Code readability is important and most professionals take coding conventions to heart, using pycodestyle you can make your code more readable to others by making it more standard by conforming to certain coding conventions.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Zoom Client on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Zoom is a communications technology platform that provides video telephony and real-time online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform. The Zoom meetings application offers a range of features and is easy to use, making it a popular choice for remote teams and individuals. On Linux, the Zoom client is available as a downloadable package that can be installed on the most popular distributions, including Fedora, Ubuntu, and CentOS.
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 Zoom Client on a Fedora 37.
You can use the ::part CSS pseudo-element to style an element within a shadow tree.
Dual monitors using a laptop as a second display. This guide assumes that you are using a Debian based distro (X11 only). Both devices must be connected to the same network.
These days, YAML is used as the configuration file format for an increasing amount of systems that I need to set up and operate for work. I have my issues with YAML in general (1, 2), but in the process of writing configuration files for programs that use YAML, I've found an entirely practical one, which I will summarize this way: a YAML schema description is not actually documentation for a system's configuration file.
One of the things that I use Linux libvirt for is a collection of virtual machines that I only NAT onto the network, instead of giving them their own distinct public IPs. When I first set this up, I didn't do anything special to give these NAT VMs consistent IPs or any names at all, which made it a bit annoying when I wanted to SSH in to one (most of them are Fedora VMs, so I can actually do that). Eventually I went through the effort to set up fixed, static IPs for these and give them names that I could use, which has turned out to be much more convenient.
There’s been a lot of hype lately around the CSS :has() pseudo-class. And rightly so! It’s basically the “parent selector” we’ve been asking for for years. Today I want to focus on ways we can use :has() to make HTML forms even better.
Is that email attachment too large? Does imessage insist on converting images to crappy MMS messages when you send to non-iPhone people?
You could always upload the file to Google Drive and just send a link. Or you could host your own file sharing platform, with only a single simple CGI script.
I made one, and I use it.
Valve released another bunch of updates for the Steam Deck and Desktop Steam Beta Clients, along with a small Steam Deck OS Preview (SteamOS) update.
Klei continuing to do great work here to expand the excellent Oxygen Not Included, along with a fancy new animated short that I always enjoy from them. This update is for both the base game and the Spaced Out expansion.
Needing a good UI for managing Razer hardware on Linux? RazerGenie is one (of a few) choice, and a big 1.0 release just went out. It can work with Razer devices thanks to the excellent€ OpenRazer project, which bundles a ton of drivers together to get loads of devices working nicely with all the added extras.
Team PSXITA have released Psxitarch v3 for PS4, a Linux distribution entirely optimized for the PS4. This distro release is really different from most other Linux releases for PS4 out there, because it’s been thought from the ground up to run on PS4/PS4 Pro.
This week is a twofer! We have the long-awaited Wayland fractional scaling support, and the equally long-awaited ultimate fix for Plasma’s multi-screen woes! Let’s take them one at a time...
The Wayland protocol for fractional scaling was finally merged last week. Kenny Levinson proposed the protocol itself, and this week, the KDE and Qt implementations for Plasma 5.27 which have been done by David Edmundson were merged. Thanks a lot, everyone!
On the shortlist of things to try on my new laptop has been Guix. I have been using Guix on my rsnapshot-based backup server since 2018, and experimented using it on a second laptop but never on my primary daily work machine. The main difference with Guix for me, compared to Debian (or Trisquel), is that Guix follows a rolling release model, even though they prepare stable versioned installation images once in a while. It seems the trend for operating system software releases is to either following a Long-Term-Support approach or adopt a rolling approach. Historically I have found that the rolling release approach, such as following Debian testing, has lead to unreliable systems, since little focus was given to system integration stability. This probably changed in the last 10 years or so, and today add-on systems like Homebrew on macOS gives me access to modern releases of free software easily. While I am likely to stay with LTS releases of GNU/Linux on many systems, the experience with rolling Guix (with unattended-upgrades from a cron job to pull in new code continously) on my backup servers has been smooth: no need for re-installation or debugging of installations for over four years!
Starting with Fedora 36 it’s been possible to run Gnome using Wayland on NVIDIA cards. The experience was not perfect. Some programs, like the mpv media player, had notable display issues and had to be forced to launch in X11 mode, using XWayland. However, the experience has been improving steadily and with Fedora 37 I haven’t found any major drawbacks to running Wayland on my NVIDIA system. Notably, even Firefox works using Wayland, and WebGL apps or Google Maps run in hardware acceleration mode.
During AnsibleFest 2022, we announced the launch of Ansible validated content. This new initiative is focused on delivering an expert-led approach for automating your platform portfolio across infrastructure, networking, cloud, security and edge use cases.
Ansible validated content is a new set of collections containing pre-built YAML content (such as playbooks or roles) to address the most common automation use cases. You can use Ansible validated content out-of-the-box or as a learning opportunity to develop your skills. It's a trusted starting point to bootstrap your automation: use it, customize it and learn from it.
