Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’, the company which bullies, stalks and lies about staff (just just to staff), is giving a bad name to the FOSS world; people need to understand such imposters
Finally, with some free time at last, I decided to perform a full upgrade of 4 of the distros that I have in my laptop.
Manjaro Ruah becomes now Manjaro 22 (Sikaris). This was taken care of by Octopi without any problem.
Mageia 8 had not big deal upgrading some packages.
MX Linux also had like 76 packages to upgrade and everything went smoothly.
OpenMandriva ROME 22.11 is the most challenging distro for me to upgrade now. I used to mess up the upgrade by not reading the forum post before, but I learned my lesson. So, I visited this post here, where rugyada kindly reminds one of the commands to do the upgrade correctly: sudo dnf clean all ; sudo dnf –best –allowerasing distro-sync
New 2022 figures have claimed some surprising results in what the most popular operating systems were in 2022
The 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey (opens in new tab) reports that Linux-based software is now more popular than Apple’s macOS as developers apparently flock to other systems.
Linux distros, representing 40% for both personal and professional use, which are recognized as being some of the most customizable and adaptive operating systems for developers. The 40% share is up from around one quarter in each of the previous five years, which shows a significant shift to Linux that may continue into 2023.
A new survey from Stack Overflow shows that significantly more developers use Linux than a Mac, though Windows maintains a huge lead over both.
“Each year we explore the tools and technologies developers are currently using and what they want to use,” the vaunted developer resource explains in its 2022 StackOverflow developer survey. “We have the favorite Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted data as well as Worked With vs. Want to Work With, which shows us precisely what developers used in the past year and what they want to work on in the following year.”
As for the platforms that developers use, Windows retains its lead, with 62.33 percent of respondents using Windows for personal use and 48.82 percent using it for work. Linux is number two, with 40 and 40 percent, respectively, while the Mac brings up the rear with 31 and 33 percent. Interestingly, Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux is in fourth place, with 15 and 14 percent usage, respectively, which indicates that the popularity—or necessity—of Linux with developers is even higher.
For non-developer “synchronous tools,” Zoom and Microsoft Teams are tied for number one with 56 percent usage, followed by Slack (53.43 percent) and Google Chat (20 percent). As for “asynchronous tools,” Jira Work Management is in first place by a wide margin (50 percent), followed by Confluence (40 percent), Trello (33 percent), and Notion (20 percent).
In this video, I cover how to Install and Use on yay in Arch Linux. Yay is used to install packages from the Arch User Repository.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera” Cinnamon and some of the applications pre-installed.
Recently, I decided to check out ThinLinc – a remote desktop solution for Linux. With client apps for Linux, macOS and Windows – it’s easy to set up and configure. In this tutorial, I’ll give you an overview of the solution and walk you through the process of setting it up.
System76 recently expanded their line of Linux laptops with a new Oryx Pro model – complete with DDR5 and a 4K OLED display! In this video, Jay will give you his thoughts on this latest model.
A quick video covering the newest release of Manjaro. This video covers the Gnome version of the distro and discusses whether or not it is the best version of any Gnome Distro.
NCDU shows disk usage and can be installed with sudo apt install ncdu or any package manager.
Following the Linux Kernel 6.1 release two weeks back, the merge window for Linux Kernel 6.2 is now closed, and that too, on Christmas day of 2022. Without further delay, Linus released Kernel 6.2 for everyone to test.
Furthermore, Linus mentioned that the final release might get delayed due to fewer activities during the holiday week.
Let’s take a look at what arrives in Kernel 6.2.
Many users associate desktop Linux with their daily repetitive grind. However, we are always on the look out for applications that help make Linux fun to use. It really is a great platform for entertainment.
Some document viewers offer a good range of different formats. Although they are not dedicated comic book viewers, Evince and okular have support for the common comic book archive files, and merit mention here.
Got photo images but not clear enough? Or you want to convert them into 4K resolution without losing quality? This app can help!
It’s upscayl, a free and open-source app for Linux, Windows, and macOS. It uses AI modules to upscale single or batch of photo images into 7680×5120 (or double resolution 15360×10240).
The Google-built Android Studio is a perfect match for developing apps on the vast mobile operating system. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Android Studio on Manjaro Linux using the Arch Linux user repository (AUR) and the command line terminal.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Scribus on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Scribus is a free and open-source desktop publishing (DTP) application that allows users to create and edit documents such as brochures, magazines, and newsletters. It contains all the functionality that a high-end program would have, including image editing, vector drawing, and layout creation. Scribus is suitable for use on a wide range of platforms, including Linux, macOS, and Windows, and it is available in a range of languages.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Scribus on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Microsoft Fonts on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Microsoft Fonts, also known as Windows Fonts or TrueType Fonts, are a collection of font families that are used on the Windows operating system. These fonts are designed to work seamlessly with the Windows operating system and are used by a wide range of software applications, including Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, and many other programs. In addition to being used on the Windows operating system, Microsoft Fonts are also available for use on other operating systems, including macOS, Linux, and mobile platforms.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Microsoft Fonts on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
A Virtual Private Network is a tool that lets you browse the internet with some degree of anonymity. While OpenVPN is an open-source network connection protocol used to facilitate a secure tunnel between two points in a network. OpenVPN is both a VPN protocol and software that uses VPN techniques to secure connections. It is one of the most popular and well-known VPN protocols among VPN users. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenVPN on Ubuntu 22.04 server.
Most Linux Distributions use open-source fonts to substitute Microsoft’s iconic typefaces like Arial, Courier New, and Times using Red Hat Liberation family to replace these similar-looking but different sizes, but you may require the original fonts for work purposes or to make your document work. The following tutorial will teach you how to install Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts on Manjaro Linux utilizing the command line terminal with the Arch Linux user repository (AUR).
Want to view and modify PDFs on Ubuntu? Consider installing Foxit PDF Reader, a simple and easy-to-use PDF viewer for Linux.
In search of a good PDF reader for your Ubuntu system? Foxit PDF Reader is easy to install and works fantastically with PDF documents on both Ubuntu and its derivatives.
You can install Foxit Reader either graphically or using Ubuntu’s command-line interface (CLI). Here’s how to get started.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Audacity on KDE Neon.
VirtualBox 7.0 is the latest free and open-source (FOSS) hypervisor version. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install VirtualBox 7.0 on Linux Mint 21 or Linux Mint 20 release by importing the official virtual box repository and installing the most up-to-date version using the command line terminal. The extra benefit for users using this method is that you will receive them instantly from the VirtualBox repository when updates drop instead of waiting for improvements or security fixes to be ported down by the Linux Mint team or Ubuntu.
Ventoy is a free, open-source tool to write media’s ISO image files directly onto storage media to create bootable USB flash drives. The following tutorial will teach you how to install Ventoy USB Bootable Image Creator on Manjaro Linux utilizing the Arch Linux user repository (AUR).
Today, we are going to see how to encrypt and decrypt files from command line in Linux using a free utility named GNU Privacy Guard (shortly GPG or GnuPG).
There are, of course, plethora of methods, and applications are available to encrypt and decrypt files in Linux. But, encrypting and decrypting files with GnuPG is the easiest method.
The default shell in most of the Linux distributions is bash. Bash is solid and a legacy utility. However, it lacks some customizations, such as nice colours, cursor support, etc.
You can use another shell, zsh to enjoy additional tweaks and help you to extend your Bash shell experience.
