary, internal storage device. All that we need to do is measure the read and write speed of the USB drive. In this tutorial, you will see how to benchmark test a USB drive via command line and GUI on a Linux system.

• Applications

  • 12 Linux Basic Health Check Commands for Monitoring Performance [Ed: This is a spammy embedded link in there, but the post seems OK other than that]

    The significant feature of Linux — is its transparency and openness to change. But users pay for it with the standardization of the command process.

    Windows and macOS systems have a graphical interface. But the Linux system is only partly graphic. You will have some apps with beginner-friendly interfaces, but you should apply for some orders in the terminal. It is the price that Linux users pay for the ability to customize the system.

  • Best Privacy – Security Tools For Linux – Latest Hacking News | Cyber Security News, Hacking Tools and Penetration Testing Courses

    There are many benefits provided by the internet, however, it also introduced new risks and challenges. The threat to our privacy is one of the most common and notable risks users have to face online. Many users have the belief that their browser, search engine, and antivirus programs are protected, but rarely is enough actually being done. This article will discuss some great security tools that can help protect your privacy online.

  • Linux Links ☛ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Apple Terminal

    
    Apple Terminal provides a command line interface to control the UNIX-based operating system that lurks below macOS. Terminal offers several features that access macOS APIs and features offering access to macOS Help search function to find manual pages and integration with Spotlight.

    Terminal is proprietary software. Let’s explore the best free and open source alternatives.

  • Medevel ☛ Save your personal data on Linux with Pika Backup

    Pika Backup is a lightweight free program that allows you to back up your files to any USB storage medium without worrying about configuration or complex commands.

    It is a straightforward app with a simple interface. Just, Plugin your USB drive and let the Pika do the rest for you.

    Pika is compatible with Gnome desktop, but it works also with KDE and XFCE.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Best File manager for Linux

    The file manager (or file explorer) is the application that displays directories and files on a Linux system. Most people think of GUI applications when it comes to file managers, but there are also some command line utilities that can be used as file managers. Finding the right file manager for your needs is important, since they all come with different features and options.

    In this tutorial, we have compiled a list of our favorite file managers for Linux. Check out our picks below to find one that suits you best.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Best Terminal for Linux

    Using the terminal is one of the main draws that attracts users to a Linux system. It is very powerful and allows you to do many tasks just from your keyboard. But you can get even more use out of the command line if you have a good terminal to go along with it. Some terminals make things easier or allow you to split windows to increase your workflow efficiency, etc.

    In this tutorial, we have compiled a list of our favorite terminals for Linux. Check out our picks below to find one that suits you best for your command line and administrative needs.

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: Ora2Pg 23.2 released

    Version 23.2 of Ora2Pg, a free and reliable tool used to migrate an Oracle database to PostgreSQL, has been officially released and is publicly available for download.

    This release fix several issues reported since past height months and adds some new features and improvements.

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: Announcing the release of AgensGraph 2.13

    AgensGraph is a new-generation multi-model graph database for the modern complex data environment. AgensGraph is a multi-model database, which simultaneously supports the relational and graph data model and enables developers to integrate the legacy relational data model and the flexible graph data model in one database. AgensGraph supports ANSI-SQL and openCypher. SQL and Cypher queries can be integrated into a single query in AgensGraph.

    AgensGraph is based on the powerful PostgreSQL RDBMS and is very robust, fully featured, and ready for enterprise use. AgensGraph is optimized for handling complex connected graph data and provides plenty of robust database features essential to the enterprise database environment including ACID transactions, multi-version concurrency control, stored procedure, triggers, constraints, sophisticated monitoring, and a flexible data model (JSON). Moreover, AgensGraph leverages the rich ecosystems of PostgreSQL and can be extended with many outstanding external modules, like PostGIS.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Best System Monitoring tool for Linux

    System monitoring tools allow users and administrators to keep tabs on CPU and memory usage, storage availability, hardware temperatures, network activity, and other helpful information on a Linux system. Your system will not always let you know what it is doing, so keeping an eye on this information can give you insight into what it is doing behind the scenes. In this tutorial, we have compiled a list of our favorite system monitoring tools for Linux. Check out our picks below to find one that suits you best.

  • Medevel ☛ Setzer: A New Open-source LaTeX editor

    Setzer is a free Libre open-source software for LaTeX document editor for GNU/ Linux desktops.

    It is a lightweight app for Linux system that is compatible with Gnome deskop.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to update Rocky Linux automatically using dnf-automatic

    dnf-automatic is a tool that helps to manage automatic unattended updates of Rocky Linux system.

    This tool is a help for many sysadmins to automate updates on a server.

    So, it is worth knowing this tool.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install VirtualBox 7.0 on Linux Mint 21 LTS

    VirtualBox 7.0 is the latest free and open-source (FOSS) hypervisor version. Among the most notable changes in VirtualBox 7.0 is the remote control of VMs hosted in the cloud and support for encrypted VMs. The GUI has been streamlined, with better integration of help and error messages and the ability to easily tweak settings such as the number of CPU cores during VM creation. The new version also includes several other features, such as support for high-resolution displays, support for multiple monitors, and the ability to print from a VM. Overall, the new version of VirtualBox is a significant improvement over previous versions and should be welcomed by users. VirtualBox has long been one of the most popular FOSS hypervisors thanks to its ease of use and wide range of features.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install VirtualBox 7.0 on Linux Mint 21 LTS release by importing the official virtual box repository and installing the most up-to-date version using the command line terminal. The extra benefit for users using this method is that you will receive them instantly from the VirtualBox repository when updates drop.

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

    Pluma is a free, open-source great option for those who need to edit multiple text files simultaneously. The Unicode UTF-8 encoding makes it easy to work with diverse languages, and the simple user interface makes it easy to find the needed features. Pluma supports standard features, such as Highlands’ advanced word processing tools. Pluma is an excellent choice if you’re looking for an easy-to-use, general-purpose editor. Thanks to its support for multiple languages and standard features, Pluma is a versatile tool that can meet the needs of many users.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install Pluma Text Editor on Linux Mint 21 release series using the command line terminal for an alternative text editor or those familiar with MATE desktop applications.

  • TecMint ☛ 20 Linux egrep Command Examples

    In this guide, we will discuss some of the practical examples of the egrep command. After following this guide, users will be able to perform text searching more efficiently in Linux.

    Have you ever been frustrated because you are unable to find the required information in the logs? Extracting the required information from a large data set is a complex and time-consuming task.

    Things become really challenging if the operating system doesn’t provide the right tools and here comes Linux to rescue you. Linux provides various text-filtering utilities such as awk, sed, cut, etc.

    However, egrep is one of the most powerful and commonly used utilities for text processing in Linux, and we going to discuss some examples of the egrep command.

  • Linux Handbook ☛ Delete Symbolic Links in Linux [2 Methods]

    The symbolic link, also known as soft link or symlink, in Linux is a special type of file that works as a shortcut to another file.

    You can create a soft link using the ln command. But what about deleting them?

    There is no special command for removing symbolic links in Linux. You can use the rm command which is also used for deleting files and directories.

  • TecMint ☛ How to Install VirtualBox 7 on Debian 11 and Debian 10

    In this article, we will explain how to install VirtualBox 7.0 on Debian 11 and Debian 10 distributions using VirtualBox’s own repository with an apt package manager.

    VirtualBox is a most popular x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization software for organizations as well as home users with an highly feature rich, high performance software solution that is freely available as Open Source product under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

    VirtualBox extends the capabilities of your existing computer (running the host operating system) so that it can run multiple operating systems, inside multiple virtual machines, simultaneously.

  • Citizix ☛ How to install and set up sftp server in Ubuntu 22.04

  • LinuxConfig ☛ How to get and change video metadata in Linux

    Video metadata contains information like author, title, genre, comment, and creation date. This information is embedded in the video file itself, but it not really a common practice for video releases to contain a lot of metadata info. If nothing else, there is usually some copyright information. In this tutorial, you will see how to get and change video metadata on a Linux system. This can be accomplished from both command line and GUI. We will cover both methods below.

  • H2S Media ☛ 3 Ways To Install 0 A.D. game on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux

    Learn the commands to install the 0 A.D game on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux to play a real strategy game on your PC or Laptop.

    The real-time strategy game “0 A.D.” (pronounced “zero ey-dee”) transports you to the year 500 BC. Similar to the model, in the classic game Age of Empires 2, you control a people that you gradually lead to a world power through skillful management and strategic warfare. In “0 A.D.” you play either in a campaign against the AI or against friends in the local network. With the included level editor, you can even make your maps and scenarios.

    0 A.D. is an open-source real-time strategy game. Special emphasis is placed on the historical events of civilizations. Thus, the peoples differ not only in appearance but also in their units, structures, technologies, and special buildings. The latest version currently contains ten different civilizations, such as the Hellenic States, and the Celtic Tribes of the Roman Republic.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ How to create bootable MS windows USB under Linux

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

    The SeaMonkey project was launched in 2005 to create a free, open-source Internet suite. It is based on the same source code as the former Mozilla Application Suite, which grew out of Netscape Communicator. SeaMonkey suite includes a browser, email and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and simple HTML editor. All of your Internet needs can be met in one easy-to-use package. The SeaMonkey project is committed to delivering seamless integration of Internet applications, and it is continually evolving to meet the changing needs of its users. If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution for your Internet needs, SeaMonkey is the answer.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install SeaMonkey on Linux Mint 21 LTS desktop with the official Ubuntuzilla Repository APT repository using the command line terminal and instructions on updating and removing the software in the future if required.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Check RPM package dependencies on Rhel/Centos/Rocky

    Files with the .RPM extension are software packages intended for installation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or one of its derivative Linux distributions, such as CentOS, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, or Fedora. When you install software by using an RPM file, your system may need to install dependencies for it to run correctly. This is common behavior for the dnf package manager as well, so you may already be familiar with package dependencies. In this tutorial, we will show you how to check the package dependencies for an RPM file on RHEL and similar distros.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Check DEB package dependencies on Ubuntu / Debian

    A file that has the .DEB file extension is a Debian software package file. They contain software to be installed on Debian Linux or another Debian-based Linux distro such as Ubuntu Linux. When you install software from a DEB file, your system may need to install dependencies for it to run correctly. This is common behavior for apt package manager as well, so you may already be familiar with package dependencies. In this tutorial, we will show you how to check the package dependencies for a DEB file on Debian and Ubuntu via the Linux command line.

