10.30.22
Posted in Hardware, Microsoft at 7:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 0d23ef8bd6577dacbd01f9526968ecc2
Going Back to Basics and Low Power Usage
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: There’s a lot to be said about what the “end of an era” for x86 would mean not only to GNU/Linux but also the hardware scene; to accomplish and complete key tasks we’ve long had sufficient computational power
Now that Microsoft is circling down the drain along with the x86 patent pool (major collapse in sales of hardware an thus a collapse in Windows licensing) it’s worth discussing a more desirable state of affairs. We’ve already peaked in terms of performance and we have far more computing power than tends to be needed, especially on the client side. Dr. Andy Farnell wrote about it last week.
At the moment, hardware is very highly complex, super-proprietary, very energy- or power-hungry, heavily patented, and barely reliable due to workarounds and ‘cheats’ (like Dieselgate for benchmarks). It’s time to consider hardware freedom and go back to basics, or a level of simplicity that makes auditing hardware actually feasible. Someone has noted in IRC that “it’s also fairly straightforward to port (assembly) code from one risc architecture to another” and potability is another thing we stand to benefit from.
The race towards higher speeds by making more and more transistors (and then cores) led to a certain unreliability and a lack of trust in hardware, much of which gets manufactured abroad. For real security and for the feasibility of education we need to at least consider another paradigm. █
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Posted in Protocol at 6:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum b16224508b4703d129d6d42819a77a47
IRC Moving Upwards
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is doing well and isn’t going away, contrary to what people expected and predicted after Freenode’s demise (there are more online users counted right now than before Freenode’s demise)
THE IRC protocol isn’t an entirely static thing. It’s not so arcane and primitive as functionality gets added on top (e.g. IRCv3) and it is backward compatible, so even ancient clients can access the "modern" (at the back end) IRC networks.
One might imagine that IRC is dead or dying, knowing that it goes back to the 1980s. We’re talking about pre-World Wide Web days!
“One might imagine that IRC is dead or dying, knowing that it goes back to the 1980s. We’re talking about pre-World Wide Web days!”In light of this past Friday’s discussion in IRC we’ve decided to look at netsplit.de and compare present usage figures to past figures. Usage in tracked networks appears to have increased lately, and moreover it improved after Freenode’s collapse last year.
Someone has said that “it would take like 10k [users] to restore freenode to its former glory even today” but an asssociate noted: “is that even desirable any more since the outcome of the disaster was an increase in independent IRC networks.”
“So usage levels of IRC haven’t gone down in recent years and have in fact improved lately.”Centralisation of IRC usage in one network with over 100,000 concurrent users was never a healthy thing. IRC isn’t meant to be centralised and it is not designed for that, either.
While recording the video above I noticed that this past Friday as many as 357k users were online across known networks (with decent size) compared to 334k in March this year, 352k in April, 351k in May, 339k in June, and 331k in August. For comparison’s sake, in April 2021 (just before the mess in Freenode) 340k users were counted across networks (some people are in multiple networks, so there may be duplicates) compared to 361k in February 2020 (picked at random). So usage levels of IRC haven’t gone down in recent years and have in fact improved lately. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, GNU/Linux, Security at 6:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 4b7ddbb46fa6769b563d42abfd3763b2
Trusting the FUD Blindly
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) campaigns have begun based on a lack of information rather than actual substance; Dramatisation of this kind merits a debate as the boy keeps crying “wolf!” in vain (because he sees a dog)
OVER the past 5 or so days we’ve included in Daily Links many articles about an upcoming patch for OpenSSL, not “imminently” as this was disclosed almost a week in advance, which is rather unusual (that long a timespan).
We’ve patiently been wanting to do a a response, waiting for insiders who can tell what the bug was or how severe it really was; we scolded some media for calling it "zero day" because as far as we can tell the term is misapplied, maybe even on purpose.
“A lot of the media reports, not privy to any details, trust the panic makers despite having no details. Where’s the fact-checking?”So many speculative, uninformed and uninformative articles have mentioned the magic “FUDword”, Heartbleed, still failing to recognise that it was a bug first discovered by Google and then hyped up by Microsofters to stigmatise Free software (we wrote a lot about this at the time). This was almost a decade ago; after that we saw many logos and sites (for pertinent bugs, not pieces of software) and even the occasional pranks after that, trying to reproduce that hype’s success [sic] because FUD travels fast and some firms wanted to “make a name” for themselves.
People with access to information or special privileges already caution us that the advanced notice is more about hype than substance. A lot of the media reports, not privy to any details, trust the panic makers despite having no details. Where’s the fact-checking?
Seeing how “Heartbleed” FUD was used by Microsoft for years (and "log4j" a year later, even by the anti-Linux Foundation), it seems likely that this is a campaign of drama, not a real security crisis. How many breaches will be caused by this? Time will tell, but probably not many (same as “Heartbleed”, where reality didn’t match the propaganda). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and US and EU sanctions, western companies began a steady withdrawal from Russian markets. Microsoft was no exception, and in June, the company blocked Russian users from downloading the latest versions of Windows – impacting the roughly 95% of computers and laptops that currently run on Windows.
This may not seem like a particularly drastic move to the average Windows user in Russia – who at least in the short term, won’t be hugely impacted by a loss of remote support from Microsoft, or official updates for Windows 10 and 11.
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Here’s the weekly roundup #22.11 for you across the GNU/Linux and tech world.
Welcome to the DebugPoint Weekly roundup #22.11, where you can find all the happenings from this week, mainly from the Linux and open-source space.
In this week, we saw several critical updates from GNOME, Ubuntu and applications. A few releases were also added this week with some BSD updates.
Here’s what happened this week.
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We cover events and user groups that are running in Hungary. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.
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Applications
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We present three best Photoshop alternatives for Linux systems that are free and open-source.
Photoshop is a raster graphics image editor and manipulator developed by Adobe. This decade-old software is a de facto standard for the photographic industry. However, it is a paid product and doesn’t run on Linux. For many users in this industry, Photoshop is still costly and comes with a hefty subscription fee. Since it does not run on Linux, you must use Windows or macOS with additional free operating systems and hardware.
As you can see, to use Photoshop, you end up paying additional fees, which are not even related to Photoshop.
Though nothing technically replaces software, below are some free and open-source apps that come close to Photoshop in terms of its functionality.
Also, all these three apps are available as Flatpak and Snap. So you can install it in any Linux distribution.
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This feature aims to enable the user, when in list-view, to expand non-empty folders (as shown in the image above).
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Instructionals/Technical
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A new GNOME extension allows you to tweak the layout, appearance, and functionality of the new Quick Settings menu in GNOME 43.
I wrote about a similar-ish GNOME extension last week that let you remove buttons from showing up in Quick Settings. The author of that extension is back with a new add-on that can that too plus a whole lot more.
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In this tutorial, we are going to explain the main difference between the curl and wget commands in Linux with examples.
These two commands are very often used by system administrators and other Linux users on daily basis. Curl is a free and open-source utility that offers to transfer data between remote machines. Wget is also a free command line utility that offers transferring files using HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and FTPS. Wget is a simple transfer utility, while curl offers so much more.
In this tutorial we are going to execute the commands on Ubuntu 22.04 but you can choose any Linux distro. Let’s get started!
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This blog post will show you the five most used echo commands in Linux with examples.
The echo command in Linux is a command that outputs the strings passed to its arguments. The echo command is supported on various Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, and other OS like Windows. This command is most used in shell scripts and batch files to output status text to the screen.
In this tutorial, we will use the latest Ubuntu 22.04 OS, but you can choose any Linux distro per your choice. Let’s get started!
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The people who can use the Linux sudo command are members of a small and select club, sometimes called the “sudoers” list. Each member has the same powers as root. So how do you join that club? We’ll walk through adding a person to sudoers as well as editing the sudoers file to limit permissions.
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The lsof command lists down open files and network connections on Linux. Here’s how you can use it to your advantage.
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Spotify has a web player, but if you use a Chromebook and wish you could use a native application to listen to your music, you’re in luck. Spotify is available on Linux, so it will work on your Chromebook. Here’s how to set it set up.
