12.19.22
Posted in Finance at 9:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Sirius accountancy has nothing to do with Sirius itself:
Registered for nearly 25 years already:
Address changing twice in a month, including 7 weeks ago:
Not the company’s own address:
The ex-wife’s (founder’s wife) appointment at Sirius ended:
A new company created less than 12 months earlier:
Summary: As we shall show later in the series (some time next month), Sirius ‘Open Source’ seems to be absconding (dodging) liabilities; moreover, it has operated through a newly-created ‘shell’ for several years already (a red flag)
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Videos at 9:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Story of GNU/Hurd was told a fortnight ago by DJ Ware
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 8:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The exploitative relationship at Sirius ‘Open Source’ was marked with a pinch of bullying and false accusations since 2018, causing health problems for some hard-working staff
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 8:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Aside from the bizarre working hours, there were other factors.
Summary: Abuse and bullying by management at Sirius ‘Open Source’ caused health problems for some staff; this is no laughing matter as there can be legal ramifications
THIS series is about halfway through now. It has only been prepared for a number of weeks and more material is being added as we go along.
Speaking for myself, I never took sick leave (or time off work for illness) in my entire time in the company. The same goes for my wife. But colleagues have had different experiences. One was rushed to the hospital with COVID-19 (from which he never fully recovered) and another suffered from abuse by managers. This abuse was causing health issues, in effect harming the health of staff, as we shall show much later in this series. This is what happens when completely untrained (not merely insufficiently or improperly trained) people are assigned or entrusted to manage a company with workers who are difficult to recruit and then retain. Skilled and experienced staff is very hard to find and keep.
As a reminder, managers at Sirius aren’t there for their skills but for nepotism. They posses no relevant skills and clients can notice this. Of course it can in turn lead to contract cancellations and non-renewals.
Here’s the relevant part of the report:
In later years the nepotism (to be expanded upon in the final section) became apparent. Some people were basically implicitly shielded from criticism.
For instance, one colleague was often late to the shift and did not apologise. Her partner did the same thing — basically came online almost half an hour late without apology. This is abject disrespect for colleagues, even people who have been in the company for much longer than them. The three-way relationship involved here will be explained later.
The above examples are merely a small subset and some are based on distant but accurate recollections of a rather dark era of distress. When a conceited manager is accusing, without any actual evidence, people of “cooking” while on the job it doesn’t sound like management but just an attempt to shame staff. As an aside, it was often unclear what the management itself was doing (if anything substantial at all). There was a sentiment that some management people colluded and perpetrated schemes against individual members of staff, not limited to Roy and Rianne. This often backfired. There were also examples of retaliation attempts. One common tactic, which can be witnessed outside the realm of high-tech as well, is to psychologically manipulate or assign people nonsensical things, e.g. asking then to perform totally meaningless jobs that don’t yield anything at all and don’t improve but rather worsen the service, encumbering staff, never to be checked by anyone (as if just to waste time). This happened in Sirius too.
The hypocrisy was not just routine; it was a new standard, e.g. reprimanding people for not picking up the phone fast enough even when there were upstream technical faults (supplier) or when Reception was far slower to pick up the phone, if at all. This sort of hypocrisy or these attempts to shame staff are akin to guilt tripping. Healthy work environments would weed out such behaviour outright. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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This week was packed with lots of goodies for everyone! We got new releases of the Firefox web browser, Kdenlive video editor, Ardour digital audio workstation, and PeaZip archive manager, as well as new distro releases including Linux Mint 21.1, Debian GNU/Linux 11.6, SystemRescue 9.06, and postmarketOS 22.12.
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Welcome to the DebugPoint Weekly Newsletter #22.15. This newsletter aims to keep you informed about the latest developments in the world of Linux and provide you with tips and tricks for using your Linux system. We’ll cover new releases, security updates, and interesting projects to keep an eye on. Whether you’re a seasoned Linux user or new to the world of open-source operating systems, we hope this newsletter helps you stay up-to-date and informed. Let’s dive in!
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Desktop/Laptop
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Aimed at hardware prosumers, the next-generation PineTab will be powered by the RK3566 system-on-a-chip (SoC), which the company claims will benefit a tablet due to low power consumption and heat output. It will sport two USB-C ports, a micro HDMI port, a microSD slot, a headphone jack, and two cameras.
The announcement led Pine64’s “December Update” video (opens in new tab) and accompanying blog post (opens in new tab), in which it stated that the original PineTab fell victim to pandemic component shortages, and “other project priorities”, such as its Linux-based smartphone, the PinePhone.
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The PineTab2 is a new, faster Linux tablet – and it’s not alone
In their December update, Pine64 announced the PineTab2, which is the successor to their PineTab from 2018. As a major change, the PineTab2 upgrades the slow A53-based A64 SoC with an A55-based Rockchip RK3566, the same chip that was used for the Quartz64, and that helped to mainline this chip and base board.
This new SoC should provide more speed and better power management, and according to some Android benchmarks, its performance should be comparable to that of a Snapdragon 450 chipset. Although this is a far cry from the RK3399 chipset in some of PINE64′s “pro” line (PinePhone/PineBook Pro), it is still faster than the PineTab’s A64, and comes with a far better GPU (Mali G52) thanks to being much more recent (2020 vs. 2015).
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Pine64 is working on a PineTab2, which will be the successor to the original Linux-powered tablet PineTab.
When Pine64 attempted to release the first PineTab, back in 2019, they ran into supply chain issues (and the rising popularity of their phones) that made the project impossible to complete.
Since then, Pine64 is now confident they can overcome the issues and finally deliver a Linux-based tablet, called the PineTab2.
The new version of the PineTab is benefiting from improved specs from the original, including a Rockchip RK3565 processor and a Mali-G52 GPU.
The Rockchip is a curious option, as it originally didn’t have much in the way of Linux support. Fortunately, Linux support for the chip has blossomed, so the PineTab2 shouldn’t have any problems.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of Manjaro 21.3.7 KDE Plasma Edition and some of the applications pre-installed.
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In this video, I cover an article about how threat actors have uploaded a massive 144,294 phishing-related packages on open-source package repositories, inluding NPM, PyPi, and NuGet
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OpenIndiana is a community supported operating system, based on the illumos kernel and userland. It was forked from the OpenSolaris project back in 2010. It is open source, free to use, and suitable for servers and workstations.
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Distrotube challenged me and the rest of the Linux community to a rap battle so there’s only 1 thing to do. I have to respond to show the old man what I can do.
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Brent’s been hiding your emails; we confront him and expose what he’s been keeping from the show.
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Kernel Space
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I'm announcing the release of the 6.0.14 kernel.
All users of the 6.0 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 6.0.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.0.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
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The exFAT file system is about to get faster in Linux 6.2, at least when creating files and directories, with the performance boost especially noticeable on low-end processors.
Microsoft released the exFAT specification and announced Linux support in August 2019, which was followed by a new exFAT implementation in Linux 5.7 (June 2020) from Samsung.
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Applications
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PeaZip is an open-source, cross-platform file archiver utility that supports over 200 archive formats.
It is a good utility to have installed on your Linux system if you want something that can easily handle most archiving tasks.
Now, with a recent update, PeaZip has become even better.
Let me take you through the release highlights.
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File manager in Linux systems plays an important role in organizing and managing the file system. It is the main interface used by Linux users to access the data and folders. With Linux file managers, you can easily copy, move, delete files or create new directories.
Linux users are spoilt for choice with a wide range of Linux file managers, each with its own unique features. To help you choose the Linux file manager that best meets your needs, here’s our review of 20 of the most popular Linux File Managers.
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Instructionals/Technical
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There’s no question Kubernetes is hard. Even from the very beginning, deploying a Kubernetes cluster can be a challenge for many IT pros. Fortunately, there’s a tool that makes this considerably easier, especially when you’re dealing with Ubuntu Server as the hosting platform. That tool is Microk8s, and I’m going to walk you through the way I deploy a Kubernetes cluster with regular success.
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The bash or any other shell uses multiple profiles, also known as shell configuration files, like “/etc/profile“, “~/.bash_profile“, “~/.profile“, “~/.bash_login“, “~/.bashrc“, “~/.bash_history“, and “~/.bash_logout” to configure the user’s interactive login or non-login shell.
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In UNIX/Linux, “watch” is a resourceful utility for monitoring updates in the specified command output (including errors) by refreshing the results every 2 seconds until it is interrupted using the “Ctrl+c” shortcut key.
It makes it easier for you to monitor the updates in background processes, disk usage, system uptime, tracking errors, and many more.
In this article, you will learn different ways to use the watch command, with practical examples.
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Personal Package Archive, commonly referred to as PPA, is a collection of packages on the Launchpad server. Linux users use it to add a third-party repository to their systems, which will help them install the packages on the system.
If you have recently added some repositories to the Ubuntu system and are no longer helpful, you can safely remove them through this article’s guidelines. This will not only free up space but also helps speed up the updating process, which may slow down due to crowded repositories.
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Shutting down a Linux system safely is beneficial since it helps protect your data, which may damage in case of improper shutdown. When you securely perform the shutdown, the system will be notified that it will go down soon and stop all the processes and services running on the system before the shutdown. You may also get approval to stop those services and in case of any important service running, you can skip the shutdown.
This article will show you different ways to shut down the Linux system safely.
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Git is a brilliant tool. It allows you to not only track your changes in a file through hooks but also seamlessly collaborate with other people. In that regard, Git is one tool that pushed the development of FOSS forward.
However, one of the biggest issues with Git is that it takes time and effort to manage your repositories. For example, committing and synchronizing these repositories can take two to three git commands. This makes managing them not only tedious but also prone to user error. Here we show you a few simple, yet effective Git hooks to better manage your repositories.