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ How To Update Google Chrome Browser on Ubuntu Linux

    Google Chrome is a popular web browser that can be installed on Ubuntu systems. However, updates for the browser are not handled through the browser itself as with Windows and macOS; instead, they are handled through the system’s updater tool. When a new update becomes available, Ubuntu will notify you of this and provide an option to install it.

    Alternatively, you can also update Google Chrome from the command line using the apt tool. Before going into the details, follow our article on how to install google chrome on various Linux distros if you want to install it on your system. So without any further ado, let me describe all the possible ways to update google chrome in your Ubuntu Linux.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Docker Swarm on Rocky Linux

    Docker Swarm is a container orchestration built on top of Docker Engine.

  • FOSS Post ☛ How to Install WebApps on Linux

    WebApps are a special type of applications. They are not fully-fledged programs on the desktop like your image editor or multimedia player, but instead, they are just websites contained in a window.

    Many websites like WhatsApp, Messenger or Office 365 are usually opened by users all the day. They want to access them quickly at anytime, and writing the URL of the website each time or searching for it on Google is a huge waste of time.

    That’s why the idea of WebApps came into life; a standalone window in the applications menu of your system that instantly opens the desired website whenever you just click it. You can leave this window opened all the day if you wish.

    In this quick tutorial, we will see how we can install WebApps easily on Linux without much hassle.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Yocto Linux: Tutorial Basics

    The Yocto Project allows users to create custom Linux distributions for emedded and IoT software. It is an open source project, calloborated on by the Linux foundation and other big names in the tech industry. Its big advantage is that it can work on a variety of architectures including some that are not as mainstream or widespread, like ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, x86, and x86-64.

    In this tutorial, you will learn the basics of how to use Yocto. We will take you through the step by step instructions to get started with creating your own Linux distribution for an embedded system.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install WineHQ on Rocky Linux 9 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WineHQ on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, WineHQ is a program that can be used to run Windows software on Linux. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on the fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop. In general, Wine is a handy tool for anyone who needs or wants to run Windows applications on another platform. Recently, the Wine team proudly announced the stable release of 7.0 and made it available for download in source and binary packages for various distributions.

    This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the WineHQ on Rocky Linux. 9.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Pluma Text Editor on Linux Mint 21 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install the Pluma text editor on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Pluma is a small and lightweight UTF-8 text editor for the MATE environment. It fully utilizes the Unicode UTF-8 encoding for international characters, making it easy to work with diverse languages. Pluma is an excellent choice if you’re looking for an easy-to-use, general-purpose editor.

    This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Pluma text editor on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

  • Red Hat Official ☛ 5 ways to navigate the Linux terminal faster | Enable Sysadmin

    Shortcut keys provide an easier and quicker method of navigating and executing commands on the command line.

• Games

  • Video ☛ That dancing robot is CREEPY. Reacting to your BAD (and great) Steam Deck boot movies. – Invidious

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Nate Graham ☛ On hiring, and fundraising to make it more biggerer – Adventures in Linux and KDE

      This year at Akademy, I took the plunge and decided to run for a seat on the KDE e.V.’s board of directors.

      What is the KDE e.V.? It’s the nonprofit organization that represents the KDE community in legal and financial matters. It has several paid employees who work on KDE stuff, most notably promotion & marketing, project management, and event planning. You can see more at https://ev.kde.org/corporate/staffcontractors.

      By the way, in case you were wondering (as I did at one point), “e.V.” is short for “eingetragener Verein” which is German for “registered association”–basically a type of nonprofit entity.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• It’s FOSS ☛ Ubuntu but rolling but also stable! That’s what Rhino Linux aims to be

  
  Rhino Linux will be the successor of Rolling Rhino Remix. A Linux distro built by http.llamaz that offered a rolling-release unofficial variant of Ubuntu.

  To clarify, the project was never aimed to replace other stable distributions and was purely a passion project made for fun.

  Considering people started using it as a daily driver and expected more from it, the developer has decided to turn this into a serious project.

  Rhino Linux is its next step for it. So, what can you expect?

• New Releases

  • Void Linux ☛ [Void Linux] New Images! (October 2022 Edition)

    We’re pleased to announce that the 20221001 image set has been promoted to current and is now generally available.

    You can find the new images on our downloads page and on our many mirrors.

    Special thanks for this image set goes out to @CameronNemo for work in fixing some of the issues with networking in the installer and @paper42 for various improvements to the live image contents.

    Also in this release, the Raspberry Pi platform images are now condensed into one image per architecture. See here for more details about which image to use for which Raspberry Pi model.

• Fedora Family / Red Hat / IBM

  • Linuxiac ☛ How to Install VS Code on Fedora Linux: A Step-by-Step Guide [Ed: Bad advice. They basically tell you to install proprietary Microsoft spyware and vendor lock-in on a platform that already has many decent code editors which are also Free software and respect privacy.]

  • Red Hat ☛ Get OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka on AWS Marketplace | Red Hat Developer

    Apache Kafka Streams allow you to implement event-driven and event streaming applications in a distributed environment. Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka takes those capabilities to the next level by eliminating the complexity and management involved in implementing and maintaining Kafka instances.

    If you’re using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host your Red Hat OpenShift cluster or Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, you’ll be pleased to know that the AWS Marketplace now offers Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka for AWS (Figure 1).

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ IT leadership: How to defeat burnout

    Over the last few years, people have had to contend with major life stressors – balancing health concerns, childcare challenges, and family issues while working from home – on top of ever-changing work environments and professional responsibilities. The risk of burnout at all levels of the organization remains high and can have a catastrophic impact on team culture.

    Helping teams navigate stress is critical to keep a healthy team environment in which all employees can thrive. At Liberty Mutual, we do this by focusing on three things: we live our values, we empower employees, and we focus our teams on outcomes for our customers over outputs.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Automation: 5 ways it can change lives

    Sometimes technology goes beyond boosting business returns and productivity and directly impacts people’s lives. For me, it was artificial intelligence: My young daughter requires medical devices to stay alive. A few months ago, she started using a new pump that stops delivering insulin when it predicts low blood glucose and delivers more insulin when it predicts high levels (both situations are dangerous and can lead to death).

  • How The Latest TRs Bolster App Dev For IBM i – IT Jungle

    The introduction of the IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, or Merlin, was the big attraction this spring with the launch of IBM i version 7.5 and 7.4 TR6 (it was later made available for IBM i 7.3). The offering, which combines a lightweight VSCode development environment running in a Web browser along with DevOps tooling from ARCAD Software served up via containers running in a Red Hat OpenShift environment, has spurred an immense amount of interest, says IBM’s Alison Butterill, the longtime IBM i product manager.

  • In The IBM i Trenches With: CloudFirst

    There aren’t that many companies that are in the IBM i business and that are publicly traded, but Data Storage Corporation, based in Melville, New York, out on Long Island, is one of them. Just down the road from another big software giant with a legacy history – Computer Associates, which is now part of semiconductor design company Broadcom.

  • Filipe Rosset: Fedora rawhide – fixed bugs 2022/09

  • Fedora Magazine ☛ You’re invited to the Fedora Linux 37 Release Party!

    I am pleased to announce we will celebrate the final release of Fedora Linux 37 with a virtual Release Party. The virtual release parties are a great way to learn more about the latest Fedora Linux release. More importantly, they’re a chance to spend time with the wonderful Fedora community. Please register on Hopin and join us on November 4th and 5th for a short program of informational sessions and social activities. Make sure to save the dates, share the registration, and show up to party with Fedora Friends!

• Debian Family

  • Tails ☛ Tails – Tails 5.5 is out

    Recently, a serious kernel vulnerability has been discovered in the Linux kernel. This is currently exploitable in Tails.

  • Neowin ☛ Tails 5.5 issued but includes worrying Linux kernel bug – Neowin

    The Tails OS team has announced the availability of Tails 5.5. It comes with Tor Browser 11.5.4 which includes bug fixes on several platforms. Unfortunately, the team did warn that a serious kernel vulnerability was recently discovered and that this is currently exploitable in the latest version of Tails – hopefully, fixes should be integrated in time for the next Tails release.

    Interestingly, Tails users may not have to wait too long for Tails 5.6 because the release calendar says that it’s due around October 25th following the availability of Firefox 102.4. While you wait for a fix to the kernel vulnerability, it’d be wise to stay off untrusted Wi-Fi networks.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu bug fix anniversary | Just Jeremy

    I first installed Ubuntu when Ubuntu 6.06 LTS “Dapper Drake” was released. I was brand new to Linux. This was Ubuntu’s first LTS release; the very first release of Ubuntu was only a year and a half before. I was impressed by how usable and useful the system was. It soon became my primary home operating system and I wanted to help make it better.

    On October 15, 2009, I was helping test the release candidates ISOs for the Ubuntu 9.10 release. Specifically, I tested Edubuntu. Edubuntu has since been discontinued but at the time it was an official Ubuntu flavor preloaded with lots of education apps. One of those education apps was Moodle, an e-learning platform.

    When testing Moodle, I found that a default installation would make Moodle impossible to use locally. I figured out how to fix this issue. This was really exciting: I finally found an Ubuntu bug I knew how to fix. I filed the bug report.

    This was very late in the Ubuntu 9.10 release process and Ubuntu was in the Final Freeze state. In Final Freeze, every upload to packages included in the default install need to be individually approved by a member of the Ubuntu Release Team. Also, I didn’t have upload rights to Ubuntu. Jordan Mantha (LaserJock), an Edubuntu maintainer, sponsored my bug fix upload.

  • Ubuntu ☛ Meet us at Kubeflow Summit 2022 | Ubuntu

    Kubeflow summit aims to bring together users, contributors and professionals who benefit from the open-source MLOps platform. After two unusual years, in 2022 the community decided to take a step further and organise two days that will be all about…Kubeflow

    So…where and when do we meet? Either virtually or in person, at AMA Conference Center in San Francisco, the Kubeflow summit takes place between 18-19 October. The Kubeflow community are the organisers. The summit is free of charge but registration is required.