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Container orchestration tools automate container management tasks, such as scheduling, scaling, load balancing, and networking. Orchestrators have become the standard way to run containerized workloads in production. They solve many of the challenges of successful container operation by abstracting low-level concepts and providing solutions for common problems.
Orchestrators allow you to rapidly deploy containers and scale them across multiple physical hosts. They make it easier to build highly available applications with good scalability. While smaller systems can get away with simpler technologies, like Docker, orchestration will usually prove more effective for larger teams dealing with sprawling microservices architectures. It lets you create, distribute, and roll back container deployments with consistency.
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In this post, we will cover 26 useful examples of find command in linux. find command is used to find files and directories and run subsequent actions on them.
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For Ubuntu 22.10 and other Linux with GNOME 43, it’s now easy to add Media Control, Notifications, or Volume Mixer to the top-right corner system status menu (aka Quick Settings), or remove useless buttons.
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On Linux-based operating system the /etc directory is used to hold global configuration files for applications and services. A good set of configurations is really important for a good working system, so being able to keep track of changes and quickly revert them, in case something go wrong, is crucial. Etckeeper helps us achieve this goal keeping configuration files under version control.
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Curl is a free and open source software we can use to exchange data with servers using one of the many supported protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTP, SFTP. Since Curl is a command line tool, we can use it in our scripts, to automatize repetitive tasks, for example. There are many use-cases Curl can cover. In this tutorial, however, we see some of the most common ones.
In this tutorial we see how to use Curl to perform basic GET and POST requests and how to set the header parameters of a request.
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In this tutorial, we will learn how to undo a merge in git.
Have you been in a position where you pushed your code production codebase without realizing you were not working on your branch. This sometimes happens if you don’t have restrictions on the production branch.
Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system designed mostly for developers. If you have developers from all over the world and you want to collaborate on some projects git will come to the rescue.
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MATLAB is a computing and programming language platform used to create and develop algorithms and analyze data. In this article, we will learn how to install MATLAB on Ubuntu 22.04.
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Want to create a bootable Windows USB on Linux? Ventoy is a pretty good option.
But before Ventoy, WoeUSB used to be the go-to tool for this purpose. The original WoeUSB project got discontinued around 2014.
Owing to its popularity, a new developer took the task of bringing the project back from the dead. And hence WoeUSB-ng was born. “ng” here stands for “new generation”. In other words, WoeUSB-ng is the new generation WoeUSB. But since the original tool doesn’t exist anymore, I’ll be referring WoeUSB-ng as WoeUSB.
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Here is how to speed up the DNF package manager on your Rocky, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, or any other Linux distribution that uses Dnf as its package manager.
The default configuration of DNF is not optimized for speed. We can add a few tweaks to the dnf.conf and make it faster.
The tweak we can do is to set the maximum parallel download to 20. By default, it is set to 3.
To do this, we need to edit the dnf.conf file. Let’s use nano and edit the file.
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DeaDBeeF is a music player for Linux, Android, and other UNIX-like operating systems. Released under the GNU General Public License, it is free software anyone can download and use. DeaDBeeF has many features that make it an excellent choice for music playback on Linux, as it supports various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and WAV. The following tutorial will show you how to install the player on Manjaro using the Arch Linux user repository.
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This tutorial describes different techniques to execute stealth scans with Nmap.
Stealth scan techniques are implemented to bypass firewalls or discover hosts alive while remaining undetected.
Nmap offers a variety of flags and options to execute different stealth scan types, most of which are explained in this article. They are easy to implement and constitute a nice learning process on IP packets.
After reading this content, the reader will enjoy a better understanding of network packets and communications while acquiring deep practical knowledge on stealth scans with Nmap.
All instructions in this tutorial contain screenshots, making it easy for all readers to understand how they are executed and their outputs or results.
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This tutorial explains how to execute the Xmas stealth scan technique using Nmap.
Nmap Xmas scan was considered a stealthy scan that analyzes responses to Xmas packets to determine the nature of the replying device.
Each operating system or network device replies in a different way to Xmas packets revealing local information, such as OS (Operating System), port state, and more.
Currently, many firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems can detect Xmas packets, and it is not the best technique to carry out a stealth scan. Yet it is extremely useful to understand how it works.
After reading this tutorial, the user will understand how Xmas, NULL, and FIN scans work. All instructions below contain screenshots, making it easy for readers to understand how Nmap commands are executed.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WineHQ on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a program that can be used to run Windows software on Linux. If you want to use graphical Microsoft Windows applications on your AlmaLinux system, you can install Wine.
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 Tor Browser on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux or RHEL-based.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Trinity Desktop Environment development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the TDE R14.0.13 release.
TDE is a free/libre lightweight desktop environment intended for computer users preferring a lean and efficient experience. It is available for various Linux distros, BSD and DilOS.Low on system requirements, it is also an ideal choice for dated hardware, while still providing a fully usable desktop.Born from the ashes of KDE 3.5.10 in 2010, TDE is a fully independent project with its own personality, community and development team.
This release comes with fixes for both CVE-2020-12755 (FISH protocol) and KMail’s EFAIL vulnerabilities.It adds Markdown support in Kate, a new window style (twin-style-machbunt), a new tdeioslave protocol to gather application information (tdeio-appinfo), several improvements to GUI interaction and a new SFTP tdeioslave based on libssh.It also solves the issue with opening files from media:/ and system:/media/ URLs from non-TDE applications and is compatible with OpenSSL 3.0 API.
Refer to the links below for further details.
Full version of the Release Notes TGW issue list Detailed changelog
We would like to thank all the people who have contributed to the preparation of this release and we are looking forward for further contributions in future.
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The past few months I’ve been rewriting the text layout engine used by Krita’s text tool. This is not the same as the text tool itself, which is still a super small rich text editor, but it is a prerequisite to getting any kind of new features into the text shape. We haven’t done any real improvements to text since the work for the last fundraiser we had for it, and that is because this needed to be done, it is a lot of work, an we had vowed to take care of resource management first, which, uh, took us so long and was so intensive that it covered the whole development cycle from 4.0 to 5.0, or a span of 5~ years. I’m not the only developer who can finally tackle a sore point, there’s work being done on audio, lots of file format updates, work on assistants, technology upgrades and more… But this blog is about text.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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If you are paying attention to GTK’s git repository, you may have noticed a change in the last weeks.
We have a directory gtk/deprecations, which is destined to contain source files that implement deprecated APIs and will be dropped in the next major release. For the 4.0 release, we emptied it out, and it has been empty ever since. But recently, it started to accumulate files again.
This is a good opportunity to remind folks how we are using deprecations in GTK. But first, lets take a look at the details.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Comparing two best Linux Distros, such as Pop!_OS vs Ubuntu Linux, can be confusing – especially since Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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This collection will help you using LibreOffice Math so you can write mathematics and scientific equations easily on Writer, Calc, and Impress. Math is the equation editor of LibreOffice that is well integrated to every window and can be called with menubar Insert > Formula. We have several tutorials with examples and pictures included you can learn below.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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First of all, Open Data is not always, or necessarily, about “offering our wisdom”. I am well aware that law making on many topics is a complex process that requires lots of time and special skills. Open Data is about knowing what the government is actually doing and why.
Secondly, sure, we know that’s how it is today. If things were working, there would be no need or excuse to try something different. We want to change the system. We are not doing this to have something else to watch on TV.
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Programming/Development
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I’ve been doing web performance for a while, so I’ve spent a lot of time in the Performance tab of the Chrome DevTools. But sometimes when you’re debugging a tricky perf problem, you have to go deeper. That’s where Chrome tracing comes in.
Chrome tracing (aka Chromium tracing) lets you record a performance trace that captures low-level details of what the browser is doing. It’s mostly used by Chromium engineers themselves, but it can also be helpful for web developers when a DevTools trace is not enough.
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How fast does it take from a code change to an observable result in development?
The inner loop is loosely defined as a local build and deploy. Optimizing this loop is one of the keys to developer productivity. But it’s one of the things that developers rarely think of.
A good inner dev loop is both fast and correct. It’s easy in theory to get “correct”: work in an environment as close to production as possible and run a production build and deploy loop on every change. That’s usually too slow. “Correct” is so important because it prevents reproducibility bugs that are notoriously hard to track down and fix. “It works on my machine.”.