This crisp guide explains how to install zsh, oh my zsh and apply the powerlevel10k theme.
Here’s how to get Kali Linux on a Windows machine with very little hassle.
Kali Linux is the primary Debian-based Linux distribution used for information security purposes such as security research, penetration testing, password cracking, and more. It is mainly used by white hat or ethical hackers to test the integrity of a system or a network.
If you cannot install Kali Linux on your PC directly, you can easily install it on Windows through a virtual machine. Read on as we guide you on installing Kali Linux on a Windows PC.
Smartphones are increasingly invasive, with tracking technology, user accounts, and apps recording your activity. If you’re looking for a way to strip things back but still use a smartphone, a Linux phone is an option. But where do you start? The answer may already be in your pocket, thanks to Ubuntu Touch.
Maintained by UBports, Ubuntu Touch is now available on more smartphones than ever before. Want to try it out? Here’s how to download and install the Ubuntu Touch Linux operating system for mobiles.
Jenkins is a free and open-source automation server that facilitates software development processes. Here’s how you can install it on Ubuntu.
Jenkins is the most sought-after tool used for automating software development. The automation software allows you to easily integrate various DevOps stages in your project.
Jenkins has great community support. The best thing about the tool is that it is easy to install and learn on any Linux system. Let’s see how you can install and configure Jenkins on Ubuntu 22.04.
ServerCat is one of my favorite tools for remotely accessing and monitoring Linux servers. With a beautifully designed UI and user-friendly structure, anyone can use this tool to access remote Linux servers.
But ServerCat has a few other tricks up its crafty sleeve. One such trick is the ability to batch-execute Docker deployments to any supporting server you have connected. With a single command, you can deploy containers to all of your Docker servers and then monitor them to make sure they’re running as expected. I’ll show you how simple it is to do just that by batch-deploying an NGINX container to multiple servers hosting Docker containers.
Do you need a good CAD application on your Linux workstation? Try out LibreCAD. It’s a 100% free and open-source app that is a great drop-in-replacement for Linux users looking to create CAD apps. Here’s how to set up LibreCAD on your Linux system.
In Linux, the file permissions determine who can access and modify a file or directory. By default, the owner of a file or directory has full control over it, but it is also possible to grant or restrict access to other users or groups. If you want to change the permissions of multiple files or directories at once, you can use the `chmod` command with the `-R` option to recursively change the permissions.
In this article, we will explore how to recursively change the file permissions in Linux.
Update Alternatives is the command available on Linux to change the default program preference using the terminal. We can use it to create, remove, maintain, and display information about the symbolic links comprising the Debian alternatives system.
Although, sometimes even after changing the app’s default value, still it not works. For example, you set Chrome as the default browser, and at the time of opening some link on the system, it selects firefox.
It is because of the priority value set by the apps on our system. Here we learn the command to change the priority of applications using the Update Alternatives command.
Want to check whether the downloaded file is corrupted or not? The easiest way is to verify its checksum.
In simple terms, the checksum can be considered a digital fingerprint of a file made up of characters and numbers.
You will find checksums while downloading files from the internet such as software packages, ISO files, etc.
So let’s jump to the ‘how to’ part.
In the summer of 2022, I participated in Google’s Summer of Code, contributing to the Thunar file manager at XFCE, with the help of my mentor Alexander Schwinn. It’s been about a month since my GSoC term was officially over, and after a hectic couple weeks, I’ve finally decided to sit down and write down the closing blog post.
[...]
This is the big one. While adding support for undo and redo, one of the most crucial things for me was doing it in an elegant way that would make it easy to have multi-level undo and redo.
How we decided to do this was to maintain a global linked list, containing information about the last performed operation, including what type of an operation it was, what files were involved in it, etc. This allowed it to be as trivial as moving a few pointers around to keep track of the state of the system once an undo or a redo is performed. The actual undo/redo operation is simply executing either the inverse of the last performed operation, or executing the exact same operation that was last undone.
GNOME 43.2 is packed with lots of changes to improve edge resistance and window snapping, window resize, window screenshots, screencast UI, as well as Night Light support, scrolling in clients with no high resolution scroll support in RDP sessions, Flatpak applications bypassing X11 permissions, and always visible cursor in virtual streams.
It also improves support for Mali GPUs and newer Intel (i915) systems and enhances Wayland support by adding black padding to fixed-size full-screen windows, preventing Wayland popovers from blocking the Activities Overview, and fixing the Wayland keyboard to actually send pressed keys on enter.
Suppose you want to use GDB, the GNU debugger for C and C++ programs, to debug a program invoked from a shell script. You might have trouble knowing what is going on in the program because the script might give it a complicated run-time context, setting environment variables in various ways depending upon the machine, architecture, installed programs, etc. with which it’s being run.
A good example of such a script is /usr/bin/firefox. On my Fedora 35 machine, the firefox script is 290 lines long. It mostly sets a lot of environment variables, but it also contains commands to make directories, remove files and directories, and make symbolic links. All these changes can have impacts on the binary when it runs. Near the end of the script, a command invokes (via exec) another script named run-mozilla.sh.
The run-mozilla.sh script itself is 356 lines long. It also sets environment variables and eventually invokes (also via exec) the Firefox binary. Additionally, the script provides options that allow you to debug the Firefox binary with a debugger, though for this article we won’t use those options.
Once upon a time, businesses took a measured, sometimes glacial, approach to rolling out new technology. But the pandemic flipped the script on digital transformation, accelerating digital transformation for nearly three-quarters of all businesses by months, if not years. And the speed of adoption increased across all aspects of an organization – from improving operations and new digital business models to delivering seamless customer experiences and adopting new workforce models.
Data science as a practice continues to make its way into the spotlight. Digital transformation technologies such as artificial intelligence, automation, and edge computing are gaining adoption, and data science is powering them. Let 2023 be the year your organization prioritizes data science. Check out these most-read articles to advance your journey.
Add the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) badge to your resume with the help of these study guides.
Today is the anniversary of Ian Murdock’s suicide. It is four years since the Debian Christmas lynchings of 2018. Two Debian Developers, Charles Plessy and I, observed the environment was so toxic that it could kill somebody else. One month later, Lucy Wayland passed away all too soon.
Wayland was transgender. Some people knew her by her original name, Jon Ward and her IRC nickname aardvark.
Transgender people don’t spontaneously die. There are a range of interconnected problems involving their environment. Debian was clearly part of Wayland’s environment.
Earlier this year, I contributed several blog posts to the debate about the Frans Pop Debian.Day suicide. Later, I looked at the way the burden of 14,000 messages on debian-private may have been a factor in the mistakes made by an underage developer in 1998.
There are significant similarities between the deaths of Ian Murdock, Frans Pop and Lucy Wayland. They were all male, in their mid-forties. They were all talented and hard-working people. Murdock and Wayland both consumed alcohol, there is no mention of whether alcohol was a factor or not for Pop. They were all single and complained about being alone. Of particular note, it looks like Murdock was alone at Christmas.
Now it is time to look at the hard evidence showing Debian progressed from transgender threats to a transgender death in the space of less than one year and demonstrate the plausible links between Debian harassment culture and the high mortality rate of transgender people in general.
Canonical scrapped its plans to bring Ubuntu to smartphones and tablets years ago. But the independent developers at UBPorts have been keeping the dream alive since 2017.