GitOps as a way of working has dramatically increased in popularity over the past few years. It can be quite a different approach to application and cluster deployments for folks new to storing configuration as code.
Evolving out of DevOps workflows came GitOps: a set of principles to guide your deployment processes based on using Git as a single source of truth. With a Kubernetes controller monitoring your clusters, GitOps compares the system you’ve described in Git to what is actually deployed. A change to your cluster or to your Git repository will automatically trigger an action - notifying you of the change or even self-healing to match your ‘desired state’.
2022 marked the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. While some tech companies beckoned employees back to their offices, Red Hat is embracing flexibility (in a conference room or stretchy pants).
Today we present a new way to use the Red Hat Insights Advisor service by using system tags to enable extended security hardening recommendations.
Not all systems are equal. For example, a web server and a workstation have different security profiles. For systems with extended security hardening recommendations enabled, Advisor identifies additional risks and remediation steps.
In November 2022, Red Hat published their ninth Global Tech Outlook, a report conducted by Red Hat that explores the challenges and funding priorities of thousands of customers for the upcoming year. Mirroring last year, talent and skills gaps were highlighted as the top barrier to digital transformation, emphasizing the importance of both hiring knowledgeable team members and upskilling existing employees on key technology. In fact, skills training is one of the top non-IT funding priorities for customers heading into 2023.
This year, Red Hat hosted dozens of pioneering service providers, ecosystem partners and technologists to come together to share real 5G deployment stories—diving deep into the open technologies and processes behind them. Through this event, we’ve continued to learn so much about 5G networks—how to monetize, innovate, close the skills gap, while digging into the critical role open source technologies play in making this happen. From overall strategy to edge computing to automation and sustainability, we’ve learned about building resilient networks that will power the next generation of eco conscious cars, healthcare applications, robotics, the list goes on and on. While Open5G hosted over 40 outstanding sessions, I wanted to share some of the big highlights we can take away as we plan for 2023.
Large scale, major release updates can be daunting. Red Hat can help.
This article explores using Red Hat Insights to run a pre-upgrade analysis on all (or a group of) systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in your fleet. Results are displayed in a simple, consolidated view, giving you management-ready reporting on your organization’s OS upgrade readiness.
The LapPi 2.0 is a DIY laptop kit with an acrylic enclosure, a UPS HAT with a 18650 battery holder, and off-the-shelf parts including speakers, a touchscreen display, a Raspberry Pi camera, and a wireless keyboard that’s suitable for the Raspberry Pi 4 and pretty much any other small single board computer from Radxa, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, FriendlyElec, Hardkernel, and others.
We’ve seen several Raspberry Pi laptops over the years with the CrowPi L and Pi-Top, and I have to say the LapPi 2.0 is not the most eye-pleasing or sophisticated design, but at least, it’s versatile and not limited to the Raspberry Pi family.
Tonight's story time: the Power Macintosh that wouldn't make any sound in BeOS R5, how I figured out the problem, and how I hacked the sound driver to fix it. (Download link at the end.)
My favourite beige Power Mac is the Power Macintosh 7300 and its relatives. They're compact, capable, upgradable and easy to work on. For as much as people raved about the pull-down side door of the Yosemite G3 and the Power Mac G4, they owe their design to their fold-out Outrigger Power Mac ancestors which did it all and did it horizontally — and in some ways did it better.
Over the past months, we’ve been working with two partner organisations, Team4Tech and Kenya Connect, to support computing education across the rural county of Machakos, Kenya.
Every year, Itch.io hosts Open Jam, a game jam where developers build an open source video game over a weekend. This year's Open Jam ran from October 28th to October 31st.
Open Jam is a friendly competition with no prizes, which makes it a great opportunity to try new things, experiment with a new game idea, or learn a new programming language. While projects don't necessarily need to be built with open source tools, the game submission needs to have an open source license. Entries in Open Jam get "karma" or bonus points for how open source the game is, such as how many open source tools were used to create it or running on an open source operating system.
Each Open Jam has a specific theme, and this year's theme was "Light in the Darkness." It's up to each developer to interpret how to apply that theme to their own game. I entered the Open Jam with a game called the Toy CPU, a simulation of a simple computer that you program using "switches and lights," similar to an old-style Altair 8800 or IMSAI 8080.
Joplin meets these criteria except for additional features. Joplin isn’t a feature-rich app like Evernote and Notion. It’s bare bones, so it’s impractical for anyone looking for something that offers all the bells and whistles.
For example, with Evernote, you access mobile scanning, advanced templates, and OCR for images. Joplin has none of these features. So if you need a more feature-rich note-taking app, Evernote is a better option.
Varnish Cache is an open-source web application accelerator that helps optimize web pages for faster loading times. It does this by storing copies of web pages in memory. When a user requests a webpage, they get back the cached version instead of having to wait for the original web server to generate the page from scratch.
Late 2017, we announced our desire to create a free, decentralised and federated alternative to YouTube.