You can get “fast” by syncing files and doing incremental compilation tricks. Webpack dev server is probably the best example of this. You can get even faster if you hook the entire loop up to a file-watching trigger — automatically debouncing and triggering background compilation and deploys. However, an optimized runtime that’s completely different than a production environment loses much of its benefit. Most of these “fast” tools are specific to a framework or language, which limits their usefulness.
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Any good platform project needs to be extensible. Kubernetes accomplishes this through APIs.
A brief overview of the major interfaces in Kubernetes for extensibility.
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By default, computer programs are executed sequentially, usually line-by-line. Although this is very efficient, you may need to run multiple processes simultaneously or control the flow and runtime of your programs for numerous reasons. Luckily, Go gives us a way to run various processes concurrently or in parallel. Concurrency comes in handy for speed, process synchronization, and resource utilization.
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During the pandemic, the supply chain and its management strategy burst into the spotlight. Supply chain management (SCM) became a household topic as its disruptions began to directly impact people’s lives and the global economy.
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Last May I left Google to build a more sustainable model for Open Source maintenance. After a summer break, I resumed my maintenance work on the Go project in September, and I started offering my services to companies that rely on Go.
My vision is that of Open Source maintenance as a real profession, where maintainers offer ongoing contracts to the companies that critically rely on their projects. Maintainers get paid like the senior engineers they are, and companies get reassurances on the reliability of their dependencies, mitigating business risk.
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There are a growing number of Shiny users across the world, and with many users comes an increasing number of open-source “add-on” packages that extend the functionality of Shiny, both in terms of the front end and the back end of an app.
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This blog post is divided in two parts: in the first part I’ll show you how to create a Linux Live USB with persistent storage that can be used as development environment, and in the second part I’ll show you the easiest way to set up RStudio and R in Ubuntu.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you have a Prometheus metric that has been slowly drifting upward for some time. You would like to find out the last time that it has been below some value. In an ideal world this would be a simple Prometheus operation, because the raw data is there in the TSDB. In this actual world, Prometheus makes it hard to work with when metrics actually happened. However, you can do it in a relatively straightforward way because of something I had forgotten until I started to write this entry.
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Leftovers
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The future of this blog includes it being a blog no more, at least not in the typical substackian / wordpressy / RSSfeedy sense.
I will be transitioning to a website with very few articles, which are well-researched and which I try to keep evergreen. Inspired by the model of David Chapman’s book blogs, with functionality and style similar to Nintil, and with a very high bar for publishing.
I expect this new blog to have no more than half a dozen articles in the next couple of years, the first of which will potentially appear before Christmas 2022
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Last week I was in the kitchen and Katara tried to tell Toph a secret she didn’t want me to hear. I said this was bad opsec, told them that if they wanted to exchange secrets they should do it away from me, and without premeditating it, I uttered the following:
You shouldn’t talk about things you shouldn’t talk about while I’m in the room while I’m in the room.
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I have always been interested in how people change their minds. I think it started with my Dad’s story – he was a conservative, religious Jew until he was 18, then he had an argument with a union activist on a picket line, and within a year had renounced his faith and become a lifelong revolutionary communist.
My dad was and is an arguer, as am I. He was raised on vigorous debate, and when he lost to someone who had arguments he couldn’t refute, he returned to the picket line, day after day, to continue the debate to learn, and ultimately to change – forever.
I, too, had an experience like this: as a baby writer, I was raised on the idea that the more copyright there was, the better I – and other creative workers – would do. Then I found myself traveling to conferences in the early 2000s with Fred von Lohmann and Cindy Cohn.
We argued about copyright the entire way across first the Pacific and then the Atlantic, and then through the streets of London and Hong Kong, for literally days on end. Within a couple of months, I had resigned from the company I cofounded and joined EFF.
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As great as the thematic programs are, you really need to check out the annual ones. Errington just published a very special 1943 installment, special because in ’43, there was no US recorded music, thanks to a bitter strike over stolen royalties by the American Federation of Musicians.
For the ’43 edition, then, Errington turned to “the small quantity of records being made in the USA, a host of South and Central American music, radio broadcasts, speeches, film dialogue and other assorted audio artefacts.”
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Daily also enhances weak network effects. Having all users simultaneously on the app creates a fake (or actual) density previously unavailable to apps that aren’t operating at scale. Whether it’s a social network or an auction, density matters.
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Most startups are founded with no moats. But the best ones can prove moat by induction.
Induction is a simple mathematical way to prove statements. An example: Can you climb a ladder to the top?
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Science
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Kilobytes (KB). Megabytes (MB). Gigabytes (GB).
We use these storage measurements every single, gosh-darned day. And most of us feel like we know exactly what they mean. But do we really?
Do we really — truly — know what a “Byte” is… and its origin? I mean… who came up with the term “Byte”, anyway?
Let’s take a moment to look over the history of the term. If, for no other reason, than to feel smarter than most other nerds.
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Software is making inroads into white-collar professions due to innovations enabled by artificial intelligence and machine learning, fueled by pandemic-surging demand.
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Given the potential consequences of climate change and a danger of reaching irreversible “tipping points,” there is an argument to be made that all options should be carefully considered. Sending giant mirrors into space to reflect solar radiation away from the Earth is one such option.
The problem is that the many such geoengineering approaches have been so taboo that there is not enough information from researchers to definitively decide what options are still viable. A National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report in 2021 and a report from the Council on Foreign Relations argue for further research and associated governance on solar geoengineering approaches (i.e., stratospheric aerosols, cloud seeding, or cirrus cloud thinning). These reports omit the solar geoengineering approach that utilizes large-scale space mirrors.
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Advancing the spontaneous bottom-up construction of artificial cells with high organizational complexity and diverse functionality remains an unresolved issue at the interface between living and non-living matter. Here, to address this challenge, we developed a living material assembly process based on the capture and on-site processing of spatially segregated bacterial colonies within individual coacervate microdroplets for the endogenous construction of membrane-bounded, molecularly crowded, and compositionally, structurally and morphologically complex synthetic cells. The bacteriogenic protocells inherit diverse biological components, exhibit multifunctional cytomimetic properties and can be endogenously remodelled to include a spatially partitioned DNA–histone nucleus-like condensate, membranized water vacuoles and a three-dimensional network of F-actin proto-cytoskeletal filaments. The ensemble is biochemically energized by ATP production derived from implanted live Escherichia coli cells to produce a cellular bionic system with amoeba-like external morphology and integrated life-like properties. Our results demonstrate a bacteriogenic strategy for the bottom-up construction of functional protoliving microdevices and provide opportunities for the fabrication of new synthetic cell modules and augmented living/synthetic cell constructs with potential applications in engineered synthetic biology and biotechnology.
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There has been more than a little sensational speculation in recent months regarding the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to attain sentience, but Bruce McNaughton, distinguished professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California at Irvine, does not waste much time pondering the possibility.
In fact, McNaughton doesn’t ascribe much to the idea of sentience, period. He discourages his students from using the term, as well as “consciousness.”
“I discourage them from using the term because as a scientist, I think of the brain as a physical system that obeys the laws of physics,” McNaughton said. “We just didn’t understand that implementation of the laws of physics could become so incredibly complex through the laws of evolution, and I think most people have only the fuzziest idea of how complex it really is in the brain.”
Konstantinos Voudouris, a psychologist and graduate student researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence of the U.K.’s University of Cambridge, shares McNaughton’s sentiments to a fair degree. “It’s beguiling almost to be anthropomorphic about how these systems are behaving,” said Voudouris, first author of a recent study that directly compared the cognitive abilities of AI agents and children age 6-10. “It’s almost a quality of human psychology to anthropomorphize things, but the psychologist can come in and scientifically evaluate that hypothesis against the many alternatives that exist.”
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Imperial College London and Empa researchers have created a fleet of bee-inspired flying 3D printers for building and repairing structures in-flight.
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A new deep-learning framework developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is speeding up the process of inspecting additively manufactured metal parts using X-ray computed tomography, or CT, while increasing the accuracy of the results. The reduced costs for time, labor, maintenance and energy are expected to accelerate expansion of additive manufacturing, or 3D printing.