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In this video, we are looking at how to install DataGrip on KDE Neon
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ID Root ☛ How To Install Visual Studio Code on Fedora 37 [Ed: This is proprietary spyware of Microsoft; developers should shun it if they care for the future of GNU/Linux]
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to solve omitting directory error on Linux. For those of you who didn’t know, The “omitting directory” error is a message that appears when trying to list the contents of a directory in a Linux system using the “ls” command. The error message may appear as “ls: cannot access ‘directory’: No such file or directory” or “ls: cannot open directory ‘directory’: Permission denied”. This error indicates that the system is unable to access or list the contents of the specified directory.
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 fix for omitting directory errors on a Linux system. You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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Xfce 4.18 Desktop environment was recently made available for download. You can find plenty of changes and improvements on Xfce 4.18.
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Use Podman, systemd, OSBuild, and Kubernetes to package your entire application and all its dependencies in a container and run it anywhere.
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Today we are looking at how to install LMMS on a Chromebook.
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Jenkins is a platform aimed at making Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration not only possible but much easier. Find out how to install it on Rocky Linux.
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The community and Fedora Linux team develop and maintain the Fedora Media Writer app. This application writes any ISO image to your flash drive (USB stick). In addition, Fedora Media Writer also has features to download the ISO file directly from the Fedora Mirrors, provided you have a stable internet connection.
Moreover, it gives you a list of options for download – such as Official Editions, Emerging Editions, Spins and Fedora Labs images.
Not only that, but you can also use this nifty utility to write any other ISO images to your flash drive. It need not be the Fedora ISO always.
Although there are other popular utilities available for creating LIVE USBs, such as Etcher, Ventoy, and Rufus – you can still give this utility a try, considering the team develops it from mainstream Fedora Linux with contributors.
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VIM stands for Vi Improved, and it is one of the most popular text editors for Linux. It is based on the older vi text editor and has many improvements, making it even more powerful and user-friendly. VIM is a cross-platform text editor, meaning it can be used on different operating systems and distributions. It is a highly customizable text editor, allowing you to customize it to your liking. It also has a lot of features that regular text editors don’t have, such as syntax highlighting, auto-indentation, and tab completion.
VIM is also known to be very fast and efficient, making it perfect for developers who need to work quickly and accurately. In short, VIM is a great text editor for Linux, perfect for both novices and experienced users alike.
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To display the current date and time in a specific format in Bash, you can use the date command. The date command allows you to specify a format string that determines the format in which the date and time are displayed.
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WINE or Emulation
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This is the first release candidate for the upcoming Wine 8.0. It marks the beginning of the yearly code freeze period. Please give this release a good testing and report any issue that you find, to help us make the final 8.0 as good as possible.
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Games
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Lutris helps you install and play video games from all eras and from most gaming systems. By leveraging and combining existing emulators, engine re-implementations and compatibility layers, it gives you a central interface to launch all your games.
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Between 2022-12-12 and 2022-12-19 there were 90 new games validated for the Steam Deck. This time two fairly big entries, with FFVII Crisis Core Remastered as Verified, and Dwarf Fortress as Playable.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Reviews
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While my first impression of Guix 1.4rc2 on NV41PZ was only days ago, the final Guix 1.4 release happened. I thought I should give it a second try, although being at my summer house with no wired ethernet I realized this may be overly optimistic. However I am happy to say that a guided graphical installation on my new laptop went smooth without any problem. Practicing OS installations has a tendency to make problems disappear as well.
My WiFi issues last time was probably due to a user interface mistake on my part: you have to press a button to search for wireless networks before seeing them. I’m not sure why I missed this the first time, but maybe the reason was that I didn’t really expect WiFi to work on this laptop with one Intel-based WiFi card without firmware and a USB-based WiFi dongle. I haven’t went back to the rc2 image, but I strongly believe it wasn’t a problem with that image but my user mistake. Perhaps some more visual clues could be given that Guix found a usable WiFi interface, as this isn’t completely obvious now.
My main pet problem with the installation is the language menu. It contains a bazillion languages, and I want to find Swedish in it. However the list is half-sorted so it looks like it is alphabetized but paging through the list I didn’t find ‘svenska’, but did notice that the sorting restarts after a while. Eventually I find my language of chose, but a better search interface would be better. Typing ‘s’ to find it jumps around in the list. This may be a user interface design problem for me as well: I just may be missing whatever great logic I’m sure there is to find my language in that menu.
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New Releases
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We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Guix version 1.4.0!
The release comes with ISO-9660 installation images, a virtual machine image, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries—check out the download page. Guix users can update by running guix pull.
It’s been 18 months since the previous release. That’s a lot of time, reflecting both the fact that, as a rolling release, users continuously get new features and update by running guix pull; but let’s face it, it also shows an area where we could and should collectively improve our processes. During that time, Guix received about 29,000 commits by 453 people, which includes important new features as we’ll see; the project also changed maintainers, structured cooperation as teams, and celebrated its ten-year anniversary!
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Back in 2018, a YouTuber who went by the name QuidsUp posted a video stating that Deepin Linux was spyware that sent information from the desktop operating system back to servers in China via the CNZZ tracker. Since then, it’s been rumored that CNZZ has been removed from Deepin Linux. Deepin’s official response was that the collection of data was similar to what Google does with Analytics for collecting anonymized data.
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It took the development team on a longer journey than expected but we are proud to present you our latest Cassini release, named after the Nasa mission with the Cassini spacecraft carrying the Huygens probe.
Just like the Nasa mission that had its fair share of nail-biting moments, this release had some nail-biting test runs because getting here required a major overhaul in how we build our ISO. The last time we presented such a major overhaul was our ISO-Next release back in August 2021.
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Arch Linux-based EndeavourOS released Cassini, which now defaults to Dracut for automating the Linux boot process.
EndeavourOS is a user-friendly Arch Linux-based rolling release distro with some excellent GUI tools and a GUI installer that simplifies handling an Arch Linux system. In other words, it might be the perfect solution for less experienced Linux users to get the best Arch Linux offers.
Just in time for the Christmas holidays, with their last flight of the year, the “Linux astronauts” at EndeavourOS chose to bring their users the brand new Cassini release. So without further ado, let’s see what it has for us.
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EndeavourOS developer Bryan Poerwo announced today EndeavourOS Cassini as the latest ISO snapshot of this popular Arch Linux-based rolling-release distribution of the masses bringing the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software.
EndeavourOS Cassini comes a little over three months after EndeavourOS Artemis Nova and brings more freedom and diversity when installing the system by letting you choose between GRUB or systemd-boot as the default bootloader, as well as the ability to install the system without a bootloader.
In addition, Dracut is now used for installing the system and there’s dual-boot support for those installing EndeavourOS alongside Windows if you use either GRUB or systemd-boot as a bootloader. Moreover, GRUB’s submenu feature is now enabled by default and it’s now possible to create a new EFI partition.
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The BunsenLabs team are happy to announce the release of BunsenLabs Beryllium, based on Debian Bullseye.
For a variety of reasons Beryllium has appeared much later than we would have liked, and we would like to apologize to users who have been waiting to upgrade their systems.
We do think, though, that this is our best release to date, and hope you agree!
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Kernels 6.0.14 and 5.15.84 are now available in the PCLinuxOS Software Repository!
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Fedora and Red Hat
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Back in late 2016, I backed the ESPRESSObin on Kickstarter. The board has three network ports attached to an internal switch, u-boot on SPI flash, a mini PCIe port for wifi/Bluetooth, and a SATA port to attach a hard drive. I had intended to do things with the board. However, due to the shipped u-boot lacking distro boot support and an extremely convoluted u-boot image build process, I left the boards I got sitting on the shelf for a long time. I filed a bug report with Marvell in 2016 to have them add support, and someone from OpenWRT commented that they had added support to build the images there. I ended up running OpenWRT on one of mine for a networking project.
The other two I figured I should get working with Fedora. I used OpenWRT’s u-boot though it is missing a patch that fedora has to look for the DTBs in multiple locations, and unfortunately, the DTB file in U-Boot is not enough for the system to boot. While copying the DTB files to the EFI partition works, it is not ideal. As a result I used information from how OpenWRT builds the images to be able to build them using the Fedora built U-Boot image. The U-Boot images, along with an RPM, SRPM, and specfile can all be found here. This is a weird corner case and is really something that should be shipped by globalscale, as such I have decided not to submit the package for review in Fedora. With that said, they work well, and Fedora works well on the boards
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Across government, organizations have extended operations from the datacenter to multiple public clouds to the edge. Now they need to manage data and deliver intelligent capabilities across those environments. More than ever, they must achieve those goals with greater simplicity, consistency and availability, along with enhanced security of their IT operations.
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An increasing number of organizations understand the importance of IT automation in staying competitive. Routine tasks can take up a large portion of an IT department’s time, so automating those tasks often makes good business sense. IT automation can help your teams to be more productive, reduce errors, improve collaboration and free up time that can instead be spent on creating solutions that push your business forward.
Whether you’re an expert, or you’re just starting out in your IT automation journey, here are 12 webinars that you can watch right now.
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Happy holidays! It has been a very busy year for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but now 2023 is right around the corner. We have a lot more work to do in the New Year, but before it arrives, let’s take a look back at some of our most notable RHEL releases for 2022.
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If you are wondering is Docker supported on RHEL? Then the answer is YES. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 does support this container-based service. Although Podman is a popular alternative to this, users can still manually install Docker. In this article, we learn the steps to install the Docker engine on RedHat using the command terminal.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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The Xfce team recently released Xfce 4.18 desktop environment with stunning new features across modules. The most significant features include Thunar’s enhancements bringing split view, folder colour and many more. Do check out our detailed feature guide for this version.
However, due to a schedule mismatch, Ubuntu users and Xubuntu flavour don’t have this version. Xubuntu 22.04 LTS and Xubuntu 22.10 are released earlier this year. They both have Xfce 4.16 desktop version.
Thanks to the staging PPA by the developers, you can now install Xfce 4.18 in Xubuntu 22.04 and Xubuntu 22.10. Here’s how.
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Linux Mint 21.1 ‘Vera’ is available to download, ahead of an official release announcement expected soon.