Now they’ve announced a release candidate of a new build of Ubuntu Touch that marks a major milestone: it’s the first version of the Linux-based operating system based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Ubuntu Unity maintainer Rudra Saraswat writes today about the new features and improvements coming to the Unity 7.7 desktop environment, which will be available next year as part of the Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) release.
In an attempt to bring back the “old-school UI concepts” from when Canonical was still developing the Unity desktop for Ubuntu, Unity 7.7 promises a redesigned Unity Dash that’s more in line with what Lomiri (the Unity8 fork used in the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS from UBports) currently offers, as well as a redesigned Unity Panel to be slightly bigger and more visually appealing than what you get in Unity 7.6.
It is not difficult for new users or those who are shifting from Windows 7 or 10 Operating systems to Linux distro when you have the right one. Thus, here we are with some best Ubuntu desktop alternatives Linux distros for beginners who want something similar to Canonical’s OS but better in terms of usage.
No doubt, Ubuntu is one of the most popular and best Linux among new users because of easy-to-use commands, huge package repository, and online tutorials. However, if you don’t like its interface and want something much easier to use, thus you should look at the alternatives we are listing here.
2023 is already here, and if this plan comes to fruition, it will impact Ubuntu’s focus and future development in some way. So, let’s analyze the likely ramifications.
First, we need to answer the question: why does a company opt to go public? Whether a company is brand new or has been in operation for years, it may decide to go public via an IPO. However, in the mainstream case, companies seeking to expand often use an Initial Public Offering to generate funds via access to capital markets. So, the most significant benefit of an IPO is the additional funds raised.
Furthermore, when a company moves to IPO, it sells shares to the public. I.e., it is a capital raise event. So, it is much easier to raise money once publicly traded. Also easier to attract employees by paying higher salaries with out-of-thin-air-newly-issued shares when public.
In other words, ideally, an IPO would allow Canonical to raise funds through the sale of company shares, potentially leading to more money and human capital being invested in the development of Ubuntu.
However, on the other hand, switching to the IPO model always involves changes in the company’s vision and direction. In this regard, it is also essential to consider how this move could affect the open-source nature of Ubuntu and the community-driven development model. So let’s see how this affects the average Ubuntu user.
SONOFF ZBMINI Extreme (aka ZBMINI-L2) is an ultra-compact Zigbee smart switch that can control home appliances and lights without a neutral wire and can fit into almost any mounting box.
The tiny wireless switch can fit into the smallest EU-type/86-type/120-type mounting box, and works with gateways supporting the Zigbee 3.0 protocol such as ZBBridge Pro, NSPanel Pro, SmartThings Hub, Amazon Alexa Echo speaker, and so on. It also supports external switches, voice control, eWelink app control, and other features.
For IDAD 2022, FSF staff took to the streets to ask passersby what they think about digital sharing. Read our wrapup and watch the first in a series of videos we are releasing in the coming days.
In our sixteenth annual International Day Against DRM (IDAD), we stood up for the freedom to share cultural works, continuing our fight against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Each year, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) rallies anti-DRM advocates from all over the world for a day of action against digital restriction. This year was no exception, building on the recent efforts we’ve made in our year-end fundraiser to draw attention to something vitally important for the free software movement and cultural endeavors alike: the freedom to share.
In addition to our call to use DRM-free media as a springboard for starting a conversation about DRM with a friend or loved ones, we took to the streets of Boston to interview passersby on how they felt about digital sharing. At first, it seemed like a strange request to our interviewees, but its supposed “strangeness” highlights the success corporations like Disney and Netflix have had on the public consciousness. Just what does make a digital file so different that we’re barred from sharing it with a friend in person, or passing it down the family line like our favorite books? The results that we received were interesting to say the least, and we’ll have more to say about them in the future.
Today, another 1,000 commits have been recorded as done by me in the curl source code git repository since November 2021. Out of a total of 29,608 commits to the curl source code repository, I have made 17,001. 57.42%.
Around the same time, I was also trying to support two good friends who were undergoing nervous breakdown due to criminal harassment and who, in late summer, were in deep distress. Now, if you’ve paid attention to my last few years’ retrospectives so far, you know I’ve had my share of dead friends in the past, so no, not this time, not on my watch.
I told my clients about my reduced availability during that time, and focused on helping those friends—from mere emotional and logistical support (“I have extra capacity. Use it.”, I said) to “last minute evac to the airport”, as they had to exile themselves for their own safety (because this is the harassment they’ve been going through). They have now left the country forever. It pains me that I won’t be able to see them around much anymore, but if that’s what it takes for them to stay alive, so be it.
It started out as a dark, life-threatening situation, and they are now safe and sound, albeit an ocean apart. I guess that’s a reasonable outcome.
Here begins my yearly roundups of the favourite books and movies that I consumed in 2022, to be published over the next few days.
Just as I did for 2020 and 2021, I won’t actually reveal exactly how many books I read in the last year. I didn’t get through as many books as I did in 2021, however, but that’s partly due to reading a significant number of long nineteenth-century novels — in particular, those books that American writer Henry James once referred to as “large, loose, baggy monsters”…
However, in today’s post I’ll be looking at my favourite books typically filed under fiction, with ‘classic’ fiction following tomorrow.
Works that just missed the cut here include John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor and possibly The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, or Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. I also feel obliged to mention (or is that show off?) that I finally read the 1,079-page Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace this year, but I can’t say it was a favourite, let alone recommend others give it a try unless they are in the market for a sturdy under-monitor stand.
This year had a lot of things happen in it, world-wide, as is always the case.
We have released Qt 5.15.12 LTS for commercial license holders today. As a patch release, Qt 5.15.12 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes and other improvements.
Google has announced that two of its latest privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), including one that blurs objects in a video, will be provided to anyone for free via open source. The new tools are part of Google’s Protected Computing initiative designed to transform “how, when and where data is processed to technically ensure its privacy and safety,” the company said.
The first is an internal project called Magritte, now out on Github, which uses machine learning to detect objects and apply a blur as soon as they appear on screen. It can disguise arbitrary objects like license plates, tattoos and more. “This code is especially useful for video journalists who want to provide increased privacy assurances,” Google wrote in the blog. “By using this open-source code, videographers can save time in blurring objects from a video, while knowing that the underlying ML algorithm can perform detection across a video with high-accuracy.”
The second tool lets developers “perform computations on encrypted data without being able to access personally identifiable information,” Dent says.
Albanian prosecutors on Wednesday asked for the house arrest of five public employees they blame for not protecting the country from a cyberattack by alleged Iranian hackers.
Prosecutors said the five IT officials of the public administration department had failed to check the security of the system and update it with the most recent antivirus software.
They are accused of “abuse of post,” which can attract a prison sentence of up to seven years.
The next step would be to arrest managers at software companies for not releasing patches fast enough. And maybe programmers for writing buggy code. I don’t know where this line of thinking ends…
Security updates have been issued by Debian (gerbv), Fedora (webkitgtk), and SUSE (ca-certificates-mozilla, freeradius-server, multimon-ng, vim, and vlc).
The LastPass password manager has been breached by hackers, meaning your master passwords could be for sale, reports David Rutland. The true severity of the breach, which was first reported in August, was detailed in a December 22 blog post from LastPass.
“Personal details and password vaults containing the sign-in credentials of millions of users are now in the hands of criminals. If you’ve ever used the password manager, LastPass, you should change all of your passwords for everything, now,” Rutland says.