“The scan speed reduces costs significantly,” said ORNL lead researcher Amir Ziabari. “And the quality is higher, so the post-processing analysis becomes much simpler.”
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An odor machine, so-called olfactometer, makes it possible to smell in VR environments. First up is a “wine tasting game” where the user smells wine in a virtual wine cellar and gets points if the guess on aromas in each wine is correct. The new technology that can be printed on 3D printers has been developed in collaboration between Stockholm University and Malmö University.
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Artificial intelligence models can outperform humans at tasks AIs normally struggle with if they are told to think a certain way, but it doesn’t help them grasp sarcasm
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Hardware
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Sometime in 2001, I walked into a Radio Shack on San Francisco’s Market Street and asked for a Cuecat: a handheld barcode scanner that looked a bit like a cat and a bit like a sex toy. The clerk handed one over to me and I left, feeling a little giddy. I didn’t have to pay a cent.
The Cuecat was a good idea and a terrible idea. The good idea was to widely distribute barcode scanners to computer owners, along with software that could read and decode barcodes; the company’s marketing plan called for magazines and newspapers to print barcodes alongside ads and articles, so readers could scan them and be taken to the digital edition. To get the Cuecat into widespread use, the company raised millions in the capital markets, then mass-manufactured these things and gave them away for free at Radio Shacks around the country. Every Wired and Forbes subscriber got one in the mail!
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I’ve been podcasting since 2015 and got really into audio when the plague started. Like…too much.
Anyway.
I’ve been obsessed with podcast audio quality for years, and have been through so…many…iterations of my setup. I started with a Yeti (still a great mic). Did the Electrovoice. Did the Shure SM7B. And now I’m using a Neumann U87ai.
You always want the initial recording to be as clean as possible.
But that’s not what matters. What matters is the quality of the chain, especially as you start fixing crap that’s in the original recording.
Here’s the basic rule. The most important rule. Don’t fuck with it.
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It’s long been possible to make extremely small robots, but they usually need some form of direct external control just to operate. Cornell scientists may have solved that problem on a basic level, however. They’ve created microrobots (no more than 250 micrometers across) with basic electronic “brains” that let them walk autonomously. Two- and six-legged robots move relatively simply, while a four-legged “dogbot” changes speed when an operator sends laser pulses.
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The competition to create ever smaller, ever better robots is a fierce one, and Cornell University is out front now with a set of bots small enough to sit on a human hair but that can move on their own using nothing but light as a power source.
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That means batteries could have customized shapes
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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We use tools that rely on artificial intelligence (AI) every day, with voice assistants like Alexa and Siri being among the most common. These consumer products work reasonably well—Siri understands most of what we say—but they are by no means perfect. We accept their limitations and adapt how we use them until they get the right answer, or we give up. After all, the consequences of Siri or Alexa misunderstanding a user request are usually minor.
However, mistakes by AI models that support doctors’ clinical decisions can mean life or death. Therefore, it’s critical that we understand how well these models work before deploying them. Published reports of this technology currently paint a too-optimistic picture of its accuracy, which at times translates to sensationalized stories in the press. Media are rife with discussions of algorithms that can diagnose early Alzheimer’s disease with up to 74 percent accuracy or that are more accurate than clinicians. The scientific papers detailing such advances may become foundations for new companies, new investments and lines of research, and large-scale implementations in hospital systems. In most cases, the technology is not ready for deployment.
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Security
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If you’ve been experiencing OneDrive crashes and error messages, before digging too deep for a solution, note that it might be Microsoft’s fault. Common solutions like restarting, or signing out and back in won’t help because the issue is with the latest Windows 10 update.
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In the past, supply chain risks to elections were typically comprised of risks of ballot availability, voting locations, and personnel to facilitate voting. This was demonstrated during the pandemic as the influx of mail-in ballots threatened the supply of paper ballots. Integrity was maintained through physical control that could be readily cataloged and captured through two-person integrity and other commands. Fraud, in general, was not scalable. Supply chain risks, in this sense, affected availability.
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Mandiant has observed attackers using the ARD screen sharing function to move laterally between systems. If remote desktop was not enabled on a target system, Mandiant observed attackers connecting to systems via SSH and executing a kickstart command to enable remote desktop management. This allowed remote desktop access to the target systems.
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A new open-source ‘S3crets Scanner’ scanner allows researchers and red-teamers to search for ‘secrets’ mistakenly stored in publicly exposed or company’s Amazon AWS S3 storage buckets.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a cloud storage service commonly used by companies to store software, services, and data in containers known as buckets.
Unfortunately, companies sometimes fail to properly secure their S3 buckets and thus publicly expose stored data to the Internet.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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“If the city makes this high-stakes bet on casino surveillance, I worry they’ll gamble away the future of our public streets,” said one privacy expert.
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When datasets containing personal information are shared for research or used by companies, researchers try to disguise data – removing the final one or two digits of a zip code, for example – while still preserving its utility for insight.
But while deidentification is often intended to satisfy legal requirements for data privacy, the most commonly used methods stand on shaky technical ground.
University of Chicago computer scientist Aloni Cohen deals the latest decisive blow against the most popular deidentification techniques in a new paper.
By describing a new kind of attack called “downcoding,” and demonstrating the vulnerability of a deidentified data set from an online education platform, Cohen sends a warning that these data transformations should not be considered sufficient to protect individuals’ privacy.
“Even by the regulatory standards, there’s a problem here,” said Cohen, an assistant professor of computer science and the Data Science Institute.
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Defence/Aggression
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While the Iranian people are fighting for regime change, Iran regime lobby in United States, NIAC, is busy trying to reclaim the narrative and making it one of reform, and not regime change.
But the Iranian people aren’t calling for reform, they’re calling for regime change. NIAC isn’t just a group which advocates for US-Iran relations, they are an active body of the Islamic regime.
Now their activists are trying to twist the protests into an issue of forced hijab, or of economic stressors; anything to avoid admitting reality, that people are saying no to the Islamic regime.
Their main talking point is that the left should make an Iran-deal and lift sanctions, as if that’s what causing the protests. NIAC founder, Trita Parsi, and NIAC activists such as Negar Mortazavi and Ellie Geranmayeh of the European Council of Foreign Relations, as well as Hoda Katebi, a hijabi fashion influencer, have all called for sanction relief.
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Environment
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Energy
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Jim Chalmer’s first Federal Budget was delivered this week. Politically astute, yet containing few surprises or significant reform measures, it was a budget lacking in courage to tackle the big challenges. Kim Wingerei reports.
The Federal Budget is first and foremost a political statement. And even more so when it is the first budget presented by the new Treasurer after Labor’s May election win. There is an overall feeling in Canberra’s press gallery that Jim Chalmers is a steady hand on the tiller of our economy.
Even the AFR hailed the budget’s “admirable moves to slash waste and unnecessary expenditure”, and The Age called it an “aspirational budget.” Some of those aspirations will be hard to implement, though. The promise of at least one nurse in every aged care home round the clock is commendable, except where will those nurses be found? Apart from allowing for modest wage increases, there was nothing announced in the budget to address the shortage of nurses, nor the even more critical dearth of doctors in the regions.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Every so often I get another update about the Elon Musk buying Twitter saga and every so often I get this unspecified feeling of dread for the future where that purchase goes through. Among the things that I’ve seen, the biggest thing that worries me is the idea that Elon Musk wants to turn Twitter into a “free speech zone”. In terms of red flags being raised, this should be the biggest, reddest flag ever raised in the history of social media.
If this happens and Twitter is made into a “free speech zone”, I am going to drastically lessen my use of it in favor of more ethical social media protocols like the Fediverse. I really hope this is an “if” problem and not a “when” problem, but I’m getting the feeling that it’s a “when” problem. You can follow me on Mastodon or another ActivityPub server (such as Pleroma or Pixelfed) at @cadey@pony.social. If Twitter really does fall, you probably should get on Mastodon too.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The jury system works well when jurors respect the rules. But whether there are clean hands among the media personalities who have inserted themselves into the story, time will tell, writes Mark Sawyer.
The discharging of the jury in the rape trial of Bruce Lehrmann made October 27, 2022, a black day for Australian justice. The cost of the aborted trial runs into the millions, notwithstanding the prolonged anguish it has caused accuser and defendant.