  • LinuxConfig ☛ Full disk Encryption with VeraCrypt on Ubuntu Linux

    VeraCrypt is a cross platform encryption solution. It can create encrypted containers to protect your files, or you can encrypt an entire disk partition on a Linux system. VeraCrypt uses the latest encryption standards, so many users place their trust in it. In this tutorial, you will see the step by step instructions to encrypt an entire disk on Ubuntu Linux.

  • Ubuntu ☛ How desktop and GPU virtualisation power up automotive innovation | Ubuntu

    Autonomous vehicles are all over the media these days. But what of the technologies that make them possible? In a previous blog post, we covered the many fascinating use cases for digital twins and their applications for the development of self-driving cars. But with the race towards autonomy becoming fiercer, the costs to use these new enabling technologies are rising exponentially. Moreover, the need for talent and experts across the world is forcing companies to shift to remote work. You’ve probably heard of virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and vGPUs (virtual GPUs), but why would you need one and how could they help your company?

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ $858 Linux mini PC features NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX 8GB module, 128GB NVMe SSD – CNX Software

    Seeed Studio is now selling the “A203 Mini PC” industrial Linux mini PC based on an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX module with 8GB RAM, and a 128GB SSD loaded with JetPack 5.0.2 (Ubuntu 20.04).

    If the name is familiar it’s because it is based on the Leetop A203 carrier board introduced about a year ago, with HDMI, two USB 3.0 ports, RS232, and other I/Os. The mini PC also offers Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth connectivity, and is designed to operate in the -20°C to 80°C temperature range for embedded, industrial, and functional safety applications.

  • CNX Software ☛ Zynq UltraScale+ SoM with up to 12GB RAM targets LiDAR applications

    
    IWave Systems provide a Linux BSP with Petalinux and Vivado Design Suite 2020.1, as well as a bare-metal BSP with Vivado 2020.1 only. There’s also a hardware development kit named the iW-RainboW-G30D with an SFP+ cage for 10Gbps Ethernet, dual Gigabit Ethernet, a DisplayPort connector, HD BNC connectors for video in and out, a PCIe Gen2 x4 slot, two FMC high-pin count (HPC) connectors, two PMOD connector, and more.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • CNX Software ☛ roboBeats – Interactive music robot doubles as Bluetooth speaker (Sponsored) – CNX Software [Ed: "Sponsored Post". CNX: we published this spam because someone paid us to, not because it is relevant.]

    The company is known for its robots for education such as the myBuddy 280 or MechArm Pi 270 robotic arms based on Raspberry Pi 4 SBC, and while the roboBeats is more like a toy for children and adults alike, the ESP32 wireless microcontroller powering the desktop robot can also be programmed with the Arduino IDE.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Notebook Check ☛ Samsung Galaxy A14 5G with Android 13 out of the box is revealed as on the way thanks to a new leak – NotebookCheck.net News

  • Android Police ☛ Android 13 comes early for adventurous Nothing Phone (1) owners

  • Android Police ☛ T-Mobile commits to Android 13 updates on these phones

  • Tech Times ☛ Android 13 to Update Google Cast SDK, Transfer Media Sessions through Audio Output Switcher | Tech Times

  • Android Police ☛ Android 13 could finally give us a feature first promised in Android 11

  • 9to5Google ☛ Android 12 update rolling out to 4K Chromecast with Google TV

  • Android Police ☛ Google’s 4K Chromecast gets its big Android TV 12 update

  • Geeky Gadgets ☛ Unlockit Android 12, 11 easy Samsung FRP bypass tool – Geeky Gadgets

  • Screen Rant ☛ The Razer Edge Is An Android Tablet With A Gaming Chip

  • Android Headlines ☛ Top 8 Time Management Android Apps For Students To Boost Productivity

  • Computer World ☛ How to choose the best Android phones for business | Computerworld

  • How to Share Apps Between Android Devices

  • CNET ☛ Swapping to Android From an iPhone? Here Are Easy Ways to Transfer Your Data – CNET

  • Giz China ☛ Android code exposure Google Pixel Tablet and foldable phone

  • Make Use Of ☛ What to Do if Android Auto Keeps Disconnecting

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • 9to5Linux ☛ Mozilla Firefox 106 Is Now Available for Download with PDF Annotation, Firefox View

      While it’s still missing the long-anticipated two-finger swipe horizontal gesture for navigating back and forward on a website without having to hold down the Alt key, the Mozilla Firefox 106 release is here to introduce annotation capabilities in the built-in PDF viewer that let you write text, draw, or add signatures to PDF files.

      This feature has been in testing for a while now, but it’s enabled by default in Firefox 106. The PDF annotation capabilities are pretty basic in this release, allowing you to write text or draw. You’ll be able to change the size and color of the text tool, as well as the thickness, opacity, and color of the draw tool.

• Programming/Development

  • Qt ☛ Porting Slate to Qt for WebAssembly

    The 6.4 release makes Qt for WebAssembly a supported platform. In this post we’ll take a look at how to port an existing application to this platform, using the Slate pixel art drawing app as an example. Slate is a Qt Quick-based application which means Qt Quick will be the focus of this blog post, however Qt for WebAssembly supports Qt Widgets as well and a lot should carry over to that module.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Why you should consider Rexx for scripting

    How do you design a programming language to be powerful yet still easy to use? Rexx offers one example. This article describes how Rexx reconciles these two seemingly contradictory goals.

  • Red Hat ☛ How to fix issues caused by reusing Go error variables

    This article discusses issues caused by reusing error variables in Go code. I will begin by illustrating the problem with a fictional company called ACME Corporation and its software engineer Wile E. Then I will present trivial examples to reveal the problem and how to avoid it.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Open source DevOps tools in a platform future | Opensource.com

    The open source roots of DevOps tools are undeniable, even with a prediction that the global DevOps market will reach $17.8 billion by 2026. The changing world of work, security, and compliance concerns, along with venture capital firms, are pushing the market to DevOps platforms where development teams can access a complete end-to-end DevOps toolchain in the cloud.

  • If You Aren’t Automating Testing, You Aren’t Doing DevSecOps – IT Jungle

    If you are going to automate application development and operations like a hyperscaler, it is not as simple as moving code to a Git repository and then you are done. Security is critical to DevOps – so much that people are now calling it DevSecOps to highlight that fact – and testing is the only way of ensuring security.

    So, again, if you aren’t automating your testing, then you are not really doing DevOps in an automated way like the Googles and Facebooks and Amazons of the world, and like you should be able to do because the tools existing for you – even in the IBM i market – do automate all aspects of the application pipeline.

  • Python

    • How to Create and Manipulate SQL Database with Python [Ed: This is a spammy embedded link in there, but the post seems OK other than that]

      Python has become a popular language in recent years. Its flexibility, with its ease of learning and use, makes it very appealing to newbie and professional SQL programmers alike.

      Structured Query Language (SQL) has become a staple in database technology. The most commonly used Relational DataBase Management Systems (RDBMS) today, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft’s SQL Server, and Oracle, all use SQL to manipulate their databases. Do note that although they all use SQL as their base query language, they are not all equal. Queries for a specific database will likely need slight alterations to function in other databases.

Leftovers

• Proprietary

  • The Verge ☛ Microsoft’s out-of-date driver list left Windows PCs open to malware attacks for years

    This gap in coverage left users vulnerable to a certain type of attack called BYOVD, or bring your own vulnerable driver. Drivers are the files your computer’s operating system uses to communicate with external devices and hardware, such as a printer, graphics card, or webcam. Since drivers can access the core of a device’s operating system, or kernel, Microsoft requires that all drivers are digitally signed, proving that they are safe to use. But if an existing, digitally-signed driver has a security hole, hackers can exploit this and gain direct access to Windows.

    We’ve already seen several of these attacks carried out in the wild. In August, hackers installed BlackByte ransomware on a vulnerable driver used for the overclocking utility MSI AfterBurner. Another recent incident involved cybercriminals exploiting a vulnerability in the anti-cheat driver for the game Genshin Impact. North Korean hacking group Lazarus waged a BYOVD attack on an aerospace employee in the Netherlands and a political journalist in Belgium in 2021, but security firm ESET only brought it to light late last month.

  • IT Wire ☛ Microsoft accused of using tax havens, subsidiaries to minimise tax

    Microsoft has been accused of using a huge network of tax havens and subsidiaries to minimise the quantum of tax it pays in Australia, a report from a tax transparency group claims.

    The Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research said in a 36-page report that while Microsoft reported an operating profit of more than 30% to shareholders, the financial reports from its subsidiaries in the UK, Australia and New Zealand among other countries listed profit as being between 3% and 5%.

    The report, which needs to be read in its entirety to understand the scale of these tax-minimisation operations, pointed out that Microsoft’s Irish subsidiaries took in profits from around the world and paid nothing in corporate taxes.

    “The Irish subsidiary Microsoft Round Island One has previously made headlines for its US$315 billion (A$506.4 billion) annual profit – nearly equivalent to three-quarters of Ireland’s GDP – and a corporate tax bill of zero dollars, thanks, in part, to its tax residency in Bermuda,” the report claimed.

• Security

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Optus’ digital ad spend back to normal after breach, says data firm

    Australia’s second biggest telco Singtel Optus dropped its daily digital advertising spend from US$55,000 (A$88.1 million) on 21 September to less than US$5000 on 22 September, the day it announced a massive data breach, a data analytics company says.

    Digital marketing intelligence company Pathmatics said Optus’ decision to reduce its advertising did not come as a surprise as this is the normal response during a crisis.

    Ten days after the breach, the company had yet to re-ignite its advertising efforts. But since 14 October, the digital advertising spend has come back to normal levels.

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Monday

    Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (kernel, linux-hardened, linux-lts, and linux-zen), Debian (python-django), Fedora (apptainer, kernel, python3.6, and vim), Gentoo (assimp, deluge, libvirt, libxml2, openssl, rust, tcpreplay, virglrenderer, and wireshark), Slackware (zlib), SUSE (chromium, python3, qemu, roundcubemail, and seamonkey), and Ubuntu (linux-aws-5.4 and linux-ibm).