Five years later, we are releasing PeerTube v5, a tool used by hundreds of thousands people on a thousand interconnected platforms to share over 850,000 videos.
The neat thing about a <select> element is that, when clicked, it triggers a menu drawn by the underlying operating system in a manner best suited (and accessible) to the given user’s device and preferences.
One of the things I really miss from my days using Jekyll, is the use of data files. Can this be done in WordPress?
So what do I mean by data files? Well, it’s probably best that I use an example.
Kubernetes v1.24 introduced an alpha quality implementation of improvements for handling a non-graceful node shutdown. In Kubernetes v1.26, this feature moves to beta. This feature allows stateful workloads to failover to a different node after the original node is shut down or in a non-recoverable state, such as the hardware failure or broken OS.
[...]
In a Kubernetes cluster, it is possible for a node to shut down. This could happen either in a planned way or it could happen unexpectedly. You may plan for a security patch, or a kernel upgrade and need to reboot the node, or it may shut down due to preemption of VM instances. A node may also shut down due to a hardware failure or a software problem.
To trigger a node shutdown, you could run a shutdown or poweroff command in a shell, or physically press a button to power off a machine.
A node shutdown could lead to workload failure if the node is not drained before the shutdown.
In the following, we will describe what is a graceful node shutdown and what is a non-graceful node shutdown.
It is a mess. The code from the blog post works on most systems, but most systems these days use 8-bit characters; the article is about systems where a character is defined as 16-bits (allowed by the C Standard) and where an integer is also 16-bits (again, allowed by the C Standard and is the minimum size an integer can be per the C specification). It's rare to have non-8-bit characters on desktop computers these days (or even tablet and smart phones) but it seems it's not quite that rare in the embedded space, where you have DSPs that have weird architectures and a charater is most likely the same size as an integer. And that's where the trouble starts.
The main issue is with fputc(). The C Standard states: [...]
Creating software isn’t only about writing code; you need to build all the source code to get a usable software artifact. This build process can be done manually, but it can become difficult as you start working on larger projects. This is where tools like CMake and Make can help you automate the process. Both of these tools allow you to go from source code to executables.
In this article, you’ll learn how CMake and Make work and the key differences between them. You’ll then implement CMake and Make to see their differences in action.
One of the things I knew right when I started at my current job is that a lot of my work would be for "nothing." I'm saying this because I work (as Staff SRE) for an observability vendor, and engineers tend to operate under the idea that the work they're doing is going to make someone's life easier, lower barriers of entry, or just make things simpler by making them understandable.
While this is a worthy objective that I think we are helping, I also hold the view that any such improvements would be used to expand the capacities of the system such that its burdens remain roughly the same.
I like how the day 14 puzzle sounds, because I think it'll give me an opportunity to show off yet another way to have Rust embedded in a web page.
From my perspective, the obvious question is: how might ML and GAI change programming? In particular, the rapid advances in GAI have led many to assume that we will gradually do away with programming as a human activity. Although it's rarely spelt out explicitly, this implies that a GAI system can take in a human description (or "specification") and produce usable software from it. At a small scale, this is already possible, with the best known example being CoPilot.
The current generation of LLMs uses natural language as an input/output. This is convenient (and impressive) for human interaction, but what about computer-to-computer communication?
Suppose you would like to check that a string is not present in a large document. In C, you might do the following using the standard function strstr: [...]
Not so fast! My own experiments with the underlying technology suggest we have a ways to go before we get there.
Still, what is different about ChatGPT versus previous AI wunderkinds is that it isn’t just the tech and business media who are paying attention: Regular folks are too.
Last week I dove into the topic of psychological safety and how to build a culture where employees feel comfortable enough to speak up with ideas, concerns or even to admit mistakes.
Of the 4 stages of psychological safety, the stage I feel isn’t discussed enough is the challenger safety stage.
Challenger safety is about feeling comfortable challenging the status quo or ideas.
Indulge me for a minute! Think about the last time you challenged someone at work. I mean truly looked someone dead in the eye and maybe said something along the lines of, “I don’t agree with your approach.”
How did that make you feel?
Did you get that sinking feeling in your stomach? Did you instantly worry about how this would impact your relationship? Or worse, did you think about how this would impact your growth at the company?
Your data pipeline is too slow, or uses too much memory. How should you speed it up?
One obvious solution is purchasing better hardware. With cloud computing, switching to a computer with more cores, or adding more RAM, can be done in minutes or seconds. Given that developer time is expensive, switching to more powerful hardware is often seen as a cheap first solution to slow software.
But there are longer-term costs involved that aren’t immediately visible. If your first solution to any performance problem is spending more money on hardware, you may eventually end up with software that is unnecessarily slow, hard to speed up, and extremely expensive.
There are so many brilliant posts on GPT-3, demonstrating what it can do, pondering its consequences, vizualizing how it works. With all these out there, it still took a crawl through several papers and blogs before I was confident that I had grasped the architecture.
So the goal for this page is humble, but simple: help others build an as detailed as possible understanding of the GPT-3 architecture.