Lehrmann has pleaded not guilty to the charge of raping a fellow political aide, Brittany Higgins, in an office at Parliament House, Canberra, in a case which has drawn saturation media coverage.
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Monopolies
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For YouTube viewers dissatisfied with the videos the platform has recommended to them, pressing the “dislike” button may not make a big difference, according to a new research report.
YouTube has said users have numerous ways to indicate that they disapprove of content and do not want to watch similar videos. But all of those controls are relatively ineffective, researchers at the Mozilla Foundation said in a report published on Tuesday. The result was that users continued receiving unwanted recommendations on YouTube, the world’s largest video site.
Researchers found that YouTube’s “dislike” button reduced similar, unwanted recommendations only 12 percent, according to their report, titled “Does This Button Work?” Pressing “Don’t recommend channel” was 43 percent effective in reducing unwanted recommendations, pressing “not interested” was 11 percent effective and removing a video from one’s watch history was 29 percent effective.
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Cornell researchers have developed a fairer system for recommendations – from hotels to jobs to videos – so a few top hits don’t get all the exposure.
The new ranking system still provides relevant options, but divides user attention more equitably across search results. It can be applied to online markets such as travel sites, hiring platforms and news aggregators.
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Patents
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The US Court of Appeals has upheld previous rulings that AIs cannot hold patents for inventions.
AIs are increasingly being used to make new discoveries but, under most patent laws, a human must be listed as the patent holder for inventions.
Dr Stephen Thaler created a device called DABUS that consists of neural networks and has been used to invent an emergency warning light, a food container that improves grip and heat transfer, and more.
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Copyrights
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The public release of ‘Stable Diffusion’, a high-quality image generation tool, sets new standards in open-source AI development and raises new questions.
Generative AI tools provide creative inspiration for artists, illustrators and writers, but also for scientists — for example, in the discovery of drugs, materials and even the design of quantum experiments. Powerful capabilities arise in particular with very large neural network models that have billions or even trillions of parameters and are trained on vast amounts of data on the internet. For example, language models such as GPT-3 from OpenAI can generate original text as if written by humans. More recently, such algorithms have been trained on text–image pairs and developed into image generation models. DALL-E (from OpenAI), Imagen (from Google) and Midjourney produce stunning images in any style, from photorealistic portraits and newspaper cartoons to medieval tapestry and much more, given text or other images as prompts.
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Getty Images is worried about future copyright claims
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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I bought an Ingersoll Buck pocket watch at an estate sale yesterday. The watch is fairly basic, and it’s missing the front glass that protects the clock face, but the watch was only $15–less than the cost of my own cheap Timex wristwatches.
This is the second mechanical watch I own, and the first mechanical pocket watch. I bought another pocket watch many years ago, but it was a cheap quartz piece of junk that beguiled me into buying it due to a frilly front cover.
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Recently LibreHacker has been posting some fractal images on the gemini aggregators.
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I went out west in May. I took and Amtrak, got stranded, twice, and eventually made my way from Missoula, Montana via Greyhound (well, American Lines, which *became* Greyhound) back to St Louis, Missouri – home. The travel back was safe but lengthy.
Departing from *somewhere* (who knows what state/town) we entered into Missouri on the way to stop off at the Kansas City terminal, and while on that journey we went through Martinville, Missouri.
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I did a similar thing, oh gosh, it’s a few years ago at this point, listening to Ambient 3: Day of Radiance by Laraaji and Brian Eno, typing an email to my old friend Sean detailing how I was awakening again. I’d go back and read it but I was so in love with him that all my emails sound so corny to me now.
The one I have the most fondness for is one I wrote my first semester of college, before I met Ameen and had my heart crushed in the most awful way. I had stayed up to work on a paper but I ended up reading about and listening to the Voyager Record and crying a ton. It was around the time I was a little obsessed with videos of people performing zäuerli yodels on YouTube and not really knowing what to do with myself as a college student. I get very nostalgic for this time period; a time before some kind of fall from grace (la chute d’Icare).
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All of the sudden not going to work anymore for the upcoming months.
We’ll, It’s been somewhere in my head but starting maternity leave was the last thing I actively thought about. So what should I do? Been struggling to keep my daily routine stable for years now and yes, this is an important factor for my well-being.
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Technical
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Or how to VNC connecting a RPI2 to a Crapbook empowered by OpenBSD…
[...]
Actually PICO-8 development sounds too much ambitious, however I crossed again a path where Linux is “in” while (Open)BSD is “out”.
In the difficult task to create interest around Computer Science for my eldest child, I thought that making video games might be enough engaging to stimulate its attention. While this has revealed — once again — wrong, I found that running PICO-8 from OpenBSD was something out of the reach, for the same usual reasons.
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Science
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A new X-ray technique that combines conventional equipment with a deep-learning algorithm might find its way into both security settings and the healthcare industry.
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Internet/Gemini
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Well, it lasted about a week hosting this web site and gemini capsule on the Sun Blade 100. Although only a handful of people visit here, the 500MHz UltraSparc IIe CPU was no match for bots, and floods of automated requests from Mastodon servers.
Both gemini and any sane website really need to be using TLS 1.2 or above, with good ciphers and large enough key size. Modern low power / low spec embedded systems of comparable general compute ability to the 21 year old UltraSparc tend to have acceleration of the encryption mathematics. This means you can host an https site on something really low spec, but it can remain fairly responsive. There’s no such luck on the Sun Blade. It just has to slowly churn through the encryption/decryption code, and takes about 1-2 seconds to handle a request.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception at 6:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Excuses commonly found online for not quitting Twitter (refusal to quit despite knowing the harms) are similar to a chain smoker’s screed
Twitter user: “My friends are there”
Smoker: “My friends are smoking”
Twitter user: “I’m already used to it”
Smoker: “My body adapted to tobacco”
Twitter user: “It gives me stress relief”
Smoker: “What will I do during lunch break?”
Twitter user: “Nothing is perfect”
Smoker: “Everybody dies eventually”
Twitter user: “It’s not as bad as they say”
Smoker: “My grandpa smoked and lived to be 90″
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Instructionals/Technical
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Maps fuel the imagination, inspire flights of fancy, and create a yearning to travel—whether to the farthest corners of the globe or the nearest White Castle for a smorgasbord of sliders.
While it’s perhaps more satisfying to pull that dusty old atlas from the top shelf of your bookcase, and it’s more useful to hit up Google Maps in a browser, it’s infinitely cooler to pore over cartographic excellence from the comfort of your favorite terminal emulator.
Here’s how you can use MapSCII to view maps in your Linux terminal.
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Don’t worry. You don’t need therapy. Whenever this happens to me—and it does happen to me—I remember that I wrote a little tool called httm. Using httm helps me find my lost files much more quickly, whichmakes the associated I’m a moron feeling pass more quickly as well.
httm does lots of other cool things too, a few of which I hope I will have time to touch upon, but let’s consider The Case of The Infamous Fat Fingered Sysadmin first.
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We all have data that we need to store, and then find. Regardless of type, data tends to build up. Eventually, we need some system for organizing it into sensible categories.
It turns out, this problem is harder than it seems.
In this article, I’m going to be talking about organizing digital files. However, most of the problems (and some of the solutions) also apply to paper files, spreadsheet tables, databases — and even physical objects.
Let’s dig in.
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In some circles, it’s popular to denigrate file extensions as a Windows-ism that’s only necessary because of (historical) limitations of that platform. However, we have a fair amount of evidence that people like file extensions even on platforms where they aren’t necessary, and adopt them by choice in various circumstances even without technical need.
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In the past 5 years, people have searched for React a lot on Google compared to Vue.js or Angular. In addition to that, the state of JS survey result of 2021 puts React as the most used JavaScript framework for the past 6 years. It is also the one with the most awareness among software engineers for 3 years in a row since 2019.
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That’s the top thing about our Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller: it comes with a fully certified module on board featuring 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless LAN, making it the perfect solution for projects requiring wireless communication, like this one.
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Games
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Seems that both options for Variable Refresh Rate and Allow Tearing are coming to the Steam Deck in a future update (thanks Reddit), here’s what that means.