  • Help Net Security ☛ CISA releases RedEye open-source analytic tool – Help Net Security

    CISA has released RedEye, an interactive open-source analytic tool to visualize and report Red Team command and control activities.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Criticism of Kelly’s new TV show has nothing to do with age

    It’s easy to blame criticism of one’s performance on different factors: for example age, sexual orientation or one’s sex (male or female).

    That’s what Patricia Karvelas, the host of Radio National Breakfast, has done in an op-ed defending the choice of Fran Kelly — who formerly did what Karvelas is now doing — to host a chat show on Friday night, a time when weary TV viewers are looking for light entertainment.

    It’s telling that the ABC affords its staff platforms to defend their mates; one would think that they have more serious jobs to perform when they are being paid from the public purse.

    Kelly was selected to host the show — called Frankly in the best narcissistic tradition which is part and parcel of the ABC — over a number of other, younger possible hosts.

  • Internet Freedom Foundation ☛ SC issues notice in petition against internet shutdowns

    In 2020, the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) issued several orders slowing down internet speed to 2G from 4G. Subsequently, the Union Territory has frequently been suspending the internet, without complying with directions of the Hon’ble Supreme Court in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, (2020) 3 SCC 637. With legal assistance from IFF, the Private School Association of J&K (Association), an association of over 3800 schools, approached the Supreme Court challenging these orders, highlighting how the frequent suspension of internet services affects the right to education of students. Advocate on Record, Mr. Shadan Farasat appeared on behalf of the Association. On October 17th, 2022, a bench led by Justice Gavai of the Supreme Court heard Mr. Farasat, and directed the Home Department of J&K to provide their response within 4 weeks.

    [...]

    The Association’s petition, which was filed in 2020, but only came up for hearing on October 17, 2022, assails the legality of specific orders issued by the Union Territory of J&K restricting mobile data services to 2G in 18 out of 20 districts of J&K. While those orders which restricted mobile data services to 2G have now been withdrawn, the Petition also assails legality of all subsequent orders that have been passed or maybe passed, without adherence to Anuradha Bhasin guidelines. Although 4G mobile data services are available across J&K, the Executive continues to suspend the internet, regularly violating Supreme Court’s directions in Anuradha Bhasin.

    [...]

    The Court directed the Home Department of J&K to respond within 4 weeks. We are grateful to Advocate on Record, Mr. Shadan Farasant for appearing on behalf of the Association. He was assisted by Vrinda Bhandari, Abhinav Sekhri, Tanmay Singh, Krishnesh Bapat and Dhruv Bhatnagar.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • SpellBinding: ABCEKSO Wordo: DURST

  • I’m Doing Alright

    I’m very much reaping what I’ve sown here and I’m truly grateful that everything is so amicable despite that. It’ll be some hard times ahead but I’m tentatively optimistic about the future for everyone involved.

    I think I’ll be starting to get back into things slowly now. For one thing I’m back at work after have taking Tuesday to Friday off last week.

• Technical

  • /g/ tomo desktop environment

    i’ve been puzzling over this setup for a while now. its been a dream of mine to launch an X session directly into tomo’s desktop shell. NOW YOU CAN! i’m using wmiv as my default shell until tomo shell is ready to take over as a desktop environment.

  • Fixing the 4wd flashing lights issue on an MN Triton

    My car has had the “4wd flashing lights” issue for nearly a year. Though in my case it hasn’t impacted the operation of the car (switching between 2wd and 4wd still works fine), it is mildly annoying to have my dash blinking at me everytime I drive it.

    The 4wd select system is a mix of vacuum tubes, solenoids, actuators and electrical wiring. The cause could be down to any of these systems and here[1] is an excellent guide that steps you through each one.

GNU/Linux

• Linux Made Simple ☛ Linux Weekly Roundup #204

  Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup.

  We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux releases, with Bluestar Linux 6.0.1 and Pisi Linux 2.3.1

• Server

  • Toby Kurien ☛ Simpler Linux self-hosting with tmux and bubblewrap

    Let’s say you want to self-host a Gemini capsule and a weblog. Maybe you’ll use a Raspberry Pi or VPS server. Typically, you’d install (or get a pre-installed) operating system, like Debian/Ubuntu. You might then apt install a webserver like nginx, and pip3 install a Gemini server like JetForce.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ Unix/Linux Command Syntax Convention – Invidious

    The Unix/Linux command syntax found in man pages gives you a quick introduction to the command in question. the syntax convention is simple but is hard to decipher if the command syntax was not formally introduced.

  • Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Josh Bressers: Episode 345 – Cheap hacking devices turn security upside down

    Josh and Kurt talk about ineffective security from the past we still use today. There has been a great deal of progress in the last few decades bringing us amazing products like the Flipper Zero, cameras that can peer inside locks, and even software defined radio. A great deal of security relies on people not having easy access to these cheap devices. What does this mean for the future of security?

  • GNU World Order (Audio Show) ☛ GNU World Order 482

  • Video ☛ Hyprland The Greatest Wayland Compositor Ever? – Invidious

    People have been asking me to cover Hyprland for a very long time so it’s about time that I actually do so, and while I could focus on the individual implementation specifics, considering it’s beta software it seems like a better idea to focus on the concepts

• Kernel Space

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 6.1 Release Candidate

    The two-week merge window that opened with the release of Linux kernel 6.0 on October 2nd is now officially closed and it’s time to get an early taste of the next major release, Linux kernel 6.1.

    The first Release Candidate (RC) of Linux kernel 6.1 is out now and ready for testers, early adopters, and bleeding-edge users who want to get a glimpse of what’s about to be included in the final release, which is expected in early or mid-December 2022.

  • Linux 6.1-rc1

    You all know the drill: it's Sunday afternoon, the two weeks of merge
    window are over, and now we're supposed to start calming things down.
    
    This isn't actually shaping up to be a particularly large release: we
    "only" have 11.5k non-merge commits during this merge window, compared
    to 13.5k last time around. So not exactly tiny, but smaller than the
    last few releases. At least in number of commits.
    
    That said, we've got a few core things that have been brewing for a
    long time, most notably the multi-gen LRU VM series, and the initial
    Rust scaffolding (no actual real Rust code in the kernel yet, but the
    infrastructure is there).
    
    And hey, this merge window was full of surprises for other reasons too
    - my main machine was basically out of action for a couple of days
    because it suddenly started showing memory problems, and it took me a
    couple of days to get that sorted out (to a large degree because it
    was unexpected and I started out blaming a kernel bug for the memory
    corruption). All sorted out now, but it caused some frustration.
    
    Talking about frustration, let me just say that after I got my machine
    sorted out and caught up with the merge window, I wass somewhat
    frustrated with various late pull requests. I've mentioned this
    before, but it's _really_ quite annoying to get quite a few pull
    requests in the last few days of the merge window.
    
    Yes, the merge window is two weeks, but that's very much to allow me
    time to look things over, not "two weeks to hurriedly put together a
    branch that you send Linus on Friday of the second week". The whole
    "do an all-nighter to get the paper in the day before the dealine" is
    something that should have gone out the window after highschool. Not
    for kernel development.
    
    The rule is that things that get sent to me should be ready *before*
    the merge window opens, not be made ready during the merge window.
    With some slack for "life happens", of course, but I really get the
    feeling that a few people treat the end of the merge window as a
    deadline, missing the whole "it was supposed to be ready before the
    merge window".
    
    You know who you are.
    
    Anyway, it's not the first time I've said this, I doubt it will be the
    last. But maybe more people could take it to heart, ok?
    
    Enough kvetching, let's get this party calmed down. The merge window
    may not be the biggest ever, but it's certainly big enough that the
    shortlog is much too big to post, and below is just my usual merge
    log. For all the gory details, please refer to the git tree.
    
    Please get the testing started,
    
                       Linus
    

  • LWN ☛ Kernel prepatch 6.1-rc1 [LWN.net]

    Linus has released 6.1-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle.

• Graphics Stack

  • Aigars Mahinovs ☛ Ryzen 7000 amdgpu boot hang

    So what you need is to get a new set of Linux Kernel Firmware blobs and upack that in /lib/firmware. The tarball from 2022-10-12 worked well for me.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Real Linux User ☛ How to verify your Linux Mint ISO image file – Linux Mint 21 edition – Real Linux User

    Being conscious about your actions and decisions that could make your Linux environment more secure, is becoming more and more important. When you download a Linux ISO image file to create a bootable live environment to test a Linux distribution and eventually install it on your production machine, it is important to be sure about its authenticity and integrity. In this article, as part of my Linux Mint tutorial series, I want to explain how to verify the integrity and authenticity of your Linux Mint ISO image file as a good start for your secure Linux Mint journey.

  • updlockfiles: Manage lockfiles in PKGBUILDs for upstreams that don’t ship them – vulns.xyz

    I’ve released a new tool to manage lockfiles for Arch Linux packages that can’t use a lockfile from the official upstream release. It integrates closely with other Arch Linux tooling like updpkgsums that’s already used to pin the content of build inputs in PKGBUILD.

  • Video ☛ How to install Krita on Linux Mint 21 – Invidious

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

  • uni Toronto ☛ How much swap space we’re using across our servers (in October 2022)

    Because our servers have different amounts of swap configured, I’m going to look at both how much swap space has been left free and how much swap space has been used. The simpler number is the amount of remaining (free) swap space. Over the past 30 days, three of our compute servers used all of their swap space, our primary login server ran down to only 13.5 MBytes free, and our test virtualization server got as low as 214 Mbytes free. Everything else always had at least 512 Mbytes free. A potentially more interesting number is the average amount of free swap space over the last 30 days, which will factor out short term spikes in swap space usage. Here, nothing had less than 550 Mbytes of swap free, even the compute servers. Looking at the standard deviation of free swap over time suggests that many of our servers don’t vary much in their swap usage.

  • Remy Van Elst ☛ OpenSSL generate self signed certificate with SAN in one command (subject alternative name)

    This small one liner lets you generate an OpenSSL self signed certificate with both a common name and a Subject Alternative Name (SAN). Most guides online require you to specify a separate config file but this guide uses a bash trick (process substitution) to pass such a config file to OpenSSL via the command line. If you are using OpenSSL 1.1.1 or higher, there now finally is a built in command line option which I’ll also cover.