The use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques, specifically ML (Machine Learning) and its various sub-fields, is changing many fields and undoubtedly will change more in the coming years. Most of us are at least generally familiar with the idea of using ML to identify patterns in data. More recently Generative AI ("GAI" for the rest of this post), in the form of systems such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, has made itself more widely known. Rather than simply classify new data, GAI can, as the name suggests, generate new outputs that conform to the underlying patterns contained in the model [1]. Existing ML systems, in general, and GAI systems particularly, are almost certainly the harbingers of further advances. This inevitably leads to speculation about "what's next?"
Using Pod::To::HTML2 a new custom FormatCode, D<> (D for deprecation), can be made to help with the Raku Documentation process. The new FormatCode should show a span of documentation that is deprecated in some way. This happens a lot when Rakudo is being upgraded. However, people using older versions of Rakudo need to understand what has changed, as well as what has been added. So it is not a good idea to delete older information, but it is not efficient to re-generate the entire Documentation suite for each new version of Rakudo.
[...]
However, this is about making a bespoke plugin to implement a new Formatting Code. Pod::To::HTML2 interprets specified local sub-directories whose name does not contain the character _ after the first character of the name to contain plugin information.
Pod::To::HTML2 is a sub-class of ProcessedPod, so below I shall mention instances of ProcessedPod, though possibly I should be saying instances of Pod::To::HTML2.
The CSS Working Group is continuing a debate over the best way to define nesting in CSS. And if you are someone who writes CSS, we’d like your help.
Nesting is a super-popular feature of tools like Sass. It can save web developers time otherwise spent writing the same selectors over and over. And it can make code cleaner and easier to understand.
It’s understandable that the company is not planning to implement RSS feeds. Believe me, I know how many more ideas a company usually has than time it has to implement them. However, that second sentence poking me in the eye for even asking such a silly question seems rather unnecessary.
Now I’m certainly reading this unkindly. I simply find it infuriating when companies botch simple customer support so readily. It will be my downfall because it makes me naively believe that I could succeed at various businesses simply because I’d demand human, kind communication with customers.
The SHA-1 algorithm, one of the first widely used methods of protecting electronic information, has reached the end of its useful life, according to security experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The agency is now recommending that IT professionals replace SHA-1, in the limited situations where it is still used, with newer algorithms that are more secure.
Someone complained earlier today that my Pixel 6A article was picked up by Planet Emacslife. While I wasn’t involved in adding my blog there and I never promised to write exclusively about Emacs, this is a good opportunity to remind people my blog has several topic-specific RSS feeds about: [...]
For a while in 2021, I regularly had a newsletter on Revue to put a lot of my "seconds" or things that I wrote but don't feel really "fit" on this blog. It seems that Revue is being shut down as a result of the Elon Musk owning Twitter fiasco so I'm going to act ahead of the curve and shut it down now.
The blog Wait But Why is the kind of cultural artifact that some people become intensely interested in, inhaling the website 10,000 words at a time. But unlike niche hobbies and internet corners, readers feel a great need to show WBW to everyone they know because, as a blog about the human experience, the topics feel so universal. Except I’ve sent Wait But Why posts to dozens of people and nobody has really cared. Half a million people read the blog per month, and I’ve probably never met any of them. As a person named Preston S. said in a Wait But Why Q&A: “As one of the many (I’m assuming here) people out there who read snippets of your posts to an unreceptive spouse …” Can’t argue with that, Preston S. Maybe it’s true that the best things in life are polarizing. Today’s Tedium is a trip through the exhaustive and wide-eyed world of Wait But Why and its author, Tim Urban—and this includes an interview, because I somehow got him on the phone.
An interview with the UW computational linguist Emily M. Bender, who was quoted in, then rebutted, science journalist Steven Johnson’s big New York Times story on OpenAI.
Hassam: Are there any novel ideas from Awk that have yet to be adopted by others?
Dr. Kernighan: The main idea in Awk was associative arrays, which were newish at the time, but which now show up in most languages either as library functions (hashmaps in Java or C++) or directly in the language (dictionaries in Perl and Python). Associative arrays are a very powerful construct, and can be used to simulate lots of other data structures.
I guess the pattern-action paradigm was also not novel but not widely used at the time. It's an effective way to organize some kinds of computations.
Hassam: Are there any novel ideas from your languages that have yet to be adopted by others?
Dr. Wirth: Mostly the "philosophy" of simplicity and regulalrity of the concepts. I always focused on the "teachability" of a language. After all, one should not teach a language, but programming. One must focus on programming concepts, and not on language features.
Hassam: Are there any neat ideas from Lisp that have yet to go mainstream?
Dr. Fahlman: It took a long time for Lisp's automatic storage allocation and garbage collection to go mainstream. This is more than "neat", it eliminates a whole class of bugs that are among the most subtle and difficult to find and fix. But people resisted this as being too inefficient until Java came along and made the idea more mainstream.