Personal details and password vaults containing the sign-in credentials of millions of users are now in the hands of criminals. If you’ve ever used the password manager, LastPass, you should change all of your passwords for everything, now. And you should immediately take further measures to protect yourself.
A Linux vulnerability with a CVSS score of 10 has been found to affect SMB servers and can lead to remote code execution.
A new flaw has been discovered in the processing of SMB2_TREE_DISCONNECT commands which can lead to remote code execution in servers with ksmbd enabled. KSMBD is an in-kernel SMB file server that was mostly written by a team at Samsung Electronics that was merged into the 5.15 kernel on August 29, 2021. This kernel server implements the SMB3 protocol in kernel space for the sharing of files over a network.
According to the Zero Day Initiative, “The specific flaw exists within the processing of SMB2_TREE_DISCONNECT commands. The issue results from the lack of validating the existence of an object prior to performing operations on the object. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the kernel.”
As the year comes to a close, AV-TEST, one of the major anti-malware solutions assessment firms, alongside AV-Comparatives, has shared some interesting statistics regarding malware growth in 2022. The data shows there were close to 70 million new malware samples on Windows, which dwarfs that on macOS, which only saw around 12,000 samples. Hence, the number of malicious files on Windows is over 5,000 times compared to that on mac. The comparison with Linux is far more favorable for Windows as close to 2 million samples were captured on Linux. However, the Windows numbers are still more than 60 times higher.
As temperatures plunged this weekend, Americans in much of the country were told to turn down their thermostats and avoid using large appliances to prevent rolling blackouts. The cascading grid stress came at an awful time but was all too predictable to anyone paying attention.
The interconnected U.S. grid is supposed to be a source of resilience, but the government’s force-fed green energy transition is creating systemic vulnerabilities that politicians don’t want to acknowledge. Utilities and grid operators weren’t prepared for the surge in demand for natural gas and electricity to heat homes, which occurred as gas supply shortages and icy temperatures forced many power plants off-line.
After Fedora and OpenSuse decided to break there MESA packages I thought we were done talking about this whole patent encumbered codec situation with h264, h265 and vc1, oh how wrong I was. Steam OS 3 and Manjaro are back to make me worried once again
I became a bit concerned that my relocation/garbage-collection speed might make the system sluggish.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
For IDAD 2022, FSF staff took to the streets to ask passersby what they think about digital sharing. Read our wrapup and watch the first in a series of videos we are releasing in the coming days.
In our sixteenth annual International Day Against DRM (IDAD), we stood up for the freedom to share cultural works, continuing our fight against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Each year, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) rallies anti-DRM advocates from all over the world for a day of action against digital restriction. This year was no exception, building on the recent efforts we’ve made in our year-end fundraiser to draw attention to something vitally important for the free software movement and cultural endeavors alike: the freedom to share.
In addition to our call to use DRM-free media as a springboard for starting a conversation about DRM with a friend or loved ones, we took to the streets of Boston to interview passersby on how they felt about digital sharing. At first, it seemed like a strange request to our interviewees, but its supposed “strangeness” highlights the success corporations like Disney and Netflix have had on the public consciousness. Just what does make a digital file so different that we’re barred from sharing it with a friend in person, or passing it down the family line like our favorite books? The results that we received were interesting to say the least, and we’ll have more to say about them in the future.
Video download link | md5sum 8d8f65debd319f2ce20370cf6df32a32
Sirius Spooking the Sceptics
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Corporate bullying and false accusations/finger-pointing thrive when companies are failing and find themselves unable to blame the management; this is the story of the company my wife and I left this month (a company that only exploits the term “Open Source”)
THE surveillance by Sirius ‘Open Source’ (with even more surveillance in the pipeline) will be explained here next month, but today’s video deals with the low-grade muck-raking done by the company’s CEO instead of actually running the company.
“They in turn resort to bullying for the sake of scaring sceptics or critics.”Who is disgracing the company? This episode in the company’s history is shameful and it is embarrassing to staff. As geeks flee the company (a years-long exodus as noted in the video above) all that’s left in Sirius is a bunch of self-appointed managers who are neither trained nor qualified to act like leaders. They in turn resort to bullying for the sake of scaring sceptics or critics. █
Video download link | md5sum f385fee779a251d54417ae0c9fb5297b
A Company Valued at One Pound
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The company known as Sirius Corporation (founded 24+ years ago as company number 03633198) is not really operational and it is carrying debt*; we seem to be dealing with a truly dodgy business here, albeit it goes by the name “Open Source” (which is a lie)
THE 27th of December is treated like Boxing Day this year (due to Christmas happening or falling on a weekend), but Christmas Eve was 3 days ago — just 1 day after Sirius Corporation — the ‘parent’ of Sirius ‘Open Source’ — had filed the annual papers about the financial state (as of March of this year). Sirius ‘Open Source’ has been racking up a lot of debt and the same is true for Sirius Corporation, which is discussed in the video above. There is another shell, albeit it is based in the United States and it probably has its own debt crisis.
“There is another shell, albeit it is based in the United States and it probably has its own debt crisis.”The way things stand at the moment, Sirius Corporation seems like a collection of shells. As noted above, we were pretty much forced (not literally at gunpoint but blackmailed using threats) to move to a newly-minted shell without any legal advice (before, during, or after the signing). We’ll revisit this subject later this month. █
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* We’ve made local copies of two PDFs [1, 2].
Jumping from one loan to the next [1, 2] (and one shell to another)
Summary: Red Hat has a history of ‘IP’ shakedown for censorship’s sake (covering up blunders); Wikileaks had a good example of this, but it has gone offline, so we reproduce it here
IT was recently reported that Wikileaks had been losing pages as the site was having issues. Today I navigated to this page, which turned out to be among those affected:
It’s still in the Wayback Machine, but many people cannot find or search/discover it at the Internet Archive.
So here are the contents of the pages which concern Red Hat trying to threaten Wikileaks into self-censorship, using trademarks for the most part:
Category:Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide.
Red Hat based on their operating system product Red Hat Enterprise Linux and management products offers support, training (e.g. certifications like Red Hat Certified Engineer RHCE), and consulting services.
Pages in category “Red Hat”
The following 2 pages are in this category, out of 2 total.