This point release of Linux Mint rides atop of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and it includes a curated crop of user-interface tweaks, bug fixes, and performance improvements – though there are no major changes from the Linux Mint 21.1 beta released earlier this month (and if you use that beta you can upgrade to final release).
So what’s new exactly?
Well, Linux Mint 21.1 ships with the Cinnamon 5.6 desktops environment by default. This version of Cinnamon offers a couple of new features, including a new Corner Bar applet comes enabled by default. Using Corner Bar you can it click the very end of the bottom panel to hide all windows and instantly show the desktop.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 766 for the week of December 11 – 17, 2022.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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PostmarketOS is a Linux-based operating system designed for smartphones and tablets. Originally envisioned as a solution to breathe new life into old Android phones, these days it’s also a popular solution for new devices that never shipped with Android in the first place, like the PinePhone, PineTab, and Librem 5.
This week the postmarketOS team released version 22.12 of the operating system, and it brings a bunch of software updates, one major new feature (for supported phones), and support for two more devices: the Fairphone 4 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 inch tablet.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Content Management Systems (CMS)
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The technology used to help enterprises and organizations of all sizes to deliver content via websites is typically the domain of content management systems (CMSs).
Among the most popular CMS technologies is the open-source Drupal framework, which debuted in 2001 and has continued to evolve over the last two decades. In the early years of the technology, Drupal was positioned as a general purpose system for building websites. In 2007, Drupal got a boost with the launch of Acquia as a commercial entity to bring the technology to enterprises. Acquia was acquired in 2019 for $1 billion by Vista Equity Partners.
Acquia today positions itself as a digital experience vendor, based on open-source Drupal technology, providing a platform that enables organizations to build, manage and deliver content.
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Programming/Development
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Godot 4.0 has been in beta for over three months, and the overall feature completeness, stability and usability have improved a lot during that time.
We continue to release a new snapshot every week to get fast feedback on our bugfixes, and potential regressions they may introduce. Thank you for your rigorous testing and timely reports!
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We looked at 10 amazing games to learn CSS. And in this article, we’ll do the same for JavaScript.
Learning a language by playing games is super fun, and for some people, it’s a great way to understand the impact of the language visually.
Without further ado, here are ten fantastic games where you can learn JavaScript.
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`XMLHttpRequest` and `fetch()` are two powerful functions in JavaScript that can be used to make Ajax calls. XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is a legacy technology that’s been around since the early days of the web. It allows you to make HTTP requests from the client side, and it’s still widely used today. The fetch() function, meanwhile, is a newer addition to JavaScript that’s slowly taking over as the preferred way to make Ajax calls. It uses Promises, so it’s easier to write and debug, and it also supports streaming and other modern features.
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Leftovers
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Linux Foundation
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Overture’s mission is to create reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data with partners including Linux, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom to challenge Google
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and thunderbird), Fedora (keylime, libarchive, libtasn1, pgadmin4, rubygem-nokogiri, samba, thunderbird, wireshark, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Gentoo (curl, libreoffice, nss, unbound, and virtualbox), Mageia (advancecomp, couchdb, firefox, freerdp, golang, heimdal, kernel, kernel-linus, krb5, leptonica, libetpan, python-slixmpp, thunderbird, and xfce4-settings), Oracle (firefox, nodejs:16, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (firefox and thunderbird), Slackware (samba), SUSE (chromium and kernel), and Ubuntu (linux-oem-5.17).
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A vector for phishing attacks and malware. Your non-technical family members and friends will likely fall for these at some point. For their sake, disable them.
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“Secure Element” (SE) chips have traditionally taken a very closed-source, NDA-heavy approach. Thus, it piqued my interest when an early-stage SE chip startup, Cramium (still in stealth mode), approached me to advise on open source strategy. This blog post explains my reasoning for agreeing to advise Cramium, and what I hope to accomplish in the future.
As an open source hardware activist, I have been very pleased at the progress made by the eFabless/Google partnership at creating an open-to-the-transistors physical design kit (PDK) for chips. This would be about as open as you can get from the design standpoint. However, the partnership currently supports only lower-complexity designs in the 90nm to 180nm technology nodes. Meanwhile, Cramium is planning to tape out their security chip in the 22nm node. A 22nm chip would be much more capable and cost-effective than one fabricated in 90nm (for reference, the RP2040 is fabricated in 40nm, while the Raspberry Pi 4’s CPU is fabricated in 28nm), but it would not be open-to-the-transistors.
Cramium indicated that they want to push the boundaries on what one can do with open source, within the four corners of the foundry NDAs. Ideally, a security chip would be fabricated in an open-PDK process, but I still feel it’s important to engage and help nudge them in the right direction because there is a genuine possibility that an open SDK (but still closed PDK) SE in a 22nm process could gain a lot of traction. If it’s not done right, it could establish poor de-facto standards, with lasting impacts on the open source ecosystem.
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I’m excited to announce the general availability of the SUSE NeuVector container security platform version 5.1. With the 5.1 release, customers will benefit from more efficient and powerful vulnerability scanning and admission controls across multiple clusters through centralized enterprise scanning, auto-scaling scanners and support for the new Kubernetes (1.25+) pod security admission (PSA) standard. The release also supports the Cilium network plug-in. This will provide Cilium users with advanced security capabilities, including zero trust security automation and full layer 7 firewall protection with WAF (Web Application Firewall), DLP (Data Leakage Prevention), DPI (Deep Packet Inspection), among others. This will enable security controls to scale across clusters and clouds which may have different or multiple types of CNI plugins. In addition, the release of open source build tools for NeuVector is now available for community users to create and build their own versions.
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Auditing tools are used to provide information about a system. These tools look at file systems, file permissions, running processes, configuration files, and more, to determine the security posture of the system. Auditing tools can help identify areas on the system where security can be improved and provide information on how to improve it.
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Defence/Aggression
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Ukraine’s army issued an instruction video on Monday with a step-by-step guide for Russian soldiers on how to surrender to one of its drones.
The video comes as part of Ukraine’s “I Want to Live” project, a hotline that encourages Russians who are reluctant to fight in Ukraine to surrender.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Twitter currently has problems. Well, one specific problem, which is the bloke who bought it. My solution to this problem has been to move to Mastodon (@sil@mastodon.social if you want to do the same), but I’ve invested fifteen years of my life providing twitter.com with free content so I don’t really want it to go away.
[...]
If you’re still using Twitter, you may post more Tweets after your downloadable archive was generated. If so, it’d be nice to update the archive with the contents of those tweets without having to request a full archive from Twitter and wait two days. Fortunately, this is possible. Unfortunately, you gotta do some hoop-jumping to get it.
You see, to do this, you need access to the Twitter API. In the old days, people built websites with an API because they wanted to encourage others to interact with that website programmatically as well as in a browser: you built an ecosystem, right? But Twitter are not like that; they don’t really want you to interact with their stuff unless they like what you’re doing. So you have to apply for permission to be a Twitter developer in order to use the API.
To do this, as the Tweetback readme says, you will need a Twitter bearer token. To get one of those, you need to be a Twitter developer, and to be that, you have to fill in a bunch of forms and ask for permission and be manually reviewed. Twitter’s documentation explains about bearer tokens, and explains that you need to sign up for a Twitter developer account to get them. Go ahead and do that. This is an annoying process where they ask a bunch of questions about what you plan to do with the Twitter API, and then you wait until someone manually reviews your answers and decides whether to grant you access or not, and possibly makes you clarify your answers to questions. I have no good suggestions here; go through the process and wait. Sorry.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Internet access is an extremely significant right, with invaluable benefits in day-to-day life. Especially in the context of developing countries, internet connectivity can boost businesses, education, information symmetries, and thus, overall development. The after-effects of COVID-19 have also revealed a populace that is more and more reliant on online tools, be it for school, work, or procuring goods and services.
Thus, it becomes essential to study the digital divide on a routine basis, to analyze the status quo and identify the hits and the misses of the attempts being made to eradicate it. To further this endeavor, IFF released its first connectivity tracker in November 2021, which created a consolidated database for all statistics pertaining to telephone and internet access in the country. This was followed by the second edition of the connectivity tracker that published a similar analysis, but with specific focus on the divide in accessing online education.
[...]
To combat the digital divide, the government had launched two ambitious schemes – PMGDISHA and BharatNet. As on date, both schemes significantly lag behind in fulfilling their targets. Under the PMGDISHA, 2.32 lakh PMGDISHA training centers were operational as on December 15, 2022. This is against the 2.5 lakh center target set at the launch of the scheme in 2018.
A total of 6.59 crore candidates have been enrolled, and 5.66 crore have been trained, of which 4.21 crore candidates have been certified under the PMGDISHA Scheme. BharatNet continues to be marred with slow pace. As on December 8, 2022, a total number of 1,84,399 GPs have been made service ready. The scope of BharatNet has been extended up to all inhabited villages beyond Gram Panchayats in the country. As per available data, the funds allocated/disbursed under the BharatNet Project as of March 31, 2022 was ₹ 22,676 crores.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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This attempt at a timezone-less Internet time might’ve succeeded if they had been a li’l bit better at openwashing. It was too blatantly their corporate thing, with the day starting not based on anything astronomical but on Swiss standard time (i.e. where the sun is gonna be over Greenwich an hour later). To promote their own factory.
If they had tied it to 刻 time notches or to the revolutionary calendar, but emphasized the new timezoneless nature of “beats”, we coulda had something great. The original pitch that this wasn’t meant to replace normal time but just used as a separate tool to coordinate stuff online was good. Maybe we’d have moved over entirely after a while. And they woulda been first to market, which would’ve been even more appealing if it had been (or looked like) more of an “open standard”.
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This weekend my parents and I took a trip to Memphis, TN to visit FedEx’s air hub. Driving to Memphis from our town takes several hours, and a departure after my workday finished on Friday meant that we didn’t arrive until after midnight. We slept for only a few hours before waking up at 2 AM to see the nightly departure rush, and then slept only a few hours again before seeing the morning arrival rush. We drove straight home afterward. It’s one of the most whirlwind trips I’ve taken in recent years.