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Sony and Sumo Digital recently put out another port, this time it’s Sackboy: A Big Adventure an offshoot of the LittleBigPlanet series.
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Getting DOOM to run on a computer it was never meant to run on is a fun trope in the world of esoteric retro computers. By now we’ve seen it run on everything from old NES systems to microwaves, treadmills, and basically anything with a computer inside of it. What we don’t often see are the displays themselves being set up specifically to run the classic shooter. This build might run the game itself on ordinary hardware, but the impressive part is that it’s able to be displayed on this seven-segment display.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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We take a look at “Accessible-Coconut”, – a friendly Linux for Visually Impaired Users. We covered the features, utilities, download details, and a brief review of this distro.
There are few free and open-source Linux distributions out there that are designed for visually impaired or challenged people. They often wonder – which free Linux distribution is suitable for me? There are very few of them, really. Although the mainstream Ubuntu and Fedora can be configured with additional applications such as screen reader, etc., they require more time and effort to make them suitable for Visually Impaired people.
But the dedicated distros are pre-loaded with applications for visually impaired persons and settings to tweak them.
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As usual, approaching 19 hours for the build. I didn’t time it exactly, as there was one error; which was easy to fix, and sent it off again, compiled successfully to completion, 947 packages.
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This blog post is divided in two parts: in the first part I’ll show you how to create a Linux Live USB with persistent storage that can be used as development environment, and in the second part I’ll show you the easiest way to set up RStudio and R in Ubuntu.
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Reviews
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So, I was searching around for a ready-to-use Arch Linux with only Window Manager options and found this Archcraft OS. Here’s a quick review of Archcraft OS, in case if you are planning to try it out.
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Once again, I ran into another Arch-based Linux distribution – named Hefftor Linux. And I got surprised by how much customization it provides ‘out of the box’ for Xfce, KDE Plasma, and other environments. Allow me to give you a tour.
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BSD
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Until 1 December, I’ll be taking preorders for print copies of OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems. You can even buy two books if you want, because I can cram a second book into a Priority Mail envelope. Just let me know the title of the second one in an order comment.
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Debian Family
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Tails, based on Debian GNU/Linux, is a portable operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship, and version 5.5 is now available for download.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Elektrobit and Canonical have partnered to bring the benefits of Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system to automotive software.
As the industry transitions towards software-defined vehicles, the new partnership will make it easier than ever before for car makers, suppliers, and developers to create the next generation of vehicle applications, while meeting stringent automotive standards.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Here at Hackaday, we love to see projects re-visited and updated after we’ve covered them on the site. It’s always exciting to see what the creators come up with next, and this Pi-Based Spectrometer project is a great example of that.
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[...] Hugo provides a detailed technical discussion on how they are accessed and stored, plus sample code (spoiler alert: the tag set instruction is 0x7c0103e6).
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Thus for many years the possibility of getting memory tagging working on these systems was an interesting possibility, but there was no idea of whether it was actually feasible or whether IBM fused off this functionality in the CPUs it sells to third parties. The POWER CPUs IBM sells to third parties are fused slightly differently to those it uses in most of its own servers, being fused for 4-way multithreading (SMT4) rather than 8-way multithreading (SMT8); it would be entirely plausible that the tagging functionality is fused off in the SMT4 parts, being that IBM i was only ever intended to run on SMT8 systems. While the ISA extension is undocumented, fairly complete knowledge about it has already been pieced together from bits and pieces, so this was not actually the major obstacle. However, there was no idea as to whether use of the memory tagging functionality might require some kind of appropriate initialization of the CPU. In theory, one need simply set a single undocumented bit (“Tags Active”) in the Power Machine State Register (MSR). However, simple attempts to enable Tags Active mode on OpenPOWER systems such as the Talos II did not succeed.
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Amongst the dazzle and display, it is easy to overlook the technical requirements of this build. The pole itself needs to be “structurally strong” explains Spencer, to withstand the dynamic moves of acrobats, “while protecting and displaying an array of thousands of integrated pixels.”
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Our goal for this project is to create a holiday themed decoration which uses NeoPixels. How we control it is via the Cheerlights API. Cheerlights is a global network of synchronized lights. Sending a tweet to @cheerlights containing one of the supported colors will trigger our project to change color, but better than that, it changes the color of every Cheerlight across the globe.
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I think there should be ample clues in the first picture to guess the ware, but I included a couple of close-ups of the circuits because I love it when circuit boards document their functions so clearly. [...]
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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At first glance, renaming entities in a database seems like it should be easy. The SQL is a dead simple one-liner of ALTER … RENAME TO …, so what could go wrong?
Well, it turns out a lot actually. Anyone who’s run a production database before will recognize that outside of an academic context, it’s actually kind of hard. The problem isn’t in the database itself, but in database clients. Anything that was still running against the old name when a rename takes place will immediately break, causing downtime and major user impact.
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The concept behind soft deletion is to make deletion safer, and reversible. Once a record’s been hit by a hard DELETE, it may technically still be recoverable by digging down into the storage layer, but suffice it to say that it’s really hard to get back. Theoretically with soft deletion, you just set deleted_at back to NULL and you’re done: [...]
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Education
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The Handbook introduces a comprehensive view of requirements including four elements or PEGS: Project, Environment, Goals and System. One of its principal contributions is the definition of a standard plan for requirements documents, consisting of the four corresponding books and replacing the obsolete IEEE 1998 structure.
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Programming/Development
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The pioneering computer scientist was instrumental in founding Birkbeck’s Department of Computer Science and her legacy lives on in the College today. We were deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Professor Kathleen Booth (née Britten) on Thursday 29 September 2022.
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Li Huang (PhD student at SIT) will be presenting at an ISSRE workshop the paper Improving Counterexample Quality from Failed Program Verification, written with Manuel Oriol and me. One can find the text on arXiv here. (I will update this reference with the official publication link when I have it.)
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The longer the time between when code has been merged and when it is released increases the chance of an oversight.
Production will break. Then, it’s a matter of how quickly you can push a fix. Deploying often means deploying fast.
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Our most important goal is ensuring the long term success of the project. Over the years we have tried various ways to support maintainers and the project. Some ways we have tried include bounties, direct donations, grants, and a few others. We have found that while there have been many wonderful individuals, and a few corporations who have been incredibly generous, and we are so thankful for their support, there are a few corporations (with revenues that are greater than some countries GDP) are building on Gitea for core products without even contributing back enhancements. This is of course within the scope of the license, however prevents others from the community from also benefitting.
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The eighteenth release of littler as a CRAN package just landed, following in the now sixteen year history (!!) as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.
littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only started to do in recent years.
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Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.
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A minor routine update 0.0.5 of gettz arrived on CRAN overnight.
gettz provides a possible fallback in situations where Sys.timezone() fails to determine the system timezone. That happened when e.g. the file /etc/localtime somehow is not a link into the corresponding file with zoneinfo data in, say, /usr/share/zoneinfo. Since the package was written (in the fall of 2016), R added a similar extended heuristic approach itself.
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Next.js is an open-source web framework for React. It offers an easy workflow to build reactive scalable enterprise-grade apps.
Next.js can also be used to to build desktop apps with Electron and Tauri (Rust), as well as mobile apps with Electron.
Because Next.js has a vast wide community of developers, it has no shortage of starter, templates, and boilerplate to speed up the production.
In this article, we offer you a collection of Next.js starters projects which are free to use and open-source, to be used in your next project.
This collection includes starters for eCommerce packages, dashboard control systems, social and community projects, content management systems, and enterprise landing pages.
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Python
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We list the five best Python code editors for Ubuntu/Linux and Windows in 2022.
Python is everywhere today, and it is arguably the C programming language of the modern era. You can find Python everywhere, from websites, apps, data science projects, and AI to IoT devices. So being a popular programming language of this decade, it is essential to know the development environment of Python, where developers create applications, especially if you are starting afresh.
Many Python development environments are available with features and utilities catering to your need. Some of them are useful for beginners learning Python by setting up the environment and other users for heavy Python development and complex setups. Here, in this post, I will touch upon the five best of them that would help you to pick one for your own need and use case.