R
- RHCE exam question 1 (2008)
- RHCE exam question 2 (2008)
These, in turn, link to the following two pages:
RHCE exam question 1 (2008)
- Release date
- May 26, 2008
Note
From: Mia Bass <mbass@redhat.com> Reply-To: mbass@redhat.com Privacy: yes Privacy: yes MIME-Version: 1.0 To: wikileaks@sunshinepress.org, usa@wikileaks.org Subject: URGENT--Removal of WikiLeaks Posting Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Privacy: yes Message-Id: <20080530124655.33C03394B47@mail.wikileaks.org> Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 13:46:55 +0100 (BST) Dear Sir or Madam: Red Hat, Inc. (Red Hat) recently became aware that a WikiLeaks subscriber has posted materials to your site purporting to be Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam questions. Those documents are found at the following links: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/RHCE_exam_question_1_%282008%29, http://wikileaks.org/wiki/RHCE_exam_question_2_%282008%29. It is our understanding that WikiLeaks.org is a website aimed toward revealing information regarding the unethical behavior of various foreign governments and corporations. We do not believe that posting exam content, authentic or otherwise, furthers the overall goal of your website. Red Hat neither confirms nor denies the authenticity of these documents. If authentic, their presence on your web site may assist people who wish to cheat on our exam; if not, then the documents mislead Red Hat exam candidates and is a clear misuse of our brand and trademarks. Consequently, it is imperative that both postings are immediately removed from the WikiLeaks website. We trust you will understand Red Hat's interests in protecting its valuable trademark rights and business interests. Please contact me no later than 5:00p.m. on Monday, June 2, 2008 to confirm that the postings have been removed, or if we need to take additional steps to remove the documents. Sincerely, -- Mia Bass Legal Affairs Red Hat, Inc. 1801 Varsity Drive Raleigh, N.C. 27606 Direct Tel: +1 919-754-4734 Email: mbass@redhat.comWikileaks responds:
From: editor@sunshinepress.org To: Mia Bass <mbass@redhat.com> Cc: wikileaks@sunshinepress.org, usa@wikileaks.org Subject: Re: URGENT--Removal of WikiLeaks Posting Privacy: yes References: <20080530124655.33C03394B47@mail.wikileaks.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20080530124655.33C03394B47@mail.wikileaks.org> Message-Id: <20080530134035.C0D28394BD7@mail.wikileaks.org> Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 14:40:35 +0100 (BST) Dear Mia. Thank you for your letter. We have reviewed the material at an editorial level. Our view is as follows: The documents reveal that, at least in the UK, the Red Hat certificate is worthless as an unknown number of students are cheating on the exam. We have revealed which questions they have access to, placing all students on a level playing field and in the process destroying a black market in exam questions. If Red Hat is to be treated seriously as a provider of test credentials, then it is obligated to change its exam questions, review its security processes and the treatment of its staff. That Red Hat now seeks to censor the messenger and play ludicrous "we refuse to confirm or deny" games with the public instead of "apologising and improving" is cause for concern. Jay LimDownload
Further information
- Context
- United Kingdom
- Company
- Red Hat
Primary language
EnglishFile size in bytes
40666File type information
PDF document, version 1.3Cryptographic identity
SHA256 bf59611711f0ef737e34acea3ddcbcfffc317115d38c4f26abe2997a4ea46072
RHCE exam question 2 (2008)
- Release date
- May 26, 2008
Download
Further information
- Context
- United Kingdom
- Company
- Red Hat
Primary language
EnglishFile size in bytes
52986File type information
PDF document, version 1.3Cryptographic identity
SHA256 67ad127820dcde13f45ec634fcb96ef39f9c17ddcf3e4f141efe87f81059e2fc
In case Wikileaks never restores that page, we’ve at least got a copy. █
According to a SpaceX resources page, Starlink satellites run on the open-source operating system Linux.
Linux was created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish software engineer, in order to be a free, openly-shared operating system that could be tailored for users’ specific computer hardware.
By its very design, Linux is easy to customize, making it ideal for specific use cases like Starlink satellites. In addition, Linux-based operating systems can draw upon a worldwide repository of open-source programs and tools, enabling rapid prototyping of new hardware and software.
From now on you can transform elements with the translate, rotate, and scale properties.
Let’s say you apply several transforms to an element, and on :hover and :focus you only want to change one of them, for example, scale.
Clicking Video Editor in the Blender splash screen will take you to a timeline where you can do basic video editing. It’s a bit different from other packages I’ve used, but I’ve cut together and exported a few things for work on it, and have been pleasantly surprised.
The idea is simple: virtually all of those sensors – many of them rated for outdoor use – use the unlicensed 433 MHz spectrum that can easily be captured using cheap RTL-SDR (software defined radio) USB dongles. With the data stream from these sensors captured, the open source rtl_433 project enables automatic decoding of these data streams for a wide range of supported sensors.
There are several ways to view your system’s IP address in Ubuntu. In this tutorial, you will learn how to find your IP address from the command line and GUI.
In the Linux system, it is a critical administrative task to manage users, add them, remove users, or assign new user privileges. In Linux, numerous users can simultaneously work on the same system. But security measures must be made to stop breaching other users’ private data. Information related to the local users is stored in the path “/etc/passwd”. In which, every row indicates the data of a single user that may contain the name of the user, user Id, directory of the user, and login details. When it comes to the listing of the user in Linux, there are multiple ways to list them, we will discuss some of these in this tutorial.
Determining the filesystem type in Linux can be useful in various scenarios, such as when you want to mount a filesystem, when you want to create a new filesystem, or when you want to format a disk. There are several ways to determine the filesystem type in Linux, such as using the df, mount, or the lsblk command. In this article, we will explore these different ways to determine the filesystem type in Linux.
There are several ways to determine the filesystem type in Linux.
Learn how to install Python on Debian 11 Bullseye, from either Debian repo or the latest stable release or pre-release from Python download.
QOwnNotes offers many attractive features for users who wish to keep all their essential information organized in one place. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install QOwnNotes on Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kuduo, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using an official dedicated LaunchPAD PPA dedicated to QOwnNotes to install the latest version using the command line terminal.
Scribus is a powerful, free desktop publishing and formatting tool for desktop operating systems. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install Scribus on Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kuduo, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using an official dedicated LaunchPAD PPA dedicated to Scribus to install the latest version using the command line terminal.
Ubuntu Cleaner is a free and open-source application that provides users with a graphical interface for removing unnecessary files on Ubuntu desktops to keep systems running smoothly. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install Ubuntu Cleaner on Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kuduo, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using an official dedicated LaunchPAD PPA dedicated to Ubuntu Cleaner to install the latest version using the command line terminal.
This post covers how to install PostgreSQL 15 on RHEL 9 system step by step.
PostgreSQL is an open-source, multi-platform, robust and highly extensible database server based on the SQL language. It provides the features like data integrity, build applications and create fault-tolerant environments.
Do you have to work with Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations and need to repeat complex tasks over and over again? For example, you need to highlight duplicate values in a sheet or remove shapes from the slides of a presentation.
If this is the case, it might be challenging for you as a Linux user. Performing such tasks manually is meaningless. A lot of different operations can be easily done automatically with VBA macros in Microsoft Office. However, there is a serious problem – they don’t natively run on Linux machines.
Linux supports the creation of containers, which act as virtual machines but are separated from the system process. Containers are lightweight, and unlike virtual machines, they don’t need CPU hardware virtualization support. Hence, you can quickly create multiple containers on one server. The containers can be created and managed using LXD.
This guide discusses everything about LXD. We will see how to install LXD and create and manage containers.
Steam Replay is Valve’s new highlight page going over a bunch of fun stats about your gaming year, something made popular by the likes of Spotify Wrapped and similar events from numerous other places.
Xfce 4.18 was released on December 16, 2022.
The lovely desktop environment has been around for around 25 years now (since 1997!). A lot of Linux and other Unix-like systems users like Xfce for how lightweight and straightforward it is.
It just doesn’t get in the way of the user like some other desktops do. It helps the user to do what he/she wants to do.
Perhaps the consistent user experience and familiar traditional design were the main selling points of this desktop, allowing it to last for more than quarter a century.
In today’s article, we will examine the current state of the Xfce desktop, as well as some important feature highlights in the latest 4.18 release. We will also discuss some possible improvement points in the mouse-driven desktop.
[...]
Xfce is a very functional desktop for Linux and other Unix-like systems, it is enjoyed by many, and won’t be going away any time soon.