The other "neat" idea -- still not "mainstream", as far as I know -- is to represent programs as the same kind of objects that the system is good at manipulating: linked lists, in the case of Lisp. The transformation from text to list-structured representations is trivial (that's why Lisp programs have some many parentheses), and you can run that code directly in an interpreter, or compile it on the fly into fast, efficient machine code.
In his work towards Open Science, Dr. Pampel always strove for reconciliation and was not known for openly attacking the publishers. So while Dr. Pampel’s position may have been to at least try and work with the corporations rather than against them, it never seemed in doubt that he was on Team Scholarship. The Team Scholarship that values the public good over profit, that values the needs of society and science over those of corporations. The fact that of all the corporations involved in academia, Dr. Pampel has decided to now side with the single one that like no other stands for investing billions of $/€ over decades to flagrantly and unapologetically oppose everything Team Scholarship strives for, just reeks of hypocrisy, even betrayal – no matter what he tries to say to defend his decision. One can easily imagine the glee of Elsevier about their latest acquisition. Whether and to what extent the Berlin Einstein-Center/Foundation is also funded by Elsevier, is currently subject to a freedom of information request.
If universities hope to graduate ‘digitally literate’ members of society, then the skills above should be cultivated in every student, regardless of field of study. Strategies that promote active learning also help students develop important critical thinking skills.
These skills can be the underpinnings of the ability to test facts later in life and to help to develop more rational and thoughtful members of society.
With the growing circulation of confusing and false ‘facts’ facilitated by the ubiquity of technology and the digital space, it is time to manage the digital commons as a global public good. Higher education institutions must work to make lying wrong again.
South Korea, also a major computer chip producer, should take note and increase its presence in global semiconductor supply chains, the Business Korea report said. Both countries face high geopolitical risks, such as invasions by North Korea or China, and a larger role in a key part of the electronics industry would reduce the risk of military action taking place.
For comparison, a single box of long matches is about €£4. So I only need to use this thing 174 times before it has paid for itself. NICE!
I realize that it was just the other day that I wrote about how, since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, everything old is new again among antivaxxers. What I did not mention is that, when it comes to pure antivax bonkers, it’s hard to surpass what has been happening in Florida lately, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has apparently decided that the path to becoming President runs through recycling every old “health freedom” antivaccine trope I’ve been writing about for 18 years now, after having used them to dictate Florida’s pandemic policy for nearly two years. Examples of how Gov. DeSantis has done this include his embrace of the “Urgency of Normal,” which advocated reopening schools with, in essence, no COVID-19 mitigations “for the children”; his appointment of Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who first made his name promoting hydroxychloroquine as a cure-all for COVID-19 with the grifting right wing conspiracy group known as America’s Frontline Doctors, and then pivoted to opposing in essence any COVID-19 mitigations that are not completely voluntary or inconvenience anyone; and the conversion of the Florida Department of Health into a pandemic-opposing antivax organization, complete with dubious studies falsely extrapolating their results to argue that vaccinating children against COVID-19 is more dangerous than letting them catch COVID-19.
Congress this week passed a bill that takes aim at the risk of improper influence when government contractors work for both federal agencies and private-sector clients. President Joe Biden is expected to sign the bill.
Nobody working to bring a $346 million Microsoft project to rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods. But in a cluster of yucca plants and cedar that needed to be cleared, surveyors happened upon a cemetery. The largest of the stones bore the name Stephen Moseley, “died December 3, 1930,” in a layer of cracking plaster. Another stone, in near perfect condition and engraved with a branch on the top, belonged to Stephen’s toddler son, Fred, who died in 1906.
“This is not as bad as it sounds,” an engineering consultant wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft and to an official in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, who was helping clear hurdles for the project — an expansion of a massive data center. “We should be able to relocate these graves.”
Software subscriptions and online tracking are two sides of the same coin: they’re attempts to make regular income off continual effort. Depending on your perspective, they either make software and websites cheaper to use, or they come with nasty strings attached.
On the back of an index card, they began drafting a list of the most critical government databases to preserve: a list of the country’s population; the land ownership registry; the tax system; the anti-corruption and procurement systems; and the justice, education, and health care systems. As he left the embassy that day with a list of Ukraine’s most precious digital assets in hand, a distinct thought passed through Maxwell’s mind: “Don’t mess this up.”
Over the next several months, Amazon Web Services helped Kyiv migrate over 10 petabytes, a colossal amount of crucial government data, from across almost 30 government ministries to the cloud and out of the reach of Russia’s invading forces. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, would later credit the move with helping to preserve the Ukrainian government and economy.
The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit company, has announced the launch of its own open-source program called the Overture Maps Foundation (via Gizmodo). This new project is placing its efforts into curating and collating map data from around the world using multiple data sources. Overture's mission is stated as being one that can "enable current and next-generation map products by creating reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data."