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Python ships with built-in modules such as os and sys that provide some functionality to interact with the underlying operating system. However, it may sometimes be more convenient to run system programs from within a Python script. Python’s subprocess module provides ready-to-use functionality to run external commands, capture and process outputs, redirect output to files and I/O streams, and much more!
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Java
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This summer I read the book “Entreprenerd” by Bruno Lowagie. It tells the story of how he started with the iText PDF Java library and turned that into a company together with his wife, and eventually sold it with all problems related to most sales and acquisitions trajects… In “Entreprenerd”, he also describes the process of writing two books about the iText library itself, as there were no good manuals available and he wanted to liberate himself from the ever-returning same questions. When I received this book about FXGL, I immediately had to think back to the story of Bruno. Who better to write a book about a library than Almas, the creator himself?
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Leftovers
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The first time I heard of longtermism I thought it was about terms of agreement that get longer and longer. But no. Longtermism is the philosophical idea that the long-term future of humanity is way more important than the present and that those alive today, so you, presumably, should make sacrifices for the good of all the generations to come.
Longtermism has its roots in the effective altruism movement, whose followers try to be smart about donating money so that it has the biggest impact, for example by telling everyone how smart they are about donating money. Longtermists are concerned with how our future will look like in some billion years or longer. Their goal is to make sure that we don’t go extinct. So stop being selfish, put away that junk food and make babies.
The key argument of longtermists is that our planet will remain habitable for a few billion years, which means that most people who’ll ever be alive are yet to be born.
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“Here’s how it was actually made: The negative was enlarged in the darkroom onto another piece of film in such a way that just Dylan’s head was on it. This would normally result in a positive image on the film which, if you printed it onto a piece of photo paper, would give you a negative print. However, I solarized this piece of film (that is, re-exposed it to light) as it was being developed. This partially reversed the image and also gave it the distinctive line between what was dark to start with and what has made dark by the solarization. Technically, this technique is actually called “the Sabbatier effect”, and the lines are called “Mackie lines”. This resulted in a quite dark and low-contrast piece of film to make a print from. I had to use the very high-contrast grade 6 Agfa Brovira paper to get a print with enough contrast.”
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Steve Martin had a bit that was like a fake infomercial where he says, “You can be a millionaire and never pay taxes!” The instructions were, “First, get a million dollars. Then,…” [Brandon’s] instructions for how to convert your MIG welder to do aluminum for under $25 is not quite like that, but you do need the right kind of MIG welder to make it work. In particular, you need an actual MIG welder that has a provision to connect external gas. The instructions show a Hobart Handler 140 that meets the criteria and has sufficient power to handle aluminum.
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Epoxy resins have been used to make some pretty cool furniture, but since it’s still a relatively new material, makers are still discovering new techniques to work with resin. [Cam] from Blacktail Studio may be the first person to bend fully cured epoxy using nothing but a form and the power of the sun.
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Science
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Every philosopher in existence had something to say about causality, so there are many different definitions, but luckily today we’ll need only need two. The first one is space-time causality. Suppose you have two events that are causally related, then each must be inside the other’s light cone, and the one in the past is the cause. It’s as simple as that. This is the notion of causality that’s used in General Relativity. One direction is forward, that’s the future, one direction is backward, that’s the past.
But it turns out that not all space-times allow you to tell apart past from future. This is much like on a Moebius strip you can’t tell the front from the back because they’re the same! In some space-times you can’t tell the past from the future because they’re the same.
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Hardware
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It is no secret that the way you build things in your garage is rarely how big companies build things at scale. But sometimes new techniques on the production floor leak over to the hobby builder and vice versa, so it pays to keep an eye on what the other side is doing. Maybe that was the idea behind [Carolyn Schwaar’s] post on All3DP entitled “Beyond Cura Slicer: 3D Printing Build Prep Software for Pros.” In it, she looks at a few programs that commercial-grade 3D printers use for slicing.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Russia will suspend its participation in the “grain deal,” an agreement which allows Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported.
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The Glocks with auto sears have also become a status symbol on the streets. Chicago rapper PGF Nuk titled his latest album Switch Music.
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The firearm homicide rate in the United States increased nearly 35% from 2019 to 2020, coinciding with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic (1). This increase affected all ages and most population groups, but not equally: existing disparities, including racial and ethnic disparities, widened. The firearm suicide rate was higher than the firearm homicide rate in 2020 and remained consistent with recent years overall; however, increases were observed in some groups (1). To assess potential increases from 2020 to 2021, final 2020 and provisional 2021, National Vital Statistics System mortality data and U.S. Census Bureau population estimates were used to examine all-cause homicide and suicide rates; firearm homicide and suicide rates overall and by sex, age,* race and ethnicity; and the percentage of homicides and suicides from firearm injuries.† This activity was reviewed by CDC and was conducted consistent with applicable federal law and CDC policy.§
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Proprietary
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If a malicious actor created an account using the previous account name of another user, they were able to link the old repository URL to their account, gaining access to code and other content in the process.
In addition, and compounding the problem, the default redirect was disabled, so if an attack was successful then all existing traffic was immediately routed to the attackers malicious GitHub repository.
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One of the most common UDP services in these multi-vector attacks is the Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP). With a high Bandwidth Amplification Factor (BAF) of 56 to 70x and common deployment onto systems provisioned with healthy bandwidth, CLDAP reflectors reliably add traffic volume to the DDoS recipe. Hopefully, the internet community can eventually clean up these exposed services. In the meantime, we can analyze and report on the span of open CLDAP reflectors on the internet today, as well as some of our findings related to the strategy and tactics behind their use in DDoS attacks.
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Security
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The state of Victoria will go to the polls on 26 November. Given that, it is easy to understand why the state’s transport authority, VicRoads, has jumped ahead of the pack in saying it will new licences to those whose documents were compromised in the disastrous Singtel Optus data breach.
This argument is bolstered by the fact that Optus, in a manner that even Ebenezer Scrooge would struggle to emulate, has made no statement about when and how it will pay for credentials which have been compromised due to the company’s errors.
A VicRoads statement says the state government will seek reimbursement from Optus. Good luck with that!
The degree of care that Optus has shown towards victims of this breach can be gauged by the fact that its last statement about the disaster was on 17 October. Two weeks on, the company is keeping its head low, in the hope that it can kick the can down the road in the best Google style.
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Victorian transport authority VicRoads says it will issue new driving licences to 342,000 people in the state who were affected by the massive data breach at telco Singtel Optus.
However, it does not appear that Optus has yet given a formal guarantee to pay for these licences. The company has also not paid a single cent towards replacement of passports that were compromised in the attack.
VicRoads said in a statement “The Victorian Government will continue to seek reimbursement of costs from Optus for the replacement of more than one million licences of Victorians impacted by the largest data breach in Australian history.”
The statement said 942,000 Victorian licence holders had their details compromised due to the breach.
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On October 25 The OpenSSL Project Team announced the forthcoming release of OpenSSL version 3.0.7. The team hasn’t shared many details but does mention that the update comes on November 1 and will include a patch for a new critical CVE.
This is one of the important and critical updates as the OpenSSL Project announced a “critical” vulnerability in versions 3.0 and above of the vastly-popular cryptographic library for encrypting communications on the Internet.
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Google pushed out a bunch of security fixes for the Chrome and Chromium browser code earlier this week…
…only to receive a vulnerability report from researchers at cybersecurity company Avast on the very same day.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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All you have to do is look at their stock price.
It’s “worth” less than 25% of what it was 13 months ago, even before you adjust for the fact that the money lost another 30% this year under Biden and (locally worse) Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.
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Defence/Aggression
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Some Islamists even regard the “far right” as allies. In February, the leading Islamist Daniel Haqiqatjou invited onto his YouTube channel Mark Collett, a prominent British neo-Nazi. The two bonded over shared fears of liberalism, secularism and the perceived threat of the left.
At the same time, elements in the Republican Party are making common cause with Islamic extremists. Republican Party officials recently joined radical Islamists in demanding that “LGBTQ” books promoting “pornography and homosexuality” be removed from school libraries in Dearborn, Michigan.
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The report—entitled Stop the Steal 2.0: How Meta and TikTok Are Promoting a Coup—was published by the San Francisco-based activist group SumOfUs and asserts that “on the eve of the second vote in Brazil’s most important election in decades, Meta and TikTok continue to put the integrity of the election on the line through their disastrous recommendation systems.”