Mostly it works just fine, the thing people love about it is that it works just fine for years without a breaking change for the user experience. However, some areas are still in need of improvements like we have seen together.
Sadly, it feels like the development team is overwhelmed with tasks and to-dos. It could help a lot if you can donate to the project or help fix some issues by yourself, if you know how to.
Linux distros are the most popular operating systems for programming and other development-related work. Whether you are a programmer or a system administrator, Linux distros can maximize your productivity.
Linux operating systems also provide power, flexibility, stability, and more features. However, the massive range of Linux operating systems may confuse programmers, whether they are experts or beginners. So, in this guide, we will explain the best Linux distros for programmers in 2023.
If you have a low-end device, it can be hard to smoothly use the operating system. That’s why Linux contains various types of lightweight and portable distros. Portable distros provide a convenient approach to using Linux from a USB flash drive. You can carry these fully functional operating systems in a USB and connect them to your machine.
It also comes in handy when you want to use someone else’s device but only works on your OS. However, the wide variety of these types of Linux distros sometimes confuses the beginners. This blog will give you a complete information on the best Linux distros for USB.
Various types of Linux OS are available to fulfill different users’ requirements. Linux operating systems like Arch Linux, Gentoo, and Kali Linux are the most suitable for advanced users. Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, etc., are best for beginners. Although experienced users know which OS they should use, this is different for beginners. Some new users are always confused about which Linux OS is best for them. So, if you are also a beginner, this guide will briefly compare Pop!_OS and Linux Mint.
[...]
Pop!_OS and Linux Mint are best for beginners and provide a fresh experience to the users. However, there is always an argument between users that Linux Mint is not optimized enough. Linux Mint uses Cinnamon, which feels a bit outdated, so many users think it is old. On the other side, Pop!_OS is completely based on Ubuntu with the latest MESA drivers making it simple for Nvidia lovers.
Sipeed also mentioned that support for operating systems such as Debian, Android and OpenWrt will be released around Q1 2023. Although, the company will provide support for more OSes in the future.
It also seems that the company will release other commercial products built around the Lichee 4A, for instance, the Lichee Cluster 4A, the Lichee Router 4A and the Lichee Pad/Phone 4A.
The award-winning project, “Research and Extension for Unmanned Aircraft Systems in U.S. Agriculture and Natural Resources,” evaluates and identifies the most reliable, cost-effective, and user-friendly drone platforms and sensors for monitoring and managing stressors in agriculture and natural resources. To maximize the accuracy of the data collected, project members developed hardware, software, and detailed protocols for calibrating and using drones.
Maria Balota, a professor in the School and Plant and Environmental Sciences and Tidewater Agricultural Research and Extension Center; Daniel Fuka, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering; Cully Hession, a professor and graduate program director in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering; and Joseph Oakes, the superintendent of the Eastern Virginia Agricultural Research and Extension Center, represented the university on the team of scientists.
The project is built around a Raspberry Pi 4 but you could easily recreate the concept using a Pi 3 or even a Pi Zero W. The Pi needs to have GPIO to control the Christmas lights, which in this case is a strip of individually addressable WS2812b LEDs, as well as an Internet connection to help host the web server interface.
The free software library RetroPie, for example, lets people relive the Amstrad CPC, Dragon 32, Commodore 64, Master System, Neo Geo, Oric, TRS-80 and Vectrex among many, many other machines. Raspberry Pi has also effectively become a near-perfect Amiga thanks to the distro Amibian.
Recently, however, our heads were turned by a new tool created by Jarosław “Jaromaz” Mazurkiewicz called MacintoshPi. This open-source project allows users to run full-screen versions of Apple’s Mac OS 7, Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 (operating systems released between 1991 and 2001) and it does so complete with sound, an active internet connection and modem emulation.
[Ted Fried] wrote in with not one but two (2!) new drop-in replacements for widespread old-school CPUs: the Zilog Z80 and the Intel 8088. Both of the “chips” run in cycle-accurate mode as well as in a super turbo mode, which can run so fast that you’ll need to use the Teensy’s internal RAM just to keep up.
For a while now, my IPFS node has complained about resource limits being exceeded. Sadly, I’ve not had any time to look into the issue. Speaking of, what kind of miserable bastard would spend their Christmas holiday troubleshooting an IPFS node? Ah yes, that would be me.
This is a LibreOffice Calc calendar of 2023 made ready for you to download, import as template and print. We offer it as editable OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) files and PDF. We use a template by Claus Kofoed Nielsen from Denmark. Feel free to download and make yourself more productive!
LibreOffice 7.5 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2023 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 7.5 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) the third pre-release since the development of version 7.5 started in mid June, 2022. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.5 Beta1, 213 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 70 issues got fixed. Check the Release Notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 7.5 RC1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard version.
The Linux Foundation announced its AgStack Project, which will host an open-source code base, along with a fully automated, continuous computation engine that will maintain a global dataset of boundaries for agricultural fields. The AgStack Asset Registry dataset will aid food traceability, carbon tracking, crop production, and other field-level analytics.
This ‘registry’ is designed to continuously update using data from satellites and real field registrations that contain boundary information, which will train machine learning models to ascertain more boundaries, among other capabilities.
A collection of articles on various branches of Open Science dedicated to Stein Høydalsvik DOI: https://doi.org/10.7557/rt.39
The scientific community builds upon open access and open information. Recalling the famous quote in a 1675 letter by Isaac Newton: “if I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The scientific community has built our collective knowledge of the world around us on the information shared by those who came before us, and that is still the case today.
Looking back at the past year examining open source science and sustainability here on Opensource.com, many of the top articles on this topic touched on aspects of climate change. And that’s a good thing to see. We’re all in this together when solving this global problem. No one benefits when the solutions to climate change are locked up in proprietary solutions. In order to succeed, we need to spread the solutions far and wide to enable a truly global effort to fight back and save our planet.
Without further ado, here is a look back at some of the highlights from this year in science and sustainability.
Often thought of as ‘the last good place on the internet’, Wikipedia plays a key role in the online information ecosystem by linking its entries to current and historic research papers. But, after following these links, how much of this research is openly accessible? Presenting evidence from a recent study, Andy Tattersall, finds that around 50% of research linked to Wikipedia from the White Rose Universities of Sheffield, York and Leeds, is openly accessible. As Wikipedia’s stated aim if for its sources to verifiable, he argues openness should be central to the use of research on Wikipedia.
The C++ language has many inbuilt methods for programmers. We just need to access those methods by importing the required libraries. Strings play a vital role in coding and C++ provides plenty of built-in functions for strings. Strings are arrays of characters. It can store one or more than one characters. The difference between character arrays and strings is that character arrays can be of fixed size but mostly we do not define the size. And in strings, we do not need to limit the size. There are many methods used for strings. We can find the length of strings, we can concatenate two or more strings, and many more methods for strings are available for programmers to use. One of these built-in methods is string copy, denoted by the term strcpy(). This function is used to copy one string in another. These methods are pre-built in the C++ library so that we do not have to write the entire piece of code over and over again for the operations we carry out for the majority of the time when we code. To use this strcpy() function, we need to import the specific library that contains this method. For this function, we have to import any of the below command.
In the C language, establishing a client-server connection through a socket requires several steps and functions. Some of these are used to retrieve data from the server you want to connect to, others are used to create the socket or convert addresses.