  • Running Netdata on the Raspberry Pi

    Best of all, Netdata provides all the data it collects in an elegant interface with easy-to-read graphs. It even has support for displaying all of its data in real time.

    You can even use this metric tool to identify what software on your Raspberry Pi is causing high memory usage or consuming too much CPU time.

    Over the following few sections, we will show you how to install and run the latest version of Netdata on your Raspberry Pi.

  • uni Toronto ☛ Two views of CPU utilization (a realization)

    The customary 0% to 100% measure is really a measure of how much of the machine you’re using and how much you have left. If you’re at 75% CPU utilization, you’re using three quarters the machine and have a quarter of it left (more or less). This is a perfectly fine measure and often what you care about, but it’s not the only measure. Another measure is what the Linux ‘top’ command tells you, which is how much CPU you’re using, or to put it another way, how many CPUs you’re using. How much CPU you’re using is generally going to be a better view into how much work is being done by various things, without having to mentally re-scale a 0% to 100% number to account for things like how 10% of a 4-CPU machine is a lot less work being done than 10% of a 112-CPU machine.

  • TecMint ☛ Linux mkdir Command Examples

    In this guide, we will take a look at the mkdir command which is used to create a directory. We will also discuss some of the practical examples of it that will help beginners to operate the Linux system confidently.

    As Linux users, we use files and directories on a regular basis. Files allow us to store important data whereas directories allow us to organize files in a proper way. In addition to this, we often create a hierarchical directory structure to organize the contents in a better way.

  • [Old] Using a Framework will harm the maintenance of your software

    In this article I’m putting together my quotes, thoughts and notes on the idea that Frameworks harm the maintainability of the software you build in that framework. I’m proposing that Frameworks:

    are harming maintainability, but not deliberate.

    have different goals than you or your team.

    make trade-offs that harm maintainability of the projects built in them.

    are designed to take your project hostage.

    offer some their benefits, and don’t harm maintainability, when used in a decoupled fashion.

  • [Old] Bradley Taunt ☛ Setup Jekyll from Scratch on a New Linux System

    Special Note: Credit needs to be given to user Achraf JEDAY for putting these instructions together on Stack Overflow (although his comments were targeting an older version of Ruby). This post is more for my own personal notes than anything else.

    I find myself constantly running into small issues when trying to setup existing Jekyll projects on new Linux systems. I could use something like Docker, but that just seems so beefy and slow to me. So here is a step-by-step way (and foolproof from my own testing) to get Jekyll running smoothly in no time!

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Days of the Devs 2022 Bundle is live, plus a Paradox Interactive DLC build your own bundle

    Humble has two big bundles you might be interested in taking a look at. First is the yearly Days of the Devs Bundle and a Paradox Interactive Bundle you can build yourself.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Play real Game Boy cartridges on Steam Deck / Linux with GB Operator

    GB Operator excites the collector in me, giving you a small device to plug into your PC or Steam Deck, allowing you to play real Game Boy cartridges.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ NVIDIA “unlaunching” the RTX 4080 12GB, apparently 4090 Ti cancelled due to melting

    Two bits of big NVIDIA news for you today one confirmed and one not so confirmed, which concerns a double-cancellation with the RTX 4080 12GB and a 4090 Ti / Titan.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • [Old] Bradley Taunt ☛ The Linux Desktop is Hard to Love

    I might have attacked the overall Linux desktop experience in favor of macOS a little harshly in this post, but it’s a simple reflection of a individual who has used both extensively. I still work with multiple Linux machines daily. I still like using Linux.

    I just don’t love it.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Data Swamp ☛ Boredom land with NixOS

  I like to tinker with systems, push their limits, see how to misuse them and have fun doing unusual setups.

  However, since I mostly switched all my computers to NixOS, there is a statement that repeats again and again in my head: NixOS is boring

• Reviews

  • Distro Watch ☛ Review: ravynOS 0.4.0 and Lion Linux 3.0

    There are all sorts of reasons I will review an open source operating system. Sometimes I’ll encounter a distribution doing something interesting that I want to share. Other times I will write about a Linux distribution just because it is popular and I suspect many people will be affected by its features and bugs. Other times I believe a project is doing something remarkably well, such as being unusually easy to set up or offering improved stability. There are also projects I will explore simply because they have such amazingly lofty goals that there is no realistic expectation they will succeed and I just want to observe the spectacle of the developers’ reach exceeding their grasp. Which brings me to the topic of ravynOS.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • DebugPoint ☛ Lubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu: Top New Features

    Lubuntu is the official flavour of Ubuntu Linux, featuring the super lightweight LXQt desktop. This Ubuntu flavour is popular for its performance in older hardware and, of course, in newer ones. Since there are few LXQt and Ubuntu-based distros out there, it is considered one of the best lightweight distro to choose from.

    Lubuntu 22.10 is based on Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu. Here’s a brief overview of the new features and enhancements of Lubuntu 22.10, which brings the new LXQt desktop with tweaks, enhancements and additional features.

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ Create your own private cellular data network with Ukama (Crowdfunding)

    
    Ukama is an open-source hardware solution enabling users to create their own private 4G LTE cellular data networking with a range of up to 1km, and compatible with the “Citizens Broadband Radio Service” (CBRS) radio band for private networks.

    The hardware above (nodes, amplifier, and TRX module) runs UkamaOS Linux distribution described as a “Cloud-native and micro-services OS for Nodes”. The OS includes a carrier-grade LTE stack (closed binary) for both home and tower nodes, an embedded and distributed 4G/LTE core, and open interfaces via REST APIs.

  • Adafruit ☛ Learn About the US Power Grid, the World’s Largest Machine

    Watch this TedEd lesson by Henry Richardson, directed by Anna Benner, to learn about the US Power Grid and the 7,300+ plants that comprise it and how renewable energy factors in.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Ryzen 9 based miniPC supports quad displays with 8K@60Hzresolution

    This past week, Beelink released the GTR6 mini PC which is built around the powerful Ryzen 6900HX processor from AMD. The GTR6 is enabled with Wi-Fi6, Bluetooth 5.2, one 2.5GbE LAN port and up to 64GB DDR5.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Old VCR ☛ IR-controlling the new air conditioner in the vintage server room

    When sizing replacement A/C units, remember that in the United States manufacturers only reported the ASHRAE BTU cooling capacity until 2017 (this is a nice explanation). The old LG was a 11,000 BTU unit (LP1111WXR) using R-401A which I bought off-the-rack from Home Depot and installed and insulated the duct myself, suitable to cool the volume of a medium-sized bedroom. Or, a medium sized bedroom with a whole bunch of computers in it. Fortunately the heat doesn’t end in my corner of sunny So Cal until around November, so when I went shopping Home Depot still had a selection of portable A/Cs in stock even this “late” in the season. Although the new one I selected (an LG LP0721WSR) says it’s “only” 7,000 BTU, that’s actually using U.S. Department of Energy standards, which is the newer measurement. Convert it back to ASHRAE BTUs and it’s a 12,000 BTU unit per LG’s spec sheet — but full tilt pulls “just” 970W as opposed to the 1200W of the old unit, and is about 75% the size. The difference is not only better technology but the greater efficiency of R-32, requiring 40% less refrigerant for the same cooling and having almost 13% greater cooling capacity. Unlike vintage computers and vintage nerds, vintage air conditioning units just don’t age well. (* A note here: Home Depot and LG are not sponsors. I’m just a customer telling you what I bought.)

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Linux On Mobile ☛ LINMOB.net – Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (41/2022): Plasma 5.26 and SGX 540 reverse engineering

    Also: A Pi Phone, Ox64, better battery life for the Librem 5 and verification on Flathub beta.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Oppo takes next logical step, launches first tablet in Australia

    Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo has taken its first steps into the tablet market, announcing the launch of its Pad Air tablet — yes, the name does ring a bell — in the Australian market on Monday.

    The company said in a statement the device — to be sold for $379 and available for purchase from 27 October — would round out its offerings which include smartphones, wearable and hearable devices.

    It described the tablet as “extremely light”, adding that it “features a gorgeous two-tone metal splicing design and comes equipped with the new ColorOS for Pad, improving the user experience with smart and smooth interactions”.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • TecMint ☛ 32 Most Used Firefox Add-ons to Improve Productivity in Linux

      In this guide, we take a look at the 32 most used Firefox add-ons to enhance your productivity in Linux desktops.

      Despite having lost its market share and popularity over the years to other browsers such as Google Chrome and Safari, Firefox still enjoys significant patronage from users who use it for one reason or another.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Earthly ☛ How to Set up a Postgresql Database Replication for Optimization and High Availability in a Django Application

    Database Replication is an approach where multiple instances of a database are configured for a server, such that data written to one database is replicated and stored in other database instances as well.

    The data is replicated from the Primary database to the Standby or Secondary databases. The standby database could either be a Hot Standby Database or a Warm Standby database depending on whether it accepts connection before the primary database goes down or not.

  • Postgres Full Text Search vs the rest

    One of my favorite Postgres features is Full Text Search (FTS). Search is a common requirement of applications. Well-known search engines like Solr and ElasticSearch are often a first choice, but with Postgres in your stack you’ve got a great chance for Pareto improvement at low complexity cost.

    Many projects function just fine with Postgres Full Text Search and other built-in extensions like trigram search (pg_trgm). GitLab’s blog has a great article on their use of Trigram indices to speed up search.

• Programming/Development

  • Rlang ☛ Simple Linear Regression in R

    To illustrate the idea of simple linear regression, we will use a very straightforward dataset. The average heights and weights of American women will be imported. There are 15 observations in the dataset. You want to determine whether weights and heights are positively connected.

  • Rlang ☛ Difference between R and Python

    The decision between R Vs Python ultimately comes down to:

    1. The goals of your mission are: Statistical evaluation or application

    2. The time you have available

    3. The most popular tool in your business or sector

  • Frederico Bittencourt ☛ Simple lock implementation

    This is a simple sync.Locker implementation in Go for learning purposes. This is not a lock to be used seriously.

  • Bradley Taunt ☛ Avoiding Featurism

    Throughout my career of designing and developing software I have run into this exact issue far too often. The major issue with getting sucked into a black-hole of “featurism” is there is no single person to blame. It probably seems easy to place all the responsibility on PMs or team leaders, but even if they are the ones adding excessive complexity to a given project, it is the role of developers and designers to speak up. It requires a team effort. Therefore, the whole team needs to be on-guard to avoid it.