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Technical
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back in september [1] i made some experiments with stable diffusion, and today i came across a paper that did the same thing, only Properly, so i’ve written a bit of a follow-up on it. don’t really feel like converting it to gemtext at the moment, so check it out on my website [2] ^v^
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Internet/Gemini
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No really, these are related.
The HTTP User-Agent is what web clients are maybe supposed to send to identify themselves; not sending this header will result in various web servers hating on the request. For example, with User-Agent not sent, stackoverflow.com denied the request along the lines of….
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Barman un cup of green tea, please. Thank you.
I see the Twitter situation since several weeks and I ask some questions about it. I didn’t post on Twitter since 2016, I only use my account to look other profiles (and since weeks/months, I use Nitter for this) and I keep it mostly in case if I have to reach a brand’s after-sales service.
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Well there is no way around this, but now that I fixed my atom feed once and for all by writing my own script to generate it, I have to submit it to Antenna one last time for processing. That means it’s probably going to spam another ten posts in a row to the feed, but I can only apologize for this and promise that it will never happen again!
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Programming
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It’s not ideal, but this post is about two different things. One is language extensibility. Another is TCB size. They are probably orthogonal.
The executive summary is that I don’t find run-time type-checking interesting. And the final form of extended languages I do find interesting are Shen (similar to ML) and StrongForth (similar to Oberon). It’s a research question whether using the extended lower-level language or a specifically-designed higher-level language is better. Also, I’m trying to use package repos as much as possible now, what’s support like there? And should the language package repo be portable to many implementations? Significant extension packages like Shen and StrongForth aren’t in repos.
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I’ve been writing multi-threaded code for a long time. And for a lot of that I’ve suspected that the threads&mutexes model is too difficult for humans to reason about.
I’m currently trying to upskill from this pthreads view of hardware to thread pools, work stealing, async/coroutines, all that good stuff. This is similar to the way I try to use higher-level abstractions like folds and maps instead of raw recursion. I first heard of concurrency primitives like this in the .Net framework, which I only briefly dabbled with. However, it’s integral to WinRT too now and that impresses me more personally. I hadn’t really grasped the implications of standard ISO C++20 supporting coroutines until now. Finally, the recent release of OCaml 5 has yet another very similar way to use the many cores in my computer.
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Of course I was wondering, how to deal with our old friends like CFLAGS and their kin. Looking into the documentation and projects using redo, I came up with two possible solutions — there are more, of course.
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In part 3 I detailed one option to deal with an equivalent of CFLAGS et al. makefile variables. I could have stopped there, but I did not like, that “compile” and all equivalent scripts sourcing config.sh were going to be rebuild, even if they didn’t pick up on a given change. Variables may be used separately in different parts of the build. So I wanted to have each Variable in a separate file (which can be versioned), and compile is exactly dependant only on CC and CFLAGS and not on LIBS or other existing, but unused variables. Now the plan is quite different:
* 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 Microsoft, Ubuntu at 6:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Looking at the Ubuntu blog today, one might easily mistake it for a Microsoft subsidiary
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 10:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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This is a blog looking at a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Ultrabook running Linux.
Our T470 has a hot-swappable external 24Wh battery and an internal 24Wh battery. Both batteries had been heavily used. We therefore purchased a new Lenovo 72Wh battery. We definitely recommend getting a 72Wh battery if battery life is important.
And if you get a new battery, we strongly recommend installing and configuring TLP. It’s an awesome command-line power management package. The software needs very little configuration as the default settings are spot on.
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Welcome to this week’s Linux weekly roundup.
We had a full week in the world of Linux releases with ExTiX Linux 22.12, Debian Edu 11.6.0, Debian 11.6.0, PCLinuxOS 2022.12.
Have a wonderful week, and merry Christmas! Remeber the meaning of the season!
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Server
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The Device Plugin framework was introduced in the Kubernetes v1.8 release as a vendor independent framework to enable discovery, advertisement and allocation of external devices without modifying core Kubernetes. The feature graduated to Beta in v1.10. With the recent release of Kubernetes v1.26, Device Manager is now generally available (GA).
Within the kubelet, the Device Manager facilitates communication with device plugins using gRPC through Unix sockets. Device Manager and Device plugins both act as gRPC servers and clients by serving and connecting to the exposed gRPC services respectively. Device plugins serve a gRPC service that kubelet connects to for device discovery, advertisement (as extended resources) and allocation. Device Manager connects to the Registration gRPC service served by kubelet to register itself with kubelet.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Josh and Kurt talk about how hard multi factor authentication is. This all starts from a Mastodon thread, and Jerry Bell, the administrator of infosec.exchange joins us to discuss password security and all things Mastodon. Infosec.exchange is an incredible story and Jerry weaves a thrilling tale.
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GNU World Order (Audio Show) ☛ World Order 491
**kscreen** , **kscreenlocker** , **kservice** , **kshisen** from the Slackware KDE software set.
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Applications
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SpaceFM is a tabbed file manager for Linux using the GTK toolkit, so it fits right in on desktops like GNOME, Mate, Cinnamon, and others. SpaceFM also features a built-in device manager system, so it’s particularly good for window managers, like Fluxbox or fvwm, which typically don’t include a graphical device manager. If you’re happy with the file managers on Linux, but you want to try one that’s a little bit different in design, SpaceFM is worth a look.
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GnuCash is a personal and small business finance application, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It’s designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible. GnuCash allows you to track your income and expenses, reconcile bank accounts, monitor stock portfolios and manage your small business finances. It is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports.
GnuCash can keep track of your personal finances in as much detail as you prefer. If you are just starting out, use GnuCash to keep track of your checkbook. You may then decide to track cash as well as credit card purchases to better determine where your money is being spent. When you start investing, you can use GnuCash to help monitor your portfolio. Buying a vehicle or a home? GnuCash will help you plan the investment and track loan payments. If your financial records span the globe, GnuCash provides all the multiple-currency support you need.
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Instructionals/Technical
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This year after largely abandoning my MacBook in favor of a NixOS machine, I started getting requests to “turn my camera on” when video calling people. This was a problem because I didn’t have a webcam. I thought about buying one, but then I realized I had a perfectly good Canon EOS Rebel XS DSLR from 2008 lying around on my shelf. This camera has a mini-USB port, so naturally, I pondered: Did a DSLR, mini-USB port, and a desktop PC mean I could have a webcam?
There’s just one problem. My Canon EOS Rebel XS isn’t capable of recording video. It can take some nice pictures, but that’s about it. So that’s the end of that.
Or is it?
There happens to be some amazing open source software called gphoto2. Once installed, it allows you to control various supported cameras from your computer and it takes photos and videos.
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Fedora IoT is a foundation for Internet of Things (IoT) and Device Edge ecosystems. It’s a secure, immutable, and image-based operating system that supports the deployment of containerized applications. We’ll discuss how you can run Fedora IoT on a Raspberry Pi to deploy a rootless Podman container.
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Docker is available in the default repository of Debian but by its nature, you are bound to get old docker versions.
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In this post, you will learn how to remove the password from a PDF file using the terminal in Ubuntu / Debian. This is important to know when you want to share the file with a third party.
As we all know, a PDF file can be protected using a password, but there comes a point where if we would like to share the file, we should remove the password.
In this post, we assume that you own the file and therefore know it. Let’s get started.
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PHP 8.2 has been officially released, along with the retirement of PHP 7.4. Rocky Linux does not support this version in either EL9 or EL8 but can be installed using the Remi PHP Repo. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the REMI PHP Module and install PHP 8.2 on Rocky Linux 9 or Rocky Linux 8, along with some tips about configuring Nginx with FPM using the command line terminal.
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The cron job scheduler does not support scheduling jobs to run at an interval of seconds. In this article, we will show you a simple trick to help you run a cron job every 30 seconds or x seconds in Linux.
Are you new to the cron job scheduler and want to run a job every 30 seconds? Unfortunately, cron does not allow for it. You can not schedule a cron job to run every x second. Cron only supports a time interval of at least 60 seconds (i.e 1 minute). To run a cron job every 30 seconds, you need to employ the trick we have explained below.
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Chrony is an implementation of the now deprecated Network Time Protocol (NTP). It synchronizes the system clock with online NTP servers, and reference clocks and is tailored to perform well in a range of conditions. These include congested networks, intermittent network connections, and systems that do not run continuously or run on a virtual machine.
Chrony maintains a high accuracy of time between systems synchronized over the internet. The accuracy attained is typically within a few milliseconds while on a LAN network, this is in tens of microseconds. It supports Linux and UNIX systems such as FreeBSD and NetBSD.
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Rocky Linux 9 is an RHEL package-based distro. Whereas Docker is a commercial platform used by individuals and businesses to create and run containers. It is open-source software that provides a lightweight alternative to other Type-2 virtualization software. For example – VirtualBox. Although the pre-built images are available, we can also create our own to run on containers powered by the Docker Engine.
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Games
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Update 19/12/22: Twitter has now completely removed the new rules, including removing all posts about it from the official Twitter Support account. It’s a small step in the right direction. Mastodon links are still completely blocked though. For now, I will still be pointing you to follow us in other places.
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DDNet community member and developer headshot2018 (also check out his fun Teeware modification) has combined Super Mario 64 and DDNet!
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Paradox Interactive have announced that they’re going to be increasing their prices. Some countries will get a huge bump and others only a little bit but some will actually be decreased.
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Hedgewars has been going for quite a number of years now, although it only had a 1.0 release back in 2019. It’s very much styled in the spirit of Worms, except with hedgehogs. If you’ve somehow never played Worms or Hedgewars: teams take it in turns to try to blow the other up, with turn-based combat and various different weapons. Your weapons also blow up the terrain and it can be thoroughly entertaining.
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Brickadia could be a good one for gamers both young and old, giving you a game that looks a little bit like a cross between LEGO, Minecraft and Roblox. It’s been in Alpha for quite some time and the developers just announced the plan to release in Early Access on Steam in April 2023.