Once upon a time, there was a straightforward good way of displaying things like alerts over time or health check failures over time in Grafana, as I wrote about in How I'm visualizing health check history in Grafana. Unfortunately Grafana broke the (once) very nice Discrete panel starting in 8.4, either through an unfixed bug or through an incompatible API change (in a minor release). As of the current Grafana 9.3.1 (as I write this), I've managed to find only five potential options among first and third party panels, none of them excellent.
After President Biden signed the executive order that implemented rules for the Trans-Atlantic Data Policy Framework in the US in October, the Commission conducted an assessment into the US legal framework that the bill was based upon. That assessment, released Tuesday, says that the legislation ensures an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies.
Now, the draft adequacy decision has been transmitted to the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) for its opinion.
According to TV2, Danske Bank is the only bank in the country to still provide cashiers – but at only two of its branches: in Copenhagen and Aarhus.
Inevitably, soon they will close too.
In announcing the legislation, Rubio’s press office cited the “risk of TikTok being used to spy on Americans” by the Chinese communist regime. TikTok, which boasts more than 1 billion users for its short-form video entertainment app, has been a political football since its inception because it is owned and controlled by Chinese [Internet] giant ByteDance.
“This isn’t about creative videos — this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day,” Rubio said in a prepared statement about the Senate bill. “We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”
Following the arrest of the Greek Social Democrat MEP Eva Kaili on serious corruption charges, the EU Parliament today voted to revoke her Vice-Presidency with one vote against and two abstentions. Now, however, further consequences must follow in order to increase transparency in the EU Parliament and prevent further incidents of corruption in the future, demands MEP Dr Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party). In addition, Kaili’s involvement in digital legislative proposals, which she had recently significantly influenced, must be scrutinised.
We’ve written a bunch of posts concerning KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which is one of those moral panic kinds of bills that politicians and the media love to get behind, without really understanding what they mean, or the damage they’d do. We’ve covered how it will lead to greater surveillance of children (which doesn’t seem likely to make them safer), how the vague language in the bill will put kids at greater risk, how the “parental tools” provision will be used to harm children, and a variety of other problems with the bill as well. There’s a reason why over 90 different organizations asked Congress not to slip it into a year-end must pass bill.
Today, the European Commission issued a new adequacy decision replacing the"Privacy Shield" decision, that was previously invalidated by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) over US surveillance. The CJEU required (1) that US surveillance is proportionate within the meaning of Article 52 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR) and (2) that there is access to judicial redress, as required under Article 47 CFR. Updated US law (Executive Order 14086) seems to fail on both requirements, as it does not change the situation from the previously applicable PPD-28. There is continuous "bulk surveillance" and a "court" that is not an actual court. Therefore, any EU "adequacy decision" that is based on Executive Order 14086 will likely not satisfy the CJEU.
The House of Representatives select committee will seek an unprecedented charge of insurrection against a former US president, according to US media.
The panel is expected to publish its final report next week.
The May 16th raid had potential to be the bloodiest yet. It was a mystery, though, right up to the last minute. For a couple of months his crew, then known as Squadron X, had been training for a “special” job over lakes in the English Midlands, learning to drop bouncing bombs that had to be released at precisely 60 feet and 200 knots. They bounced because they were set spinning in the bomb bay beforehand. It was all top secret, and none of the crew knew what the target was. On the night before the raid they learned they were to attack three dams, the Möhne, the Eder and the Sorpe, to flood the industrial centre of Germany. Bouncing bombs could breach the defences of the first two dams. But his crew’s target, the Sorpe, built of earth-banked concrete and set among hills, defied any bomb-sight and couldn’t be flown at directly. They would have to skim very low along the dam and drop an inert bomb, with 6,600lb of explosives, at the estimated centre of it. They had not practised that.
A little over a decade ago, Gary Dye, then a gas measurement engineer at NW Natural, Oregon’s largest gas utility, lost faith in his employer to responsibly deal with what he believed to be systematic inaccuracies among the company’s hundreds of thousands of gas meters.€
On a quest to tame these inaccuracies, in late 2011, he proposed a simple technical fix that he claims will “result in more accurate billing, extended meter lives, reduced landfill waste, and a more efficient utilization of [utility] personnel.”
Alex De Vries has published Cryptocurrencies on the road to sustainability: Ethereum paving the way for Bitcoin, a detailed review of the energy implicantions of Etereum's switch from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. This analysis broadly concurs with mine from The Power Of Ethereum's Merge that while the power reduction of Ethereum's network is of the order of 99+%, the impact on the total energy consumption of cryptocurrencies is much less. Below the fold I discuss the details.
Moreover, a section headed "Acceptable Use Policy" states: "Neither Customer nor those that access an Online Service through Customer, may use an Online Service: to mine cryptocurrency without Microsoft's prior written approval."
If the most recent decade is a guide to the future, Diener says, the district can only expect to receive enough water to grow crops on about 300,000 acres in an average year. That's half the original area of Westlands Water District, and 40% less than what's available to grow crops today.