  • Frederico Bittencourt ☛ Concurrency in Go: shared memory

    I’ve been playing around with some examples to better understand how Go’s memory model behaves on concurrent programs. I’m going to try and explain what I’ve learned regarding operation ordering on multi-core CPUs.

    The example I’m going to show is an extension of the Message Passing example written by Russ Cox in his Hardware Model post. After reading it I wanted to experiment with this behavior and see it for myself. This is the result.

  • Rlang ☛ IF ELSE- ELSE IF Statement in R

    IF ELSE- ELSE IF Statement in R, A developer’s best tool when trying to return output based on a condition is an if-else statement. The syntax in R is: [...]

  • Python

    • James G ☛ Announcing IndieWeb Utils v.0.3.1

      I am excited to announce that IndieWeb Utils is now in v0.3.1. This update is the culmination of months of work from project contributors. Before I get any further, I want to note a special thank you to James, Tantek and Angelo for their collaboration in this project. Their contributions, code reviews, and suggestions have greatly enhanced this library.

    • James G ☛ Announcing getsitemap, a Python library for sitemap URL retrieval

      I have worked on numerous projects that involve finding all of the URLs in the sitemaps associated with a website. For example, one of the first steps the IndieWeb Search crawler takes when it starts crawling a website is to find all of the URLs in all of the sitemaps. Separately, I have written scripts that validate the status codes of all the URLs in a sitemap.

Leftovers

• Xe’s Blog ☛ Site Update: HLS support

  I use YouTube as a video hosting service because it’s largely predictable and it’s the evil I know. I’m starting to try to reduce my dependencies on large centralized systems like YouTube and one of the ways I want to do this is by hosting my own video.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | With No One Answering Phones, How Can We Actually Reach People?

  A few weeks ago, I wrote a column on the imbalance of communications success between callers and callees. The latter have all kinds of ways not to return calls, emails, and other portals of the so-called communications technological revolution.

• Hackaday ☛ Automatic Flag Waver Lets You Show Your Loyalty Without Getting Tired

  A flag is a great tool to show your loyalty to a country, a sports team or even a philosophical movement. But there’s not so much you can actually do with a flag: you can either hang it somewhere, or wave it around to attact others to your cause. [Mellow] found that waving quickly becomes tiresome, and decided to design a machine that automates this task for him.

• Education

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Getting Stuck in the Past

    Why do we miss new technology waves? Two reasons that stop us from continuous learning: [...]

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Rubenerd: Thinking about AMD’s 7000 series CPUs

    Someone bootstrapping a machine with the intent to upgrade will need a much larger power supply and cooling system from the outset, which will price out more people. That sucks.

  • Hackaday ☛ Everything You Wanted To See About Restoring A 1956 Radio

    Ever wanted a good, good look at the insides of a 1950s radio, along with fantastic commentary on the internals and the purpose of various components? Then don’t miss [Adam Wilson]’s repair and restoration of a 1956 Philips 353A, a task made easier by a digitized copy of the service manual. [Adam] provides loads of great pictures, as well as tips on what it takes to bring vintage electronics back to life. What’s not to like?

  • Hackaday ☛ 2022 Cyberdeck Contest: A Wrist-Worn Deck With A Hybrid Interface

    You’d think that now that the 2022 Cyberdeck Contest is wrapped up, we’d stop writing about it. Sorry, but no — there were so many great entries that we just can’t help but keep focusing on them. And this wearable hybrid interface cyberdeck has a look we love so much that we can’t resist spotlighting it.

  • Hackaday ☛ Cutting A Wearable Display In Half Is Harder And Simpler Than It Seems

    In the world of hardware hacking, you sometimes spend a ridiculous amount of time debugging a problem, only to find a simple solution that was right in front of you the whole time. [Zack Freedman] got a good dose of this while building the Optigon V2, a modified Epson Moverio wearable display he uses as a teleprompter in all his videos. He prefers having the teleprompter over his left eye only, but the newer version of the Moverio would shut off both sides if one is disconnected, so [Zack] needed a workaround.

  • Hackaday ☛ Fourteen-Legged Cell Carries Nature’s Tiny Computer

    Computers are, after all, frighteningly complex state machines. Quite of bit of the software we write can be modeled as a state machine, too. A great technological achievement by humans? Turns out, state machines exist in some of nature’s tiniest natural computers, according to biologists studying Euplotes eurystomus, a kind of water-dwelling eukaryote. This single-cell organism uses fourteen protolegs known as cirri that move in a particular gait, in response to certain stimuli.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • TruthOut ☛ DOJ Opens Investigation After Incarcerated Man Dies From Untreated Cancer

• Proprietary

  • Paul Heinlein ☛ AWS Filtering in bash

    I often use the AWS Command Line Interface to create or modify AWS assets, typically in the context of a bash shell script. I’ve found that I frequently need to extract information from one aws operation in order to complete another one.

    What follows are some of what I’ve learned in that filtering operation.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft 365 Message Encryption found to leak structural information in messages

    “Attackers who are able to get their hands on multiple messages can use the leaked ECB info to figure out the encrypted contents,” WithSecure consultant and security researcher Harry Sintonen explained. “More emails make this process easier and more accurate, so it’s something attackers can perform after getting their hands on e-mail archives stolen during a data breach, or by breaking into someone’s email account, e-mail server, or gaining access to backups.”

  • Locus Magazine ☛ Baker & Taylor Ransomware Attack [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Distributor Baker & Taylor spent over two weeks with their operations offline after they were targeted in a ransomware attack around August 20, 2022, crippling their ability to process orders. Their sys­tems were restored in September, with a statement saying, [...]

• Security

  • Sven Hoexter: CentOS 9, stunnel, an openssl memory leak and a VirtualBox crash

    OpenSSL 3.0.1 leaks memory in ssl3_setup_write_buffer(), seems to be fixed in 3.0.5. The issue manifests at least in stunnel and keepalived on CentOS 9. In addition I learned the hard way that running a not so recent VirtualBox version on Debian bullseye let to dh parameter generation crashing in libcrypto in bn_sqr8x_internal().

    A recent rabbit hole I went down. The actual bug in openssl was nailed down and documented by Quentin Armitage on GitHub in keepalived My bugreport with all back and forth in the RedHat Bugzilla is #2128412.

  • Hacker News ☛ Hackers Can Use ‘App Mode’ in Chromium Browsers’ for Stealth Phishing Attacks

    Application Mode is designed to offer native-like experiences in a manner that causes the website to be launched in a separate browser window, while also displaying the website’s favicon and hiding the address bar.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NYOB ☛ Alarming: Court of Justice may severely limit enforcement of European’s privacy rights

      Hardly noticed by the general public, the Advocate General (AG) of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has issued an opinion, aiming to limit one of the last potential avenues for users to enforce their privacy rights under the GDPR. According to the AG, Europeans would hardly get compensations for GDPR violations – although the GDPR explicitly foresees a claim for non-material damages. The final judgment will be issued by the CJEU in the next months.

    • Chat Control [PDF]

      The idea that complex social problems are amenable to cheap technical solutions is the siren song of the software salesman and has lured many a gullible government department on to the rocks. Where ministers buy the idea of a magical software ‘solution’, as the industry likes to call its products, the outcomes are often disappointing and sometimes disastrous81 . And the very idea that we can replace police officers, social workers and teachers by ordering Facebook to watch our children and grandchildren more closely is a non-starter. The kids left Facebook years ago for Instagram; they’re now headed via Snapchat to TikTok, and to an assortment of gaming platforms.

      Finally, universal human rights set the boundaries for state action. Pervasive surveillance, without warrant or suspicion, is contrary to human-rights law, just like torture. Arguments in its favour must be treated with great suspicion and cannot be conceded on utilitarian grounds. Agencies tasked with defending the rules-based international order should defend the basic rights of their own citizens, including the rights of children, rather than seek to undermine them. The rule of law must take precedence over ‘national security’. We must maintain a moral advantage over competing authoritarian states, not just a military and technological advantage. End-to-end encryption must therefore remain available for moral reasons. It must also remain for very good cybersecurity reasons – as Levy and Robinson conceded in their earlier paper82 , and as we discussed in “Bugs in our pockets”83

    • Gannett ☛ Angela Davis reacts to FBI’s Aretha Franklin surveillance: ‘I was shocked’

      A 270-page Franklin dossier was released in September following Freedom of Information Act requests by the Detroit Free Press and other news media outlets after the singer’s 2018 death. It shows that the Detroit music star was very much on the FBI’s radar, largely because of her associations with Davis and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

      The Franklin document, compiled over four decades and heavily redacted in places, includes FBI investigations into matters unrelated to racial-justice pursuits, such as online music-piracy claims and death threats against the singer.

    • NPR ☛ California drivers can now sport digital license plates on their cars

      The company’s so-called RPlate can be equipped with GPS and allows users, including employers, to track a vehicle’s location and mileage.

      That capability has raised eyebrows among privacy advocates, but Reviver has said that it doesn’t share data with the California Department of Motor Vehicles or law enforcement.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Californians can now get a digital license plate for their car. Here’s how

      The digital plates will be able to display different emergency messages, such as if a vehicle is stolen, or if there’s a local Amber Alert. The plates will also have built-in tracking abilities to help locate stolen cars. Wilson said drivers with privacy concerns will be able to disable the feature on their personal vehicles.g

    • The Wall Street Journal ☛ An Uneasy Use for Apple’s AirTags: Tracking a Loved One With Dementia

      He has reviewed numerous tracking apps and devices, though not AirTags. He says that he doesn’t trust such devices and that he wouldn’t use AirTags. Devices can be lost or forgotten, he says, and batteries can run out. (Apple says an AirTag’s battery is good for more than a year.)

      “These tracking technologies give people a false sense of security,” says Mr. Ellenbogen.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Mass Surveillance Is Bad News for Privacy — and Democracy

      The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) paused its use of artificial intelligence and facial recognition software in 2020 after technology from Clearview AI (one of the RCMP’s contractors) was deemed illegal as mass surveillance by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. As Maura Forrest reports for Politico, the RCMP is keen to resume using the technology. They’re also cagey about the technologies they rely upon and the extent to which they plan to use these surveillance systems in the future. That’s bad news for privacy — and democracy.