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Recently, Epic Games rolled out a change to their account system aimed at protecting the younger people on their store and it has caused issues for the Heroic Games Launcher.
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Justin Wack and the Big Time Hack looks like a fun time for those of you eager to play more comedy 2D point and click adventures.
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GE-Proton 7-43, the community-built version of the Proton compatibility layer, is out now and it comes with some useful looking fixes for Steam Deck and Linux desktop gamers.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I continue to be truly amazed by all the work going into KDE Plasma. Not only is it my desktop environment of choice on Linux, it’s Valve’s too as it powered the desktop mode on Steam Deck. It’s about to get some juicy upgrades too.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Reviews
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Over the span of a year I end up reviewing about 50 Linux distributions here, on DistroWatch, and often try various others to get a feel for what is happening in the open source ecosystem. As I browse the open source community for new gems I make note of projects which are particularly good at delivering a great experience. A year ago I shared my top picks of 2021 and this year I’d like to repeat the experience, sharing my favourite distributions and the projects which I feel are the most polished of all the operating systems I reviewed in 2022.
Last year my cup overflowed with promising, powerful, and solid experiences. I identified seven distributions which performed very well and which I’d recommend for either beginners or, in some cases, more experienced users looking for a smooth experience. Plus, I talked about a cool meta-distribution: Bedrock Linux which, while not a Linux distribution in the usual sense, I found quite useful.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Delve is a debugger for Go programs that currently supports multiple architectures and operating systems. At the time of this writing, Delve supports Linux on x86_64, aarch64, and 386, Windows on x86_64, and macOS on x86_64. These are the most common architectures that Go supports. But the list of potential architectures is long, and on that list is PPC64LE, an architecture that a significant amount of users use on servers. PPC64LE is the code name for the little endian mode of the Power ISA, introduced by Power8 around 2013. You can run Linux operating systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Fedora on this architecture.
While working on a bug that targeted RHEL on PPC64LE, I realized that I needed a debugger and the options were limited. You can use GDB, which runs flawlessly on PPC64LE and understands Go binaries, but it needs to understand Go programs better. Delve does a better job of understanding the runtime and data structures. But Delve doesn’t support PPC64LE at that point. So I asked myself: How hard could it be to port Delve to PPC64LE? As you might have guessed, this is my first port ever.
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Just about every organization relies on cloud or application services as the industry moves into the era of digital transformation. Let’s check out some of the best and most popular content that Red Hat Developer published on these topics in 2022.
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Many people traditionally commit to improving themselves personally and/or professionally at the start of a new year. If you are an IT leader, these five resolutions can help you become a stronger, more effective leader.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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For what I believe is the first time, Ubuntu devs have decided to ship a bespoke desktop background to be used exclusively in development builds.
And naturally the new artwork conveys a creative concurrence of the release codename.
Now typically, each new dev release of Ubuntu uses its predecessor’s artwork for the bulk of its development cycle. It only gains a custom wallpaper of its own near UI freeze. Not so with the Lunar Lobster, the next short-term release of Ubuntu ear-marked for emergence in April 2023.
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Ubuntu ☛ Chiselled Ubuntu: the perfect present for your containerised and cloud applications [Ed: Canonical has become a Microsoft reseller. Truly appalling. People join Canonical thinking they would promote GNU/Linux and instead they end up working on Microsoft projects. We need Ubuntu and Canonical whistleblowers.]
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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It’s not just the software which is becoming more complex, the hardware is too. Modern vehicles already have up to 150 electronic control units (ECUs), often scattered through the vehicles, close to sensors. Increasingly, manufacturers are moving towards a model where these ECUs are combined and consolidated, connected by an Ethernet network. As the amount of data vehicles deal with increases, it’s unlikely that all of this will be directly uploaded to cloud servers. Instead, much of it will be processed inside the vehicle, before ‘edited highlights’ are uploaded to the cloud for processing.
This has important implications for vehicle maintenance and also poses cost issues. Car manufacturers face challenges when it comes to managing the ever-growing complexity of their systems, while trying to keep annual recurring costs down.
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The Czech public sector is steadily raising its involvement with open source. Through their national open source portal and multiple projects, the Czech Republic has managed to better organise its use of open source in public administrations. The Declaration builds on those past efforts from different public and civil society actors to move towards a more organised form of open source governance, a national OSPO.
Lucie Smolka, Chairwoman of the Committe for Open Cities : “This declaration is a great step towards the establishment of the Czech National OSPO. We are very happy to have been able to cooperate with all the actors of the Czech Open Source community towards this goal.”
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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Now that the Talos II is back in order and the Fedora 37 upgrade is largely behind me, it’s now time to upgrade Firefox to version 108. There’s some nice performance improvements here plus a hotkey for about:processes with Shift-Escape. Support for WebMIDI seems a little gratuitous, but what the hey (haven’t tried it yet, the Macs mostly handle my music stuff), and there are also new CSS features. As before linking still requires Dan Horák’s patch from bug 1775202 or the browser won’t link on 64-bit Power ISA (alternatively put –disable-webrtc in your .mozconfig if you don’t need WebRTC). Otherwise, we were able to eliminate one of our patches from the PGO-LTO diff, so use the new one for Firefox 108 and the .mozconfigs from Firefox 105.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Publicly accessible databases often impose query limits or require registration. I’ve decided to host different light/medium size by using PostgreSQL at databases.pacha.dev.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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LibreOffice Base is a complete database package which you can use for your small projects.
In this article you will learn how to create database and tables in LibreOffice Base.
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Licensing / Legal
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In the framework of the REUSE Booster initiative, the FSFE provides individual assessments and direct assistance to Free Software projects in the implementation of the REUSE best practices. GNU Health, a project that combines social medicine with technology, has recently become REUSE compliant. We have talked with Dr. Luis Falcón, its founder.
[...]
GNU Health is a community driven Free Software project from GNU Solidario; a non-profit humanitarian organisation that focuses both on technology and on social medicine. The software has been adopted by different organisations and national public health systems around the globe. From now on, users and re-users of GNU Health will have a clear overview of the copyright notices and license terms thanks to the standardised way of displaying it by following the REUSE specification.
“The task of manually keeping track, displaying and writing the legal information in large Free/Libre projects like GNU Health can be daunting. The REUSE project makes this tedious process simple. I invite the Libre software community to adopt REUSE as the standard for displaying legal information to boost development, productivity and integration among projects.”
Dr. Luis Falcón, founder of GNU Solidario and author of GNU Health.
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Programming/Development
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So now that we know what JSON-M stands for, let’s get into the reasons why it is needed. There is really only one data structure in M, which is known as the array, but is really a tree. In fact, it is most often implemented as some kind of B-Tree. It is also what’s known as a sparse data structure, in that it does not require every node to contain data, nor even to exist. One of the most powerful features of M is its full language integration with a persistence storage facility, or database, known as globals, which are structured exactly the same as its in-memory arrays, and which are a first class primitive of the language. By simply prepending a caret character (^) to any array, you are now operating with the database on disk, rather than the symbol table in memory. And since they are the same exact data structure, the language provides for easy merging of a tree or sub-tree between local (in-memory) arrays and global (on-disk) arrays, as well as local-to-local and global-to-global merging. This tree-like data structure is incredibly powerful, in part because of how dynamic it is. The language doesn’t enforce any kind of template or schema, nor any other kind of predetermined structure on the data. It is created on-the-fly, being shaped as needed. Though this kind of dynamic data structure is very flexible, it comes at the cost of having to build your own data dictionary schemes, and having to write and maintain your own indexes, since the language has no built-in database management system.
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Git merge is a powerful tool that allows developers to integrate changes from different branches into a single branch. In this article, I’ll explain different ways to merge branches with Git, using a simple example to illustrate each method.
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Following the curl line is what looks like an interactive login procedure, which certainly is not something a real curl would present. Based on this, I think we need to give this use of curl a fairly low realism score: a 2 out 5.
Trying that displayed command line in a real terminal unfortunately only gives us Could not resolve host: secure.da-34-22.remote.com. I doubt that the TV company actually purchased this domain though. It seems a little too generic.
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In a previous article, I showed how the Rexx scripting language is both powerful and easy to use. It uses specific techniques to reconcile these two goals that are often considered in conflict.
This article walks you through two example Rexx scripts so you can get a feel for the language. Rexx purports to be highly capable yet easy to work with.
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Notwithstanding the ‘elitist’ moniker the community has earned, learning Linux has become considerably easier over the years
[...]
For AI/ML experts, Linux has been the focus of high performance computing as most high performance libraries at various points of the ML software stack have been written with their focus around Linux. Windows support is erratic by comparison and at times completely absent. Case in point, even NVIDIA does not fully support Windows with some of its libraries.
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Reshape data in R, In general, data processing in R Programming Language is accomplished by reading data from a data frame that is organized into rows and columns.
Data frames are commonly used because data extraction is much simpler and thus easier.
However, there are times when we need to change the format of the data frame that we receive. As a result, we can use various functions in R to split, merge, and reshape the data frame.
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Perl / Raku
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There’s no single big Raku application I work on regularly at the moment, but there’s plenty of smaller ones that I need to do a bit of work on now and then. Nearly all of them involve using a database for persistence; I tend to reach for Postgres. This year I put together a few Raku modules to ease my work with databases on these projects. All of them are available for installation via zef; maybe some will make nice Christmas gifts for others using Raku and databases together.
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Java
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Java is easy to read and understand: Java has a simple, English-like syntax, which makes it easy for beginners to read and understand code.
Java is widely used: Java is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and it is used to build a wide range of applications, including web, mobile, and desktop applications.
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Leftovers
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What explains Messi’s unique abilities? David Konzevik, a former Argentine soccer player and now a famous economist living in Mexico City told me recently, “I have never before been so moved seeing a player as I am with Messi. I have watched him doing magic with the ball for years. There is nobody like him.”