Although there is no particular order, this series of steps and function calls must be done in an order because their results are used in the input arguments of the subsequent function.
In this Linux Hint article, you will learn how to use the connect() function and create a socket from scratch to connect remotely to a server.
We begin with a description of the syntax, the input and output arguments that make up this function, and a theoretical explanation of how it works. Then, we will look at an example that shows step-by-step process on how to create and connect a socket.
Generating random strings in Python is a common task that can be useful in various scenarios, such as when you need to create unique identifiers, when you want to generate random passwords, or when you want to create random data for testing purposes. In Python, you can use the random module and the string module to generate random strings. The random module provides functions for generating random numbers, and the string module provides functions for generating random strings.
[...]
In conclusion, generating random strings in Python is a useful task that can be easily accomplished using the random module and the string module. The `random` module provides functions for generating random numbers, and the string module provides functions for generating random strings. By combining these two modules, you can generate random strings of any length and complexity. Understanding how to generate random strings in Python can be helpful in various scenarios, such as when you need to create unique identifiers, when you want to generate random passwords, or when you want to create random data for testing purposes.
In Python, you can generate a random password using the secrets module, which is part of the Python standard library. The secrets module provides a secure way to generate random strings, numbers, and other values that can be used for various purposes, such as generating passwords, tokens, or unique IDs.
In Bash, the && operator is used to perform a logical AND operation. It allows you to execute a command if and only if the preceding command executes successfully.
The UNIX/Linux shell is a command-line program that creates a bridge between the terminal emulator and kernel to allow users to enter commands, execute programs, and perform various other tasks by typing commands at the command prompt.
Once the shell has finished executing the user assigned program, it will send the output to the user on the terminal screen, which is the standard output device.
Note that the shell is not just a program but a whole programming language like Python or C/C++. You can write your own program, utility, or script that contains the if-else logic, loop statement, functions, variables, object, etc.
Most users are familiar with the Bash shell (the successor to the traditional “sh“), but there are many other shell implementation programs that provide different features and functionality, which we will explore in this article.
Why does Davina want her colleagues to know more about the virtual consoles, the terminal, and the shell?
I don’t know any developer who doesn’t use a terminal, a shell, and some CLIs. I definitely use them all the time. They are the central building bricks of my Mouseless Development Environment.
So, since it’s so useful, let’s look a bit deeper what’s this shell, console, and terminal. More precisely, we’ll see, in this article: [...]
Rust is consistently voted one of the languages people most want to learn. In 2022, Opensource.com had a few articles to help you get started.
Rust is a fairly new language, but it’s grown quickly. The general excitement about it goes beyond interest in a new language to try. Rust has genuinely useful features, like the ability to allocate data to the heap (instead of the stack) using the Box data type. There’s no separate garbage collection required, and you don’t have to manually manage memory yourself. Additionally, the Crate.io infrastructure for library management and installation makes it easy to find and use functions contributed by the Rust community.
Rust is a programming language focusing on speed, concurrency, and safety. Thanks to its integration with online registries, its helpful compiler, and its almost intuitive…
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program released in 1979 for the Apple II computer. It was easy to use and allowed for data sorting and storing in tabular rows and columns. VisiCalc was created to address and replace the manual spreadsheet management method. Changing a single value meant modifying the entire spreadsheet because changes made to one cell were automatically applied to all connected cells with VisiCalc. This program was one of the most critical factors in making personal computers more appealing to everyday customers and companies instead of hobbyists and techies.
This web site, www.bricklin.com, includes lots of information about VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet program as we know them today. It has material directly from Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, the co-creators of VisiCalc, including scans of original photographs from VisiCalc’s development days, a working copy of the program, and other things from Software Arts, Inc., Dan and Bob’s company. Additional material is constantly being added, so researchers, computer historians, and teachers should check back periodically.
January 2, 1979: Entrepreneurs Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston incorporate their company Software Arts to publish a little program called VisiCalc.
The first spreadsheet for the Apple II, the $100 VisiCalc ultimately becomes personal computing’s first “killer app.” It helps transform personal computers from “cool to have” toys into “must have” business accessories.
In 1979 Dan Bricklin, a student at Harvard Business School, and Bob Frankston wrote VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, for the Apple II. It helped dispel the notion that the Apple II was only a toy for hobbyists. The PC version of VisiCalc was called “the first killer app” for the PC.
Process9, India’s leading language technology company, has released the latest version of its cloud-based neural machine translation technology – MoxWave. This new Made in India SaaS product can translate content into 13 Indian languages, including a popular mix of Hindi and English (Hinglish). More Indian and global languages are being added to the product. One of MoxWave’s key features is its ability to be tailored for particular domains like BFSI, e-commerce, Govt/PSU or chatbots. With customization, the translation caters to the target audience by using words that are specific to the industry. Companies and individual translators can even use their own data to train the software so that it can produce an output of higher quality.
By now, you’ve surely seen the AI tools that can chat with you or draw pictures from prompts. OpenAI now has Point-E, which takes text or an image and produces a 3D model. You can find a few runnable demos online, but good luck having them not too busy to work.
Everyone’s all, “Wow, chatGPT, amazing, a real milestone, everything will change from now on”. And they’re right – but probably don’t realize that this is not the first time something like this has happened. In fact there’s been wave after wave of computing technological innovation ever since the industry got started in the 1950’s. Here are some of the waves I’ve experienced personally.
With the proliferation of biometric access to mobile devices, entering a password on your desktop can feel so passé. [Snazzy Labs] decided to fix this problem for his Mac by liberating the Touch ID from a new Apple keyboard.
The Unified Program and Debug Interface (UPDI) is Microchip’s proprietary interface for programming and on-chip debugging, and has become the standard on AVR MCUs after Microchip’s purchase of Atmel. Being a proprietary interface means that even entry-level programmers like the Atmel-ICE are rather expensive at over $100. That’s when for [Scott W Harden] the question arose of whether the much cheaper MPLAB Snap board (~$34) could be used as well for AVR UDPI purposes.
Stabilizing an inverted pendulum is a classic problem in control theory, and if you’ve ever taken a control systems class you might remember seeing pages full of differential equations and bode diagrams just to describe its basic operation. Although this might make such a system seem terribly complicated, actually implementing all of that theory doesn’t have to be difficult at all, as [Limenitis Reducta] demonstrates in his latest project. All you need is a 3D printer, some basic electronic skills and knowledge of Python.
There’s a mystique in audiophile circles about tube amplifiers. They can have a very nice sound which is attributed to their even-harmonic distortion, but they are often portrayed as requiring rare and expensive components. You don’t need matched gold-plated tubes and special transformers would by Japanese monks with oxygen-free silver wire when the tube you’d have found in a TV back in the day paired with a repurposed mains transformer will do. [Mikremk] demonstrates this with a simple but effective amplifier using a PCL82 triode-pentode.
What follows is both a small introduction for newcomers and a friendly reminder for all you veterans out there. Regardless of your preferred equipment (skis obviously being cooler than snowboards), if you find yourself lucky enough to embark on winter holidays despite Covid-19, use this quick read to freshen up on the basics!
Teeth are organs with their own blood supplies and delicate nerve structures, which “people don’t understand,” Winters said. By whittling away the hard, protective enamel that covers the surface of a tooth, “you’re basically giving yourself a deadline for how long that tooth can last.”