    • Michael West Media ☛ Scraping the bottom of the barrel in assault on privacy – Michael West

      A MWM investigation revealed that FinTech companies in Australia are scraping and selling users’ sensitive banking data. The problem is more widespread than that, reports Callum Foote.

      Cybercrimes are at record levels. And banks are now no longer automatically repaying customers who have been defrauded. It’s time to read the fine print because there is another way that customers are being screwed over.

      Jill Berry is the CEO and co-founder of Adatree, an Open Banking technology platform founded to remove barriers for companies wanting to share data according to the Consumer Data Right (CDR) regulations set out by the Australian Information Commisioner.

      She says: “In banking, the practice of scraping means giving a third party your login credentials, allowing it to log into your account on your behalf without your knowledge to scrape your data.”

• Defence/Aggression

  • What drives Al-Shabaab in Somalia: foreign forces out, Sharia law in and overthrow the government

    Yet, examining these motivations offers important and actionable insights into the factors that perpetuate the conflict in Somalia or block efforts to resolve it.

  • Medforth ☛ France: First conviction in connection with the murder of Samuel Paty: Girl sentenced to three and a half years imprisonment, of which eighteen months suspended, for “terrorist activities”

    During the investigation, police officers had discovered research on her mobile phone about weapons, shooting and martyrs, reports franceinfo. However, in police custody, the teenager had stated that she condemned the murder of Samuel Paty.

  • Meduza ☛ Mass shooting at a Russian training ground The Russian defense ministry reports 11 dead in a shooting within a military unit in Belgorod. Unofficial sources say the number may be twice as high. — Meduza

    A deadly shooting at a Russian military training ground in the Belgorod region has killed 11 and injured 15, according to official sources. Unconfirmed reports by witnesses say the number of casualties may be as much as twice that. The incident allegedly occurred when Russian officers made derogatory remarks about Allah to volunteers of Tajik origin. Official reports say there were two shooters, both of whom were killed. A witness says a third shooter escaped. The incident occurred against the backdrop of frequent shelling in Belgorod and complaints from soldiers about conditions at the training ground and on the front lines.

  • Meduza ☛ Belarus arrests several people for planning ‘terrorism and sabotage’ on opposition’s orders — Meduza

    On October 16, the Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs announced the arrest of several people who were allegedly preparing “acts of terrorism and sabotage” on instructions from “the opposition in exile” and ByPol.

  • Meduza ☛ Ukrainian military intelligence puts a $100,000 price on blogger Strelkov’s freedom — Meduza

    The Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced that it would pay $100,000 for handing Igor Strelkov (Girkin) over to Ukrainian captivity.

  • Meduza ☛ Multiple casualties reported in latest round of shelling in Belgorod — Meduza

    The Belgorod region was shelled on October 16, setting off its air defense system. RIA Novosti correspondents report 16 explosions.

• Environment

  • Energy

    • Positech Games ☛ Solar Farm update: We finally have planning permission!

      I should probably call this article ‘How I managed to get planning permission granted for a solar farm after initially getting refused’. But I’m sure the algorithm will find it anyway…

      Its been a LONG time since the last update. Since then, we put in an application for planning permission and… got refused. This was pretty devastating, and I was fairly convinced that was the end. I’d close down the company, write off all the money already spent and spend my days grumpily complaining to people how the system was broken. Instead… we now have permission! and here is the epic story

    • NPR ☛ Who is Just Stop Oil, the group that threw soup on Van Gogh’s painting?

      Most of the money for its operations comes from the Climate Emergency Fund, based in Los Angeles, which began with a foundational grant of $500,000 from Getty Oil heiress Aileen Getty. Filmmaker Adam McKay made a $4 million contribution and joined its board of directors last month.

      Since the soup incident on Friday, some critics have pointed out that Just Stop Oil accepts donations in cryptocurrency, which has a reputation for having a devastating impact on the environment.

    • Scheerpost ☛ Are Green Resource Wars Looming?

      Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox examine what the increased interested in lithium batteries will mean for the planet and its people.

    • Didier Stevens ☛ Quickpost: Standby Power Consumption Of An Old Linear Power Supply | Didier Stevens

      So, if you are planning to follow the advice of energy experts here in Europe (and watch out, quite a few are not experts at all, just echo chambers) to reduce your electric energy consumption and save money, consider the following points (their idea is to unplug chargers you don’t use).

    • Hackaday ☛ Ebike Charges In The Sun

      Ebikes are slowly taking the place of many cars, especially for short trips. Most ebikes can take riders at least 16 kilometers (10 miles) without too much effort, at a cost that’s often a single-digit percentage of what the same trip would have been with an internal combustion engine. If you’re interested in dropping the costs of your ebike trips even further, or eliminating it entirely, take a look at this small ebike with integrated solar panels.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Squishin’ accomplished! Elephants smash giant pumpkins

      Some of the world’s largest land animals demolished some of the area’s largest pumpkins this morning during the Oregon Zoo’s 24th annual Squishing of the Squash.

      “We gave our elephant family some extra-large pumpkins to stomp on and chomp on,” said Steve Lefave, who oversees the zoo’s Asian elephant area. “First they destroyed them, then they enjoyed them.”

    • News AU ☛ Oregon Zoo Elephant Family Crushes Giant Pumpkins

      [...] The Oregon Zoo explained that the event is a tradition dating back to 1999, when a local farmer “dropped off a prize-winning 828-pound pumpkin for the elephant family.”

• Finance

  • Common Dreams ☛ Sanders’ Advice to Democrats Running in Midterms: ‘Talk About the Economy’

    The Independent senator from Vermont, who caucuses with the Democrats, echoed his recent opinion piece for The Guardian in an NBC News interview, telling “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd that “what I think is Democrats should talk about the economy.”

  • Scheerpost ☛ The Chris Hedges Report: Dr. Gabor Maté on Trauma, Addiction and Illness Under Capitalism

    The renowned physician and author explores the links between trauma and illness in his new book, “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Activists Across the Country Are Making the Right to Housing a Reality

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Scanning phones to detect child abuse evidence is harmful, ‘magical’ thinking

    Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the UK’s University of Cambridge, argues that these proposed regulations – which, frankly, rely on technical solutions such as device-side message scanning and crime-hunting machine-learning algorithms in place of police, social workers, and teachers – lead to magical thinking and unsound policies.

    In a paper titled Chat Control or Child Protection?, to be distributed via ArXiv, Anderson offers a rebuttal to arguments advanced in July by UK government cyber and intelligence experts Ian Levy, technical director of the UK National Cyber Security Centre, and Crispin Robinson, technical director of cryptanalysis at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’s equivalent to the NSA.

  • BBC ☛ Elon Musk under federal investigation over Twitter deal

    The log referenced drafts of a 13 May email to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – the American regulator which enforces the law against market manipulation.

  • EDRI ☛ Johansson’s address to MEPs shows why the CSA law will fail the children meant to benefit from it

    On 10 October 2022, EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, addresses the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties (LIBE) Committee about the proposed EU Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (2022/0155). The address follows months of criticism from civil liberties groups, data protection authorities and even governments due to the risks it poses to everyone’s privacy, security and free expression online.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘It Is Crucial for Pennsylvania Voters to Elect John Fetterman’: Philadelphia Inquirer

    “An experienced public servant, Fetterman has an abundance of the kind of values and priorities that are needed to move the nation forward.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Warnock Campaign Says Dodging Second Debate Shows Walker ‘Can’t Be Trusted’

    “If Herschel Walker can’t show up for a debate, he can’t be trusted to show up for Georgians in the U.S. Senate.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Biden’s Marijuana Plan Is Good, But More Must Be Done

    Last week, President Joe Biden—a driving force behind the 1994 crime bill which accelerated mass incarceration in America—announced a three-step plan for marijuana reform which began with a pardon for “all current United States citizens and lawful permanent residents who committed the offense of simple possession of marijuana.” The pardon is a welcome development for those invested in dismantling the carceral state. But a closer look at the limits of the plan’s impact reveals that much more still must be done to achieve justice around the issue of marijuana laws.

  • TruthOut ☛ Cannabis Industry Poured Millions Into Legalization Ballot Measures in 4 States

  • Scheerpost ☛ Don’t Expect Mass Prison Releases From Biden’s Marijuana Clemency

    President Biden’s mass pardon may signal a shift in the federal approach to cannabis, but it won’t let anyone out of prison.

  • TruthOut ☛ Ron DeSantis’s Ousting of Elected Official Sets a Dangerous Precedent

  • TruthOut ☛ Building Feminist Jails Ignores a Larger Problem

  • Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: The Non-West Coalesces

    Nations representing more than 80 percent of the global population and a like percentage of global gross domestic product are perfectly capable of seeing the Biden administration’s pointed provocations and do not approve. 

  • Scheerpost ☛ Xi Jinping’s Full Speech From 20th Communist Party Congress

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • [Old] IPT ☛ The New York Times, Linda Sarsour, and Misinformation

      And here’s where two things are true: There apparently was a Russian troll operation that aimed at exacerbating divisions within American society. And Sarsour has long been one of those divisive voices, with an anti-Israel obsession that repeatedly crosses into antisemitism.

    • BBC ☛ Chinese technology poses major risk – GCHQ Chief

      “I think it’s really important from a very early age that we understand that there is no free good here. When we are using these services we are exchanging our data for that and if it’s proportionate and we’re happy with the way that data is safeguarded then that’s great.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • UN censures censors

    As in previous years, the report shows that intimidation and reprisals disproportionally affect certain populations and groups, including representatives of indigenous peoples, minorities or those who work on environment and climate change issues, as well as people who may suffer discrimination based on age, sexual orientation and gender.

    “The risks affecting women victims, as well as women human rights defenders and peace builders, who share testimony and cooperate with the UN remain daunting. We will continue to work to ensure that all can safely engage with the UN,” Brands Kehris stressed, as she presented the report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

    The report, entitled ‘Cooperation with the United Nations, its representatives and mechanisms in the field of human rights’ (A/HRC/51/47), including extensive annexes detailing cases country by country, can be accessed online.