Many claim that Messi’s remarkable ability as a player is the result of Pep Guardiola’s teachings when he played in Barcelona. However, since he was a child in Argentina, Messi was already a brilliant player. Ernesto Vecchio, a coach from his youth, said, “As a player, he is very similar now to how he was as a youngster. He decides in milliseconds what he is going to do with the ball at his feet.”
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He wrote in the Fortnightly Review, which he edited, about “the great topics of this year of noises. They have been the cattle-plague, the [financial] panic, the disclosures of railway mismanagement, the agitation for Reform, the Fenians, the conflict of the President with Congress, the Seven Days’ War, ending in the expulsion of Austria from Germany, and the freedom of Italy from a foreign yoke.”
The world turns slowly, and much that looks new and shocking to us today was happening 150 years ago, though often in a different guise. Many problems that bedevilled the lives of our Victorian ancestors are still alive and kicking and far from solution. I do not mean anything along the lines of the tired old quote from Karl Marx about history repeating itself “first time tragedy, second time farce” (in reality history has a nasty habit of serving up tragedy twice over). It is rather that serious confrontations and crises are often so deep-rooted that they go on recurring down the centuries.
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I don’t know about you, but personally my sphincters have gotten way more of a workout this election cycle than seems healthy or advisable. Given the considerable efforts so many of us valiantly exerted over the past few months to keep from messing our collective national trousers [cue national anthem] at the prospect of a red wave, it stands to reason that we might all need a little breathing space, a little “me” time.
In Maryland, where I grew up, a “little me time” for many will soon include firing up very legal spliffs with considerably less trepidation about the long arm of the law walking away with your dime bag. That’s if you’re White. If you’re Black, Native American, or Latinx, the new laws mean having to worry less about a joint being used as a solid pretext to blow your brains out at point blank range – as in the case of Patrick Lyoya – or kneel on your neck for nearly nine minutes–as in the case of George Floyd.
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Lately, figurative painting has become a much stronger presence on the art scene—and in the art market—than it’s been in living memory. About a decade ago, the hot thing was a certain kind of post-minimal but decorator-friendly abstraction, usually exemplifying what John Yau called, at the time, a “well-produced scruffiness” via “ironic variations of the artistic canon,” as exemplified by such honored precursors as Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, and Frank Stella. Critics got all bent out of shape over the market frenzy over a few of these young neotraditional abstractionists, for instance Jacob Kassay and Lucien Smith, and their fate was sealed when Walter Robinson coined the term “zombie formalism” to describe the formulaic nature of their production and its indebtedness to the color field and minimalist painting of the 1960s. No one could ever take that cohort seriously again, and collectors started looking elsewhere for new finds. Figurative painting seemed like a fresher field. The push in that direction has only taken on greater momentum, partly because figurative painting seemed to offer artists a way to communicate more directly their passionate beliefs, and to focus on human stories rather than on abstruse aesthetic concerns. And it offered curators and collectors a way to display their sympathies right there on the wall—like wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve.1
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[Smbakeryt] needs your help. He bought a 1984-vintage Z8000 coprocessor card for the PC, but the software is missing in action. Apparently, the co-processor — called a Trump Card — appeared in Byte magazine courtesy of the famous [Steve Ciarcia]. The schematics were published, and if you sent [Steve] proof that you built it, he’d send you the software. The product was later commercialized, but no one seems to have the software, so [Smbakeryt] is on the lookout for it.
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[Carson Katri] has a fantastic solution to easily add textures to 3D scenes in Blender: have an image-generating AI create the texture on demand, and do it for you.
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Science
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MIT has been working on very thin solar cells made of a film just a few microns thick. The problem? The cells are so thin that they’re hard to work with. You could make a small solar cell on top of, say, a glass slide, but that’s not all that interesting since you can make perfectly good solar cells that are as fragile as glass using conventional techniques. But in a new paper, MIT researchers describe creating 50-micron-thin fabrics that can generate electricity from solar.
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Hardware
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[Ben Katz] designed the original MIT Mini Cheetah robot, which easily captured attention and imagination with its decidedly un-robotic movements and backflips. Not long after [Ben]’s masters thesis went online, clones of the actuators started to show up at overseas sellers, and a few months after that, clones of the whole robot. [Ben] recently had the opportunity to disassemble just such a clone by Dogotix and see what was inside.
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Recent research underscores the enduring value of this ancient technology, whether in making decisions, enhancing productivity or winning over customers. Start with decision-making, and a study from Maferima Touré-Tillery of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Lili Wang of Zhejiang University. In one part of their study, the researchers approached strangers and asked them to take a made-up survey. Half the respondents were given a pen and paper to fill out the form; the other half were handed an iPad. At the end of the exercise, respondents were asked if they wanted to give their email address to receive information on how to donate to a charity. Those who used paper were much likelier to provide their email addresses.
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The T-CAMERA S3 is a compact embedded module based on the low power ESP32-S3 SoC supporting dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2. The device is equipped with an OV2640 camera module, a 0.96” OLED display, a PIR sensor and a few JST connectors for additional devices.
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TopTon TP-X4F is a mini PC and network appliance equipped with four 2.5GbE ports and powered by a choice of processors from the AMD Ryzen 5000U series up to the Ryzen 7 5825U octa-core-16-thread processor.
The system supports up to 64GB RAM and up to five high-speed internal SATA or NVMe storage devices through M.2 sockets and SATA connectors and comes with three 4K display interfaces: HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C, as well as four USB ports.
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Medical equipment often makes for interesting teardown videos: the strict requirements imposed by certification bodies mean you’ll find good quality components and a high standard of design and manufacturing. But when [Buy It Fix It] bought an ultrasound scanner on eBay, he wasn’t interested in tearing it down: his plan was to use it to find out if his sheep are in lamb, so he went on to repair it and modify it for its new purpose.
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[Harry]’s newest robot, the MotherLoader V2, looks fantastic but was ultimately more of a learning experience and test bed for some experimental features. Luckily for us, [Harry] created a lengthy write-up detailing everything that he tried and revised.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Taiwan’s Liberty Times newspaper reported that TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, had set up a subsidiary on the island to tout for business, contravening Taiwanese law that Chinese social media platforms are not allowed commercial operations on the island.
The Mainland Affairs Council, responding to that report, said the Cabinet’s working group had discovered that there was indeed a suspected breach of the law, and legal authorities were investigating.
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Whether you’re a teenage girl or a government employee with a top secret clearance, TikTok wants to brainwash you and steal your secrets — maybe even both!
While spending all your time on any social media platform can’t be good for your health, TikTok in America is specifically programmed to hook its users, with documented mental health problems plaguing teenage girls. A recently viral “blackout challenge” on the platform literally resulted in kids dying while they strangled each other — or themselves.
Meanwhile in China, if you are under fourteen, the TikTok that you use is capped at forty minutes’ usage a day and floods your feed with science and pro-CCP content, according to a 60 Minutes report, which compares the Chinese version to “spinach” and its exported, Western version to “opium.”
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As a surgeon-scientist who has over the years applied for more research grants than I can currently remember from various funding agencies, including the NIH and other federal entities, I sometimes like to discuss how the NIH determines which grants to fund given that the current budget only allows the NIH to fund roughly 10% of the grant applications that it receives every year. (This is, unfortunately, a situation that has persisted for many years now, despite increases in the NIH budget.) After all, I have submitted far more grant applications to fund my lab to the NIH, the Department of Defense (which, little known to most people, actually funds a fair amount of cancer research), and other agencies than have ever been funded. (I will keep my percent success rate a secret, but it’s fairly low, which is not uncommon among investigators.)
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Advocates seek to counter cultural stigma and the harsh effects of COVID-19 with innovative approaches to reaching a vulnerable population.
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Security
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For businesses working with operating systems like Linux, additional issues can arise. Historically, Linux has been considered one of the more secure operating systems. However, Linux attacks are becoming more attractive to threat actors because those systems tend to have a higher payoff value. Businesses operating with Linux are faced with increasingly dangerous Linux-based vulnerabilities, like those related to remote control execution (RCE) and local privilege escalation (LPE). RCE is considered the holy grail for attackers, given the level of control it offers over machines and systems. And if RCE isn’t possible, attackers can always rely on an LPE vulnerability.
With Linux, traditional patching tools like apt, dnf, or yum (which are used for updating on-disk versions of vulnerable software), are problematic, since they don’t immediately apply to already running code, like the Linux kernel that is always running, or shared libraries already residing in memory as a dependency of multiple services. Changes occurring on disk will only translate to revisions in the running code when those services are restarted, or the whole system is restarted – something obviously disruptive to any workload. This means that some customer or user somewhere is going to experience a business disruption.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Under the proposal by the D66 liberal party, window brothel curtains will stay shut and clients will be asked to book via a QR code on their smartphones rather than directly to the sex worker behind the glass.
However, sex workers oppose the idea and argue it will make their work less safe because it will be harder to assess potential clients and any danger they might pose.
“Lucy”, a Dutch sex worker, said Amsterdam was the world’s safest place to work when she spoke to the Telegraph at the Prostitution Information Centre (PIC) in the red light district.
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And this is not the only worry. Since 2018 Zimbabwe has collected fingerprints, photos, addresses and phone numbers to clean up the voters’ roll, which was reportedly full of “ghost voters”. This frightens many Zimbabweans, especially those belonging to the minority Ndebele ethnic group, much of which is concentrated near Bulawayo. In 1983 some 20,000 mostly Ndebele people were massacred by the army. Emmerson Mnangagwa, now the president, was head of the security services at the time. Now, people fear data collection “is a way to re-identify and target us,” says Rodwin Sibanda of the Habakkuk Trust, an NGO in Bulawayo.
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The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least. Despite a TikTok executive’s sworn testimony in an October 2021 Senate hearing that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” decides who gets access to this data, nine statements by eight different employees describe situations where US employees had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how US user data was flowing. US staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own, according to the tapes.