What's worse, the water comes in bursts. In 2017, when rain drenched California, Westlands actually turned away potential water deliveries because no growers wanted it. Other years, the district gets no water at all, except for what it can buy on the open market at exorbitant prices. Such drastic fluctuations in water availability have been especially tough on growers with almond trees that require water every year just to stay alive. Growers now are ripping out some of those parched orchards.
What's urgently needed, according to Diener and other growers, is the infrastructure to store water underground when it's abundant, so that it's available when the rains stop.
It was called the Plan for Transformation, the most ambitious public housing makeover in U.S. history.
Under the plan, launched in 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority would demolish most of the city’s public housing developments, displacing thousands of families. Then, over the next 10 years, the agency would replace or repair 25,000 units of housing while bringing new investment to low-income communities.
The reality is that Hepfner should know that these are just links which include credit and certainly cannot be reasonably described as theft. Indeed, canvassing Hepfner’s own Facebook page reveals that she has regularly posted links to articles from the CBC.ca and Hamilton Spectator (here, here, here, and here).
Does Hepfner believe these are all examples of theft? If so, is she an accomplice to theft by posting the links in the first place? The links each take the reader to the source, generating potential ad revenue for the CBC or Hamilton Spectator. Is that a lack of credit? Ultimately, why does she think that Facebook should compensate those news outlets for the links that she posted? Or consider that she posted the same link on both Facebook and Twitter on the same day. Consistent with the bill she just voted for, why does she think that Facebook is stealing the link, but Twitter is not?
The suspended accounts include The Washington Post's Drew Harwell, The New York Times' Ryan Mac, CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, Voice of America's Steve Herman, The Intercept's Micah Lee, Mashable's Matt Binder, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, and independent journalists Aaron Rupar and Tony Webster.
Musk, who has reinstated literal Nazis on the platform in the name of free speech, has claimed that the real-time flight trackers available on other larger platforms pose a risk of violence. He claimed that a man had followed a car carrying his young son because he thought it was him earlier this week, vowing legal action against the owner of the @elonjet account even though it's unclear how the flight tracker would aid someone in identifying and tracking a car. Musk had the Twitter policy on the flight trackers, which he had vowed not to ban, changed so to accommodate his complaints – days after criticizing previous Twitter management for restricting access to Hunter Biden laptop data and banning accounts that had not violated the actual terms of service.
Teen Vogue spoke with activists and organizers about Twitter’s uncertain future. They all requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about their work and concerns.
In the United States, leftist accounts, including mine, have been targeted for suspension after right-wing users organized a mass reporting campaign under false pretenses. Other left-wing organizers and media accounts fear they could be next. One Twitter user who spoke to Teen Vogue says the platform’s change of ownership threatens their livelihood — they often uses Twitter to report at protests — and their safety.
Since buying Twitter, Elon Musk has made radical changes that have sparked fears for the future of the platform, from firing half the staff to restoring ex-president Donald Trump's account and suspending those of several journalists.
AFP looks back at a rollercoaster two months at the Silicon Valley giant.
It is not immediately clear why Twitter, now owned by billionaire Elon Musk, suspended them, though some of the journalists covered and have been in some cases critical of Musk. Olbermann, shortly before being suspended, tweeted a link to a Mastodon social account that tracked Musk’s private jet (the Elon Musk jet account had been active on Twitter, until Musk changed the terms of service earlier this week to ban accounts that share real-time location information about private individuals).
On Thursday, Twitter accounts for at least nine journalists and one left-leaning political pundit were suspended. An antifascist and an anarchist media account were also canceled. The account for Mastodon, a platform that has emerged as one of Twitter’s major competitors, was suspended as well, and links to Mastodon and other autonomous, decentralized networks were blocked as “unsafe” links that could no longer be tweeted. Some of the suspensions were initially communicated as permanent, but Musk then stated in a tweet that they would last for seven days.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, who released the first batch of “Twitter files,” said that while he saw general warnings from the government to Twitter about possible foreign hacks, he saw no evidence of specific government involvement in Twitter’s decision to suppress the New York Post’s story on the Hunter Biden laptop.
But Jordan said that the revelations are enough to warrant more investigation.
What is ActivityPub and how does it work? At the simplest level, it is a method (protocol) for social media servers to talk to each other even if they are owned by different entities and dedicated to different purposes. Imagine that CBS News, BBC, National Review and Fox News create their own social media servers using the Mastodon user interface and ActivityPub as a server-to-server protocol. All that the owners of these sites must do to connect to each other is to list the server addresses of each other on a list of “federated sites.”
A variety of celebrities and politicians throughout the country and world have slammed Musk for the suspensions, which occurred Thursday night. Musk has said the journalists, who work for outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, have posted information about his location.
Those who were suspended were covering Twitter’s suspension of an account that tracks the location of Musk’s private jet using publicly available data. Musk defended suspending the account and those of journalists, stating on Twitter that “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.”
In the post, which was written by Mr. Carmack, 52, the technologist criticized his employer. He said Meta, which is in the midst of transitioning from a social networking company to one focused on the immersive world of the metaverse, was operating at “half the effectiveness” and has “a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort.”