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After a surprisingly tight result, Brazil’s election is going into a second round in which far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro will face left-winger Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva after the latter received 48.4 percent of the votes cast, and the incumbent obtained 43.23 percent. Twenty years on from his first presidential victory – from 2003-2010 – which is remembered by many in the country as an era of economic growth and declining inequality, Lula da Silva could be days away from one of the most remarkable moments in political history.
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How JFK and Robert Kennedy hid the quid pro quo that saved the world from nuclear war.
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Denis Pushilin, Russian-appointed head of the annexed “DNR,” announced that Russia and Ukraine have completed the latest round of prisoner exchanges:
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The Russian Ministry of Defense reported an attack by unmanned aircraft on the Port of Sevastopol. In the morning of October 29, nine flying unmanned craft and seven “autonomous marine unmanned devices” attacked Black Sea Fleet ships at anchor in the city. Seven of the 16 drones were shot down. The defense ministry reports that the marine minesweeper Ivan Golubets and a floating barrier sustained “minor damage.”
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Colonel General Alexander Lapin has been removed from his post as commander of the Army Group “Center,” according to sources of the Moscow Times and the RBK media group.
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Environment
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Finance
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In mid-September, the nation’s railway carriers were locked in tense negotiations with several rail labor unions, and a rail strike—a potential economic catastrophe for the country and global supply chains—loomed on the horizon.
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The rally united tens of thousands, from the left and right, against their government’s support for sanctions on Russia and the war in Ukraine.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.
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The layoffs at Twitter would take place before a Nov. 1 date when employees were scheduled to receive stock grants as part of their compensation. Such grants typically represent a significant portion of employees’ pay. By laying off workers before that date, Mr. Musk may avoid paying the grants, though he is supposed to pay the employees cash in place of their stock under the terms of the merger agreement.
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The 2022 midterm election represents a unique and historic opportunity to protect our democracy and our right to equality before the law against an unrelenting offensive being waged by the reactionary right.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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I entered the CNN website today. Fine, make fun of me, sometimes I like seeing what the higher levels of the simulation look like. You do it too sometimes even if you don’t admit it, it’s like pron.
I mindlessly scrolled through an article and got to see the ads at the end, upon which I was greeted with the following piece of misinformation: [...]
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And when clients become fixated on a particular diagnosis, providers say they must walk the fine line between offering a reality check and finding a way to support their clients, who are often deeply concerned.
“It’s almost as though me, as a professional — with a master’s degree, a clinical license and years of experience — is competing with these TikTokers,” Ms. Barsch said.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal censorship agency, at the request of the Prosecutor General’s office, has started blocking the domain t.me, which is used to create shortened links in the Telegram messenger app. A service on the Roskomnadzor website for checking access restrictions for Internet pages confirms this information.
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Protests were reported on October 29 at several universities across the country where students chanted, “Death to the dictator,” and, “Woman, life, freedom.”
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Lots of students shout “fuck you” at a small number of persons, one of whom maces our cameraman.
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Monopolies
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We analyzed datasets of articles and websites containing false claims to determine what proportion of them made money using Google’s ad platforms. We obtained these datasets from organizations that track online disinformation around the world and wrote software to determine whether a web address was currently earning money from Google ads. Between Aug. 23 and Sept. 13, 2022, we ran the datasets through this software system to calculate the proportion of web addresses monetizing with Google ads for each dataset. We include our detailed findings in Appendix A.
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Pro Publica ☛ How Google’s Ad Business Funds Disinformation [Ed: But Bill Gates-bribed Pro Publica won't write about disinformation from Microsoft]
The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google’s sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections.
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There’s a piece of news floating around the open IP and allied communities at the moment which appears to have caused some consternation. It comes from Adobe, who have announced that due to an end of their licensing deal with Pantone LLC, PSD images loaded into Photoshop will have pixels containing unlicensed Pantone colours replaced with black. What, Pantone own colours now, are we expected to pay a royalty every time we take a picture of a blue sky? It’s natural to react with suspicion when hearing a piece of news like this, but for once we think this might not be the unreasonable intellectual property land grab it may first appear. To illustrate this, it’s necessary to explain what Pantone does, and what they don’t do.
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Software Patents
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Fedora and openSUSE have taken a step backward in usability, disabling GPU-accelerated decoding for H.264, H.265, and VC1 codecs.
Video codecs often rely on the GPU for encoding and decoding, as it is faster and less resource-intensive than relying on the CPU. After Red Hat’s lawyers raised concerns about the drivers, and associated patents, for the Mesa VA-API, specific to AMD GPUs. In response, Red Hat opted to drop support for the video acceleration feature, impacting H.264, H.265, and VC1 codecs, some of the most common video codecs.
In short order, openSUSE followed suit, announcing VA-API would be disabled in that distro moving forward.
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In short, some video codecs, such as H.264, are patent-protected by MPEG LA, a US company based in Denver, Colorado. Therefore, their use implies the payment of patent fees.
By chance, Red Hat’s lawyers discovered that the codecs used by Fedora via the Mesa library violated patent rules. So naturally, they immediately raised concerns about initiating patent infringement lawsuits against the corporation.
As a result, the decision has been made to remove their use in the Red Hat-sponsored distribution, Fedora.
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Primarily, it will affect AMD GPU users using open-source drivers, preventing them using GPU acceleration to play video content that requires using these codecs.
Additionally, it also affects any user who uses open-source graphics drivers, even if they run iGPUs on Intel chips. Fedora developers have not yet provided any clarity on this, but you can test it out for yourself.
[...]
The patents for H.264 and H.265 are with a company called MPEG LA, which specializes in holding patents in the video codecs and display standards sector.
Whereas the patent for VC-1 is under SMPTE, which is a group run by professionals from the media and entertainment sector.
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All is not lost yet; Linux users have other codecs available to them. Users who are willing to take the extra step of installing OpenH264 will still have the ability to play back media in that format without infringement worries. Airlie also suggested that having OpenH264 installed might be sufficient to allow the re-enabling of other H.264 codecs on the same system — but it is not clear that any lawyers have signed off on that idea. Some of the disabled functionality may yet show up in third-parties like RPM Fusion as well. Meanwhile, though, this episode is just another reminder of the threats posed by software patents. We are free to write any software we like — but we may not be free to run it.
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Copyrights
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In Hunley v. Instagram, several photographers are suing Instagram for copyright infringement, that is, when someone copies content without a license or fair use defense in the United States. Hunley, as the plaintiffs—the ones doing the suing—claim that Instagram is guilty of copyright infringement by allowing others to embed photos on other websites.
They are saying that in addition to grabbing the “embed code”—a short snippet of web code that allows embedding content into another page—website designers and users should also have to negotiate a copyright license to display the embedded content. This would drastically change how we build and use services online.
While this specific case is about embedding images around the web, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs could easily make it more difficult to embed anything in other contexts around the Internet, not just the web.
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Subscription-based pirate IPTV services continue to thrive but according to major rightsholders desperate to protect their investments, platforms offering free IPTV streams are also a problem. Services in both categories have now been submitted to the US government for action. Here’s an overview of the services and why they’re causing disruption.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Despite previous forecasts to the contrary, God opened the skies up in the evening, and I had clear skies to work with from 8pm AKDT onward. So I was unexpectedly given a great opportunity for stargazing late in the evening, and I was not disappointed. I got to do some work with my 60mm refractor, drawing some star fields near Cassiopia and Perseus, which was good. But the highlight of the evening was an awesome, dynamic display of green aurora, which started sometime around 9pm and was very energetic around 10pm-10:30pm. The display was still ongoing when I quit for the evening at about 10:30pm.
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Coming out of the pandemic, October’s been my first big month of travel in years. I always fly carry-on only, but almost had to check a bag when I realized my favorite shaving foam no longer comes in TSA-approved sizes. I tried other brands and various gels and all left me with cuts and burns. On my last trip I ended up buying a full size can of foam and leaving it in the hotel. What a waste!
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Technical
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Internet/Gemini
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Gonna take down my Gemini capsule for a few days. It’ll back up soon.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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