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Defence/Aggression
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Along the U.S. southern border, two cities — El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico — prepared Sunday for a surge of as many as 5,000 new migrants a day as pandemic-era immigration restrictions expire this week, setting in motion plans for emergency housing, food and other essentials.
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More than 30 Pakistan Taliban militants were holding several officers hostage on Monday after breaking free from custody and seizing a police station, officials said.
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Firstly, let’s dissect the F-35. The late world famous aircraft designer and originator Pierre Sprey, who made huge contributions to the successful design of the F-16 and A-10 – among other aircraft — called it a “turkey” on Canadian TV in 2012 and said that it would lose against contemporary European fighters. He also said old low frequency radar, which the Russians and the rest of the world have in excess, can easily detect the aircraft, therefore making its so-called “stealth” an expensive and unnecessary feature that might make little difference in combat. For example, in the Kosovo Air War in 1999, the Serbs used ancient low frequency radars to detect the “stealthy” F-117 and direct missiles close enough to shoot one down and damage another. (2)
More recently, Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight has basically described the aircraft as a disaster with many defects even now after more than a decade in the service. He also points out that some new defects and failures have been hidden by the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E). He says “The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program appears to be in a state of suspended development, with little progress made in 2021 toward improving its lackluster performance. The latest report by the Pentagon’s Director, Operational Test & Evaluation reveals stagnation and even backsliding in some fleet reliability measures. And that’s just the public DOT&E report. In an unprecedented move, DOT&E is concealing many of the key details of the F-35’s poor performance. For the first time ever, the testing office created a non-public “controlled unclassified information” version of its report, and although there is much overlap between the two versions, the meaningful details about the ever-troubled program are only included in the non-public one.”(3)
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Bowing to the reality that the opposition Houthi movement now controls 80 percent of the population of Yemen and has acquired the means to launch missiles deep into Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, U.S. officials have been focusing on the truce as a means of achieving a ceasefire and ending the war.
The truce “has brought a period of unprecedented calm in Yemen, saving thousands of lives and bringing tangible relief for countless Yemenis,” President Joe Biden said in a statement in August.
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In the Belgorod region, as a result of shelling on December 18, eight people were wounded and one was killed, according to reports from the head of the region, Vyacheslav Gladkov.
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A fire broke out at the Markovskoye oil and gas field in the Irkutsk region.
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The key fact is not the military war between Russia and Ukraine, so far a limited, secondary affair except for the massive on-the-ground suffering of the Ukrainian people and the soldiers on both sides of the conflict. The year’s key reality is rather the economic warfare between the United States and the EU versus Russia and China: sanctions and countersanctions. Their ramifications (energy price spikes, supply chain disruptions, and massive market shifts) worsened the inflation already troubling many countries. These, in turn, provoked central bank interest rate increases that added more disruptive and costly shocks to an already problematic 2022 global economy.
For decades, wealth and income have been redistributed upward—with minimal protest by the working classes who were harmed by that redistribution. During 2022, working classes in many countries were no longer willing to defer their needs in the wake of that redistribution. Labor militancy, unionization, and strikes have all been renewed with remarkable energy and enthusiasm. Increasing numbers of workers are unwilling to wait and see whether or not long sluggish center-left and center-right governments and parties would do anything adequate to change the deepening inequalities, instabilities, and injustices of contemporary capitalism.
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The operation to liberate Crimea “has begun in people’s minds,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an interview with French television networks TF1 and LCI.
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Mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko says that the city has fully restored heating services.
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On December 17, Viktor Bout, who returned to Russia from a US prison in early December, took part in the opening of a new branch of the right-wing nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, in Ukrainian Luhansk, which is currently under Russian control.
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Winter’s arrival in the northern hemisphere brings increased concern about the war in Ukraine—now in its tenth month. Concern about the suffering of civilians under siege, and the fate of millions of refugees. Concern about the energy crisis and militarization in Europe. Concern about war-related food shortages in Africa. And concern about the possibility of a civilization-ending nuclear war.
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Donald Trump took to his beleaguered social media app late Saturday to lash out against the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection following reports that the panel is planning to use its final meeting Monday to recommend criminal charges against the former president and 2024 White House hopeful.
“They say that the Unselect Committee of Democrats, Misfits, and Thugs, without any representation from Republicans in good standing, is getting ready to recommend Criminal Charges to the highly partisan, political, and Corrupt ‘Justice’ Department for the ‘PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICLY’ speech I made on January 6th,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “This speech and my actions were mild & loving, especially when compared to Democrats wild spewing of HATE. Why didn’t they investigate massive Election Fraud or send in the Troops? SCAM!”
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There are many disturbing similarities between the brutality imposed on Stalin’s victims and the injustices endured by the incarcerated in federal and state prisons.
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Environment
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But for those following Arctic politics, Trump’s interest wasn’t a surprise. Geopolitics in the Arctic has become increasingly fraught in the last decade, as Greenland has been of increasing interest to the superpowers—especially the United States and China. There are three main reasons for this interest, said Rasmus Leander Nielsen, an associate professor at the Center of Arctic Political Science and Economics at the University of Greenland: The melting ice will create new commercially valuable sailing routes from the east; Greenland maintains security importance to the United States as the site of its northernmost military base at Thule; and finally, Greenland could become a crucial rare-earth mineral source.
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) sets forth the fundamental rights belonging to every individual in the world. The UDHR celebrated its 74th anniversary on December 10, 2022.
This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the Declaration on the Human Environment and the 5th anniversary of the Declaration of Ethical Principles of Climate Change. These declarations call for the preservation, enhancement, and equitable use of the environment for present and future generations.
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Liz Cheney, the anti-MAGA yet deeply conservative outgoing representative from Wyoming, may have said it best: The midterm election results were “a clear victory for team normal.” The center held. “Democracy,” such as it is, held. Even stalwart progressive comrades of mine in the climate movement found the results reassuring.
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For the rest of the day, I remained keen on this notion of forgetful snow, its presence in what was a usually snowless reality making everything somehow dreamier, as if there was no such thing as time before the snow, only the moment being experienced now — Zen and the Art of the Nucleated Snowflake, if you like. For me, it was also about memory. What are we not remembering?
On a possibly lighter note, do I remember this view across the River Thames from Observatory Hill before any of those vast office buildings at Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs? (‘The barges drift/With the turning tide/Red sails/Wide/To leeward, swing on the heavy spar./The barges wash/Drifting logs/Down Greenwich reach/Past the Isle of Dogs,’ also wrote Eliot.) Beyond the much older Queen’s House and former Royal Naval College used to be creaking masts and rigging. Now, there is just the glass-enshrined dry-docked Cutty Sark, while back over at Canary Wharf, the big ships are Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, HSBC, JP Morgan, Infosys (cough, Rishi Sunak), Chase, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, etc. Plus we have the very occasional sound of a Chinook crossing the crisp blue London sky, with St Paul’s Cathedral in the distance, the twin rotors now overhead, and the snow gleaming like a blanket of white gold. When London looks so beautiful, it is easy to forget when it is ugly.
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Energy
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It hasn’t been called a “zombie bill” for nothing.
After Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) fossil fuel industry-friendly permitting reform legislation was defeated for the third time on Thursday, climate campaigners voiced concern that Democratic leaders could try to cram the bill into a must-pass omnibus spending package that’s being negotiated in private on Capitol Hill.
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Finance
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Is there a growing divide between employers who want staff back in the office and employees who want to work from home?
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Could drone delivery of groceries, and consumer goods in general “become mainstream” even in cities, cleaning them of those lousy human riders who even dare demand sleep and money? It depends, says this article.
Up in the mountains, the sooner it happens, the better it is, if you ask me.
Cities are a totally different beast, of course. Besides increasing acustic and visual pollution, drones may crash on pedestrians for many reasons, going from faults to collisions with birds. But that would be nothing compared to physical limits, that is the fact that drones could never really reach customers living inside apartment buildings. This is why that article does not just discuss at length whether drone delivery could ever be feasible everywhere, but also asks “would we even want it?”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Back in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn in and implicitly promised to destroy our government because it was “the problem,” many of us who strongly opposed him wondered what the final stage of Reaganism would look like.
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Elon Musk, the billionaire owner and CEO of Twitter, launched a poll on the social media giant’s platform on Sunday evening asking users to decide whether or not he should step down as head of the company.
“I will abide by the results of this poll,” Musk said.
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Elon Musk’s Twitter announced Sunday that users are no longer allowed to post links to some of the social media platform’s competitors, including Facebook, Mastodon, Instagram, and Post, a move likely to draw the notice of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and European Union officials.
In a post explaining the new policy, Twitter said it will “remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the [banned] platforms on Twitter.”
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Musk has said previously that he would like to turn Twitter into a super app like Tencent’s WeChat
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Twitter specifically said users cannot promote Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Pos accounts. Twitter will also prohibit users from sharing third-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee and lnk.bio.
“We still allow cross-posting content from any social media platform,” Twitter Support added in its thread. “Posting links or usernames to social media platforms not listed above are also not in violation of this policy.”
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Twitter users will no longer be able to link to certain rival social media websites, including what the company described Sunday as “prohibited platforms” Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon.
It’s the latest move by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.
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The new, restrictive policy came after many users, eyeing the exit doors, began posting links to their accounts on other platforms following Elon Musk’s takeover as CEO of Twitter and its subsequent reinstatement of far-right accounts, suspension of journalists and mass layoffs.
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Not only are free links to Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr prohibited, but so are those to aggregating platforms like linktr.ee and lnk.bio, according to the policy. It also considers it a violation to spell out “dot” in place of a period, as well as posting a screenshot of handles for accounts on banned platforms.
Users found to be in violation may be required to delete the relevant post if it’s an “isolated incident or first offense.” A temporarily suspended account is also on the table, with users potentially facing a permanent suspension for “subsequent violations.”
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Twitter temporarily banned the “free promotion” of specific third-party social media platforms through link sharing as well as social media link aggregators, the company announced Sunday, before walking back the policy that night.