The latest development is the decision by Republicans and Democrats in Congress to include a measure banning TikTok from devices used by federal employees in the $1.7 trillion year-end omnibus bill setting out federal funding for the next year.
It follows similar moves by a host of state governments to keep TikTok off devices held by state government workers.
On December 24, RansomHouse threat actors added the government of Vanuatu to their leak site, claiming to have locked them on October 6 and exfiltrated 3.2 TB of files. A proof pack includes files that do appear to be consistent with government files. The evidence pack did not include particularly personal or sensitive files.
From what this blogger has seen, lack of insurance does not reduce the likelihood of an entity becoming a victim in the k-12 education sector. How many school districts have we seen that were hit and did not have any cyberinsurance to pay any ransom demands or just refused to pay ransom? Vice Society even told this blogger that the absence of cyberinsurance is not a factor for them or deterrent, and when asked about one of their recent attacks on a k-12 district, a Hive spokesperson told this blogger that they had no idea whether the victim had cyberinsurance to pay as they hadn’t checked. So maybe that approach is not likely to be as effective as some might hope.
Nearly 90 per cent of the ransomware victims were small and midsized enterprises, and only 41.8 per cent of them had systems that could defend against ransomware attacks, the data added.
In this post I will go into technical details on what attackers could do with the stolen encrypted vaults, specifically how they could use tools like Hashcat to crack vault passwords and get access to sensitive log-in credentials.
To simulate the stolen data, I will use my test Lastpass account to extract an encrypted vault from the Chrome Browser extension on macOS. Following this, I will use a wordlist attack to bruteforce the vault which has a weak and guessiable password.
If you have an account you use to store passwords and login information on LastPass, or you used to have one and hadn’t deleted it before this fall, your password vault may be in hackers’ hands. Still, the company claims you might be safe if you have a strong master password and its most recent default settings. However, if you have a weak master password or less security, the company says that “as an extra security measure, you should consider minimizing risk by changing passwords of websites you have stored.”
That might mean changing the passwords for every website you trusted LastPass to store.
MSG Entertainment — the company running New York’s Madison Square Garden and other venues — has chosen to turn over its doorman duties to facial recognition tech. Setting aside the fact (for the sake of argument) that this tech tends to subject minorities and women to higher rates of false positives/negatives, recent events at MSG Entertainment-owned venues suggest maybe it’s not a wise idea to do certain things just because you can.
The data, that were allegedly scraped due to a vulnerability, include email, name, username, follower_count, creation_date, and phone_number. The seller provides a sample on the forum that involves well-known individuals.
Since then, EFF has joined with those in the labor community to learn more about surveillance in the workplace and on work devices, and the effect it has on employees. Particularly as regulators start to pay more attention, and legislators include workers’ privacy in general consumer privacy bills, it’s important to understand the ways that the workplace presents unique challenges in this arena.
Bossware has Real Effects on Workers
As white collar remote workers felt bossware breathing down their necks, there was more coverage than ever of how employers are monitoring the workforce, and the lasting effects it has on workers’ health, safety, livelihood, and collective bargaining rights. Even for remote staff, these stresses affected their mental health and family responsibilities. But it is workers across all fields that have increasingly felt the heat of surveillance, and some of the coverage was propelled by blue collar workers who fought back, from meatpacking facilities to service workers to delivery drivers who experienced increased surveillance as a form of retaliation for wage demands. Neither the ineffectiveness nor the impact on real people calmed employers’ desires for increasing means to monitor and control worker behavior, with some even floating a database on worker productivity. Courts and agencies in other countries, like the Netherlands, have been quicker to take on U.S. firms who they allege have violated the human rights of foreign remote workers with demands on their acquiescence to invasive monitoring.
A similar pattern is detectable in the digital world. The slavers have replaced their human product with data and information. The ubiquitous sharing of information on social media platforms has brought with it a fair share of dangerous ills. A $2 billion lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta, which was filed in Kenya’s High Court this month, is a case in point.
The petitioners, Kenyan rights group Katiba Institute, and Ethiopian researchers Fisseha Tekle and Abrham Meareg, argue that Meta failed to employ sufficient safety measures on the Facebook platform which would have prevented the incitement of lethal conflict. Most notable were the deaths of Ethiopians arising from the Tigray War, a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and seen the displacement of 2.1 million Ethiopians.
The Swedish Migration Agency found a third of all Pakistani master’s students dropped out and took up full-time work as soon as they hit the 30-credit or one-semester threshold to be eligible for a work permit under Swedish law.
This year began with a report that elucidated what police are doing with drones. Answer? Not much for now. A law in Minnesota mandates police departments report all of the times they deployed drones and for what reason. We’ve suspected that police have few clear uses, other than invasive surveillance. The Minnesota report reveals that drones were mostly just for training purposes.
One purpose Axon was hoping to find for drones this year was to stop school shooters. The company announced they were developing a drone that came with a mounted taser for the purpose of subduing people in dangerous situations. The backlash was immediate. After a majority of Axon’s ethics board resigned the company paused the project.
In Oakland and in San Francisco, activists defeated municipal plans to authorize police to use deadly force with remote-controlled robots. In Oakland, police hoped to use a shotgun-mounted robot-–a plan which received so much backlash the proposal was pulled in just a few days. In San Francisco, it took a little longer. After the Board of Supervisors voted 8-to-3 to authorize police to use robots strapped with bombs to deploy deadly force, an EFF-led coalition mobilized. After one week, which included a rally and international press attention, the Board of Supervisors reversed course.
A Khabarovsk military court is hearing a case against service member Daniil Frolkin. He’s been charged with spreading known falsehoods, created by a group of people with selfish motives, about the Russian army. Human rights media project OVD-Info called attention to the case.
Authorities in the city of Izyum, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, have decided to rename 19 streets in order to “de-Russify toponyms,” according to the city’s deputy mayor Volodymyr Matsokin.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry released a statement saying that Russian joined the United Nations (UN) illegally, occupying the place held by the USSR on the UN Security Council.
In fact, though Hunter Biden came up in this deposition 36 times, Chan’s testimony was that Hunter Biden came up in just one briefing with social media companies, one in which someone from FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, Laura Dehmlow, refused to comment in response to a question from Facebook about the already-published NY Post story.
On the southern coast of Africa, local community groups and environmental activists have been celebrating a significant legal victory over a major oil player. In September a South African court prohibited Shell’s controversial plan to conduct seismic exploration for oil and gas deposits off the Wild Coast in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. But, the battle is far from over, Shell is appealing the ruling, and it has the resources and government support to take the case through the country’s court system to get the decision it’s after.
Thanks to fresh scrutiny this year from state politicians, water activists and journalists, the Saudi agricultural giant Almarai has emerged as an unlikely antagonist in the water crisis. The company, through its subsidiary Fondomonte, has been buying and leasing land across western Arizona since 2014. This year The Arizona Republic published a report showing that the Arizona State Land Department has been leasing 3,500 acres of public land to Almarai for a suspiciously low price.
The case has prompted calls for an investigation into how a foreign company wound up taking the state’s dwindling water supplies for a fee that might be as low as one-sixth the market rate. But the focus on the Saudi scheme obscures a more fundamental problem: pumping groundwater in Arizona remains largely unregulated. It’s this legal failing that, in part, allows the Saudi company to draw unlimited amounts of water to grow an alfalfa crop that feeds dairy