  • Crickey ☛ Meta denies empowering Modi government, but doesn’t shake misinformation fears

    We’ve had a couple more data points over the past week demonstrating the dangers to democracy posed by the seemingly tight interplay between the world’s rising authoritarian leaders, social media and the billionaire oligarchs who seek to control it.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ WeChat users are begging Tencent to give their accounts back after talking about a Beijing protest

    This censorship extends to WeChat, the dominant messaging app with over 1.2 billion global users, the majority of whom live in China. Users soon realized that just posting a picture of the event, even in a private group chat, could cause their accounts to be permanently banned.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Index On Censorship ☛ “Where is the sense of urgency?”

    Similarly, we must point out the unacceptable lack of implementation of the recommendations made by the landmark Public Inquiry into Caruana Galizia’s assassination and the exclusion of structured public consultation, including with our organisations, on proposed legal amendments relating to the safety of journalists and SLAPPs, which in the latter case fail to meet international standards. The process provides a historic opportunity for the Government of Malta to implement its obligations under international and European legal and policy frameworks to create an enabling environment for journalism and to protect journalists.

  • Due process in law a deceitful farce: ask Julian Assange

    Nils Melzer, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture reveals judicial, political, media cultures built to persecute and demonise Assange in his book The Trial of Julian Assange.

    Melzer’s evidence merits massive publicity.

    Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower behind The Pentagon Papers, judges Melzer’s book, “A harrowing account of how official secrecy, corruption and impunity suffocate the truth and poison the rule of law”.

    Direct quotes from Melzer will be recorded in inverted commas.

    This story of cruelty, “Who cares about due process?”, begins in the US.

  • Salon ☛ Fake justice from the puppet-masters: The persecution of Julian Assange

    The engine driving the lynching of Julian is not here on Pennsylvania Avenue. It is in Langley, Virginia, located at a complex we will never be allowed to surround: the Central Intelligence Agency. It is driven by a secretive inner state, one where we do not count in the mad pursuit of empire and ruthless exploitation. Because the machine of this modern leviathan was exposed by Julian and WikiLeaks, the machine demands revenge.

    The United States has undergone a corporate coup-d’état in slow motion. It is no longer a functioning democracy. The real centers of power, in the corporate, military and national security sectors, were humiliated and embarrassed by WikiLeaks. Their war crimes, lies, conspiracies to crush the democratic aspirations of the vulnerable and the poor, and rampant corruption, here and around the globe, were laid bare in troves of leaked documents.

    We cannot fight on behalf of Julian unless we are clear about whom we are fighting against. It is far worse than a corrupt judiciary. The global billionaire class, who have orchestrated a social inequality rivaled by pharaonic Egypt, has internally seized all the levers of power and made us the most spied upon, monitored, watched and photographed population in human history. When the government watches you 24 hours a day, you cannot use the word liberty. This is the relationship between a master and a slave. Julian was long a target, of course, but when WikiLeaks published the documents known as Vault 7, which exposed the hacking tools the CIA uses to monitor our phones, televisions and even cars, he — and journalism itself — was condemned to crucifixion. The object is to shut down any investigations into the inner workings of power that might hold the ruling class accountable for its crimes, eradicate public opinion and replace it with the cant fed to the mob.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Documentary ‘Ithaka’: The fight to free Julian Assange

    WikiLeaks was launched in 2006, and the Australian editor’s platform gained international attention four years later, following the publication of a trove of leaks provided by whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a former US Army intelligence analyst. The classified material, which included videos, suggested that the United States was hiding proof of war crimes committed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  • Evening Standard UK ☛ Julian Assange makes final shortlist for human rights award

    Mr Assange’s wife Stella Assange said: “Julian has been imprisoned for almost four years in Britain’s harshest prison for his important work to end impunity for war crimes and bring about greater accountability by informing the public about the human cost of war.

    “He faces 175 years if he is extradited for his publishing work. Julian’s work embodies the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and he is paying for it with his freedom.

  • Galway Alliance Against War to Screen new film on Julian Assange this evening

    The campaign to free Julian Assange takes on intimate dimensions in this documentary portrait of an elderly man’s fight to save his son.

  • Reuters ☛ Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian [crackers] to sabotage his career

    The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, said Dechert “wrongfully disclosed this dossier first to Mr. Solomon’s employer, the Wall Street Journal, at its Washington DC bureau, and then to other media outlets in an attempt to malign and discredit him.” It said the campaign “effectively caused Mr. Solomon to be blackballed by the journalistic and publishing community.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Eugene V. Debs: Socialism Will Free Workers From Private Tyranny

    The Capitalist system has separated labor from ownership and reduced the workers to a condition of wage slavery. They throng the labor market eager and anxious to find a purchaser who will buy their labor power.

  • PHR ☛ Iran’s Government Must End Brutal Crackdown on Protesters, Respect International Human Rights Law: PHR

    Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) condemns the wanton and excessive force perpetrated by Iran’s security forces against demonstrators amid mass protests across the country. In light of increasing reports of arbitrary arrests, detention, torture, sexual violence, and killings of protestors and human rights defenders in Iran, PHR joins calls for an immediate, independent mechanism to investigate the human rights crisis and advance accountability.

  • IPT ☛ Iranian Dissident: “The least we can do here is to be their voice”

    Now living in New York and hijab-free, Havva has been joining the protests – both on the street and on social media – in support of the women still in Iran who are now fighting for the right to live without hijab. “This is not about politics,” she says. “This is about women. This is our fight.”

    The Investigative Project on Terrorism caught up with her to talk about why, even though she no longer lives under the arm of the regime, this fight matters.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Iran’s women on freedom: ‘This cause won’t die’

    Yet the protests have expanded well beyond the issue of women’s rights, into a more far-reaching contest, also fueled by economic grievances, between the aging religious leaders who rule the Islamic Republic and legions of citizens tired of their strict and intrusive rules, brutally enforced by militia.

    The protests “are a plea and cry for a type of personal autonomy that many of the young generation have come to see as normal … being able to walk in the street without being either harassed, or being arrested,” said Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian American political scientist at Columbia University in New York, who has twice been detained in Iran for lengthy periods.

    Video footage shot in Iran shows continued defiance, violent clashes, and security forces shooting live ammunition to disperse crowds – actions that protesting Iranians contacted for this article say have only hardened their resolve.

  • Amnesty International ☛ Iran: At least 82 Baluchi protesters and bystanders killed in bloody crackdown

    Iranian security forces unlawfully killed at least 66 people, including children, and injured hundreds of others after firing live ammunition, metal pellets and teargas at protesters, bystanders and worshippers during a violent crackdown after Friday prayers on 30 September in Zahedan, Sistan and Baluchistan province, Amnesty International said today. Since then, another 16 people were killed in separate incidents in Zahedan amid an ongoing clampdown on protests. Evidence gathered from activists, victims’ families, eyewitness testimonies, and images and videos of the protests suggest the real death toll from Zahedan is likely to be higher.

  • IPT ☛ Persecuted at Home, Iran’s Christian Converts Finding Europe’s Doors Closed

    But apostasy is a crime in their native Iran, and Christians – even non-converts – are regularly subjected to discrimination and violence. Hassan’s brother-in-law was arrested, tortured, and ultimately died in prison for practicing his new religion. And so in 2018, after Iranian security forces raided their home, seizing their computer, passports, and Bible, Hassan and his family fled, escaping to Germany in the hopes of finding asylum there.

  • ABC ☛ Apple workers in Oklahoma vote to unionize in 2nd labor win

    The union victory follows a vote to unionize an Apple store in Towson, Maryland, in June. That effort was spearheaded by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Maryland, which is preparing to begin formal negotiations.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Revolt at Notorious Facility That Holds Political Prisoners as Iran Protests Enter 5th Week

    Dubai-based Al-Arabiya assembles tweets from Iran about the prisoner uprising at Iran’s maximum-security prison, Evin, which led to the outbreak of a major fire on Saturday. The facility holds political prisoners, including foreigners. Interrogations there have routinely involved torture.

  • TruthOut ☛ As the South Cracks Down on Abortion Access, Tax Dollars Flow to Fake Clinics

  • Counter Punch ☛ What My Grandmother Talked About When She Talked About Whiteness

    My family never talked about his murder in my presence, and, to this day, I have not heard them discuss it since. It is almost as if it never happened. I wonder if our failure to discuss this is a coping mechanism; or, perhaps, an attempt to push the event into the back of our minds. We know there will never be anything resembling justice in the case; maybe it is easier to pretend like it never happened.  I only found out because my great-grandmother, a wizened old black woman whose face spoke of years of enduring the weight of patriarchy and white supremacy, accidently told me the story in the summer of 1992.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Extreme Weather Videographer Faces Copyright Infringement Hurricane

      Billion-dollar entertainment industry companies often complain about widespread copyright infringement. However, some independent creators deal with similar problems on their own. Extreme weather photographer Brandon Clement faces hundreds of thousands of rip-offs on Facebook, YouTube, and elsewhere, leading to billions of misappropriated views.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Whales are fish

    Whales are fish actually (and by “actually” I mean cladistically). And birds are reptiles (dinos specifically).

    And all of the “such and such isn’t a vegetable, it’s a [fruit/berry/leafy green/brassica cultivar/pair of corduroys]” is also wrong since vegetable is only a culinary term, not a cladistic term.

    And Frankenstein (the monster, not his eponymous creator) has been called that, at least since the 1927 play and the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein movie.

    Vegetable is only a culinary term, not a cladistic one, although in the latter realm it is often used as a 1:1 synonym to plants (which would mean that bananas grow on a vegetable and so do acorns).

• Politics

  • Militanta

    Imagine the venerable Adorno, sitting in his office in West Germany’s Frankfurt University (funded by imperialist powers such as the United States) writing a paper praising the thought of Karl Marx. If he wished to truly understand Marxism, he could have very well taken the four-hour train ride to Leipzig instead of writing papers!

    See, there’s a certain type of intellectual who criticizes the powers that be yet lives in a way that is dependent upon them. The tenured professor of philosophy who decries the gatekeeping of knowledge yet publishes her papers in a prestigious journal inaccessible to the public; the engineer who decries the military-industrial complex yet contracts for Lockheed Martin; and so on.