Twitter is blocking users from tweeting links to many major servers for Mastodon. The bans were enacted sometime after after journalists and Mastodon’s own account were unexpectedly suspended.
I'm calling this model "the unbundled web," and I think RSS should be the primary method of interop. (The term "decentralized" has already been co-opted by all those bitcoin people, so I'm using "unbundled" as a synonym with less baggage.)
That's a pretty high-level view of things. Over the past several months I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it looks like if you zoom in to the next level. If I had the ears of a bunch of people working on publishing, reading, and community apps, what features would I ask them to implement? What features should I implement in Yakread, my own reading app?
My Twitter account was suspended last night, around the same time that a wave of prominent journalists being suspended for criticizing Elon Musk.
My account suspension was a bit less egregious than how journalists were treated, but it’s still remarkable because I have several comparable data points from before Musks’s takeover.
Gjevjon is the creator of an all-lesbian group called the Hungry Hearts, an art project that produces music, live performances, and installations. In 2017, the Haugar Art Museum invited Gjevjon’s Hungry Hearts to participate in an exhibition on gender fluidity. At the time, Gjevjon warned the museum’s curator that trans activists would pressure management to exclude her.
Just a few days prior to the exhibition’s opening, Gjevjon was informed by museum management that they had received multiple complaints about her work, and in particular, the lyrics to a song she had produced that referenced vaginal anatomy. Her contributions were removed from the exhibition after the museum asserted her safety could not be guaranteed.
Prior to its removal Friday, the Pornhub Official channel had amassed nearly 900,000 subscribers. It was first launched in December 2014. The channel’s URL now displays a 404 (“not found”) error on the web.
Today, four Pirate Party Members of the European Parliament (Greens/EFA) and Stella Assange address US President Joe Biden in an open letter co-signed by 41 EU lawmakers, NGOs, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and many more, asking him to pardon Julian Assange. WikiLeaks co-founder Assange is currently imprisoned in the United Kingdom and waiting for extradition to the United States to stand trial on charges of espionage and computer misuse.
The silencing of prominent voices could raise the regulatory heat on Twitter, and possibly Mr. Musk’s other companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, which is a big recipient of government funding and projects. It could also hurt his push to get reluctant advertisers back onto the platform.
The action set off a wave of protests. News organizations, including The Times and CNN, have demanded that Mr. Musk explain his rationale. Supporters of the journalists argued on Twitter that the move was overly punitive.
Twitter suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists who cover Elon Musk on Thursday night, including Keith Olbermann and Aaron Rupar.
The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Mashable’s Matt Binder, the Intercept’s Micah Lee and Tony Webster have also been suspended, according to NBC News.
The discussion revolved around the suspension of numerous journalists. The accounts of Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O'Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Steve Herman of Voice of America and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster had all been suspended as of Thursday evening.
The Twitter account for Mastodon, a platform billed as a Twitter alternative, was also suspended early Thursday evening. Twitter accounts operated by NBC News journalists were unable to tweet any links to Mastodon pages. Mastodon was, however, trending on Twitter.
Videos obtained by VOA's Persian News Network, PNN, along with similar video posted to social media, show crowds marching and chanting anti-government slogans. PNN reported they also taunted Iranian security forces, including the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, comparing them to the terrorist group Islamic State.
In one video, demonstrators packing the streets can be heard chanting, "This nation wants freedom, this nation wants a settlement."
The government has responded with a harsh crackdown, leaving hundreds dead and thousands arrested, and leading to international condemnation and sanctions.
Today is International Day Against DRM 2022, so let's check in on my ebook collection statistics. It seems that this is becoming a biennial endeavour rather than a quarterly one, but hey, better late than never!
A Digiday report said that Netflix had allowed advertisers to take back money for ads that had not yet run. The Thursday report cites some instances in which Netflix had only delivered about 80 percent of the expected audience to advertisers.
The Amazon Spends Money To Sell Montague Portal hardcover and ebook sale has ended. Amazon has reverted the price to normal everywhere except for Kindle in the UK, and I’m sure that’ll follow soon. At first, I thought The Algorithm was drunk, but the hardcover sale stopped right when their spend crossed $500. That could be a coincidence, sure, but it’s a strangely regular number. Maybe someone at Amazon knew I’d take advantage of this and decided to give my career a hug? I will never know. This goes down as a Christmas miracle, and is hereby dubbed “the gift of the Bezi.”
Google's decision to completely deindex pirate sites from search results is spreading across Europe. Earlier this year the MPA admitted that around 10,000 domains had already been removed but today's figure is likely to be much higher. Takedown notices on the Lumen Database and a report published in Lithuania cast additional light on a stealthy but massive piracy deindexing program.
Hi there, I am back into gemini. Long story short, ever since I moved back to Brazil I wasn't able to setup my Odroid server back up. So, now I'm using flounder.online to host my Gemini site under my own domain. Anyway, more updates coming soon. Bye for now.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.