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Many Mastodon URLs no longer work on Twitter, classifying them as potentially dangerous around 6:30 PM PT. Domains like mstdn.social and mastodon.social have been removed from Twitter, although other domains are still working.
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Much has and will be made of the various personal details the Netflix production is promoting. The dominant theme is blame and blamelessness, enriched by a layering of score-settling. Unaware by the implications of her own conduct, Meghan herself observes that, “Most people need to find someone to blame.”
The couple are, naturally, clean, washed, pristine; the laundry of everybody else, from the media to the ghastly relatives, is not. “I believe my wife suffered a miscarriage because of what the (Daily) Mail did. I watched the whole thing,” states a forlorn Harry.
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At the time of writing, I have essentially left Twitter. It was a fun ride and without going into what’s happening there now, this is a good opportunity to look at my 12 years on the platform.
Early in November, I downloaded my data and locked my Twitter account. This gave me all the data I needed. Using R, a few nifty libraries and the tweets.js file that was part of the download, I could gain quite a lot of insight. You can use this code to analyse your own data.
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Seems more than a bit euphemistic to describe not paying rent or promised severence packages as mere cost-cutting measures. And it also seems like an inauspicious time to shake up the company’s legal department.
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There are so many questions today after a wild night on Twitter, which saw Elon Musk suspend multiple journalists’ accounts, citing violation of his company’s anti-doxxing policies. Twitter also shut down its Spaces audio chat feature, which journalists — including at least one who Musk had suspended — and Musk used last night to have a live discussion about the suspensions.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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UPDATE, 12/18, 10:05 a.m. PT: Taylor Lorenz’s Twitter account (@TaylorLorenz) has been restored. She said the temporary suspension from Twitter appeared to be because she had posted links to her accounts on other social platforms, in violation of a new rule that Elon Musk announced Sunday. Later in the day, the page on Twitter’s help site about the new “Promotion of Alternative Social Platforms Policy” was removed; Musk tweeted that the policy “will be adjusted to suspending accounts only when that account’s *primary* purpose is promotion of competitors, which essentially falls under the no-spam rule.”
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In a private meeting with the president and the Minister of the Presidency, Maria Nela Prada, President Arce spoke frankly of the threat to press freedom and the necessity to uphold human rights and the right to know. The president was firm in his support of Julian Assange and the desire to see him a free man.
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President Joe Biden is pressing ahead with a controversial criminal case against Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, a whistleblower website. Assange has been languishing for close to four years in the UK’s harsh Belmarsh Prison while appealing extradition to the United States, where he faces espionage and computer intrusion charges that could land him in a maximum security prison for 175 years.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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At least 500 people have been killed in Iran since protests there began in mid-September, according to U.S.-based rights monitor HRANA.
The Human Rights Activists News Agency said the dead included 69 people under the age of 18, and that authorities have arrested more than 18,400 people.
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And Finns aren’t batting an eyelid. Ditto their Nordic neighbors, who are used to family-oriented social policies and work-life balance.
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The winner of the Qatar men’s World Cup is not Argentina, who won the greatest match in finals in history, or even the upstart semifinalist Morocco. It is neither the Golden Boot winner, the otherworldly Kylian Mbappe of France, nor the Golden Ball winner, the legendary Argentinian Lionel Messi. The champion is Qatar, and they didn’t have to win a match. The World Cup host country looks to have successfully—with the West’s full complicity—engaged in brazen sportswashing, earning plaudits and envy from authoritarians the world over.
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Three months after a St. Louis public safety official said the city planned to review how off-duty police officers are used by private companies to patrol some neighborhoods, city officials said they had identified a consultant to do the work but were still looking for a way to pay for it.
The pledge to review police moonlighting came in September, after ProPublica revealed how the use of private police forces in St. Louis exacerbates disparities in how the city is protected. Deputy Public Safety Director Heather Taylor, responding to ProPublica’s findings, said the city would hire a consultant to study the issue.
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Why does this woman need to spend a week getting debriefed (in the name of medical care) at a military base? Are the ganjapreneurs going to have a bidding war over which brand of CBD she’ll endorse? How come, with all the coverage of her arrest and detainment, the Times hasn’t run a single piece about Russia’s draconian marjuana prohibition? We’ve heard plenty about Paul Whelan, who’s doing time for espionage, but nothing about the Russian prisoners doing time for mere possession. (The Russkies tagged “possession” onto Griner’s smuggling charge.) And the Times continues to ignore Marc Fogel, a 61-year-old American teacher arrested after entering Russia in August 2021 with less than 20 grams (prescribed for him by a doctor in Pennsylvania for chronic pain) and sentenced to 14 years in a penal colony. Unlike Griner, he was not quickly classified as “wrongfully detained” by the US State Department.
Time.com (the website of the once-important magazine) reported on Fogel’s plight and noted that “From 2012 until his arrest, Fogel had been working at the Anglo-American School in Moscow, an elite private school that teaches the children of American diplomats and those of other international political figures.”
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1. Please note the gender of horsemen. Patriarchy runs richly through each of these four great scourges.
2. The worst of the “four horsemen” (I suggest a fifth below) is arguably the first one, with the climate crisis in the lead – the biggest issue of our or any time. There’s no public health, demilitarization, democracy, social justice, and rule of law on a dead planet. At the same time, the odds of annihilation through nuclear war do not get worse with each day we go without a terminal exchange. We just stay lucky. Climate pollution is different: the risk of passing terminal tipping points rises with each day of mass emissions that raise atmospheric carbon saturation to ever more lethal and exterminist levels. Every tricky day in which you are not killed by a climate change-driven high intensity weather event or drought just brings you closer to the day when you will be as long as you and your species continue to emit 37 billion metric tons of CO2 or so into the atmosphere each year. It all accumulates, hovers, cooks, and kills.
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Former deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee Keith Ellison was reelected as Minnesota’s attorney general in November. His Republican challenger, Jim Schultz deployed a tough-on-crime campaign, hoping to capitalize on Ellison’s support of Black Lives Matter and the movement to defund the police.
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As delivery workers support others’ holiday dreams, they urgently need support in their 2023 contract fights.
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This year had the unwelcome distinction of being the first to see over 100 million people displaced worldwide. Such a staggering milestone reminds us that greater efforts are needed to address the underlying causes forcing so many innocent people to flee their homes.
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The UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights has issued a press release detailing the views of its experts on the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians during the past year, which they say has seen the worst death rate among the Occupied population since the organization began systematically tracking fatalities in 2005.
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Monopolies
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Software Patents
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Copyrights
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Leading up to the FIFA World Cup final this weekend, U.S. law enforcement seized 23 domains operated by pirate sports streaming sites. The domains in question were used by sites targeted in a similar action a week earlier. This triggered a game of whack-a-mole that’s not over yet. Meanwhile, other sites are being targeted, including the popular Soccerstreams portal.
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Early December, prolific Genshin Impact leaker ‘Ubatcha’ was targeted in a DMCA subpoena application filed by publisher Cognosphere. Since then the subpoena has been characterized in various ways, from a full-blown lawsuit to a matter that’s best ignored. Both are incorrect but there is a broad middle ground. With Ubatcha promising no more leaks, will that put this issue to rest?
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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I was absent for several days in the small net. I had busy weeks with many time-consuming home and work activities. So I was able to look at selected things and I was doing it irregularly. This was my first thought then I finally did my full small web routine. And then I thought that maybe it isn’t true.
Because I had free time, which was annexed by less demanding things. So there was for eg. non-committal scrolling of eye-candy things on YouTube. It was so comfortable to sit on a couch and do so. Without any entry threshold. With a dopamine award for finding “so pleasant images”. A soft sofa didn’t make me travel so far to a desktop computer. In one hand, one finger, and lazy scrolling through a mobile screen. Hah! Isn’t that how the whole business is organized? It’s easy to lull our vigilance.
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I think we can consider this place moribund, if not actually undead.
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For some reason I have been playing Auld Lang Syne recently, reflecting on the past year. Mostly all that I have done wrong, and some of the stuff I have discovered about myself personally. So to hopefully at least slightly make up for the fact that this is a tiny piece of wasted resources on another individual’s computer; here are the lyrics to the song. Also for no purpose an accompanying youtube video to an instrumental version of the song.
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“Breathing is difficult down here in the damp, dusty air, as the dark dungeon corridor stretches out in front of you. At the very dimmest, flickering edge of your torchlight, it splits in a T-intersection, branching left and right. Make an Insight check.”
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Technical
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Internet/Gemini
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In the early days of the fediverse user numbers (aka hosting costs) were low and enthusiasm was high.
Admins made their instance because they wanted to. Moderators volunteered because it felt meaningful (or whatever). We all had similar values and vibes were good. When the hat was passed around everyone happily threw a few bucks into it. Setting up a small instance can be done fairly easily by using a pre-configured docker image so only basic linux skills were needed.
All that is about to change.
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I’ll go through the steps to setup a Mastodon instance on Fedora Server. This guide is based on the original Install from source guide in the Mastodon documentation, but includes Fedora-specific tweaks such as packages, file path differences, and SELinux policies. I’ll first go through prerequisites and basic setup, and then branch of in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure.
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This post is in part to test some tweaks that I’ve recently made to my setup. I finally got fed up with gemfeed’s misbehavior when it comes to improperly sorting gemlog entries in the resulting atom feed. A number of times changing computers has led to the order being broken and throwing aggregators like Antenna through a loop. Therefore, I am putting a hold on atom feed generation for now and reverting back to submitting the gemlog as it is in gmisub format. The reason I used atom at all was just to make sure that my posts were sorted properly in Antenna if I wrote too many too fast, but let’s be realistic… how often am I going to write more than one post in a day? It happens so infrequently that it doesn’t merit relying on broken software to try to give it unnecessary finesse.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 2:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Who takes the labour surplus?
Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ became an unproductive company because managers could not properly manage very basic stuff like holiday cover; they had relied too much on people who work all night long to actually serve clients (by doing actual, technical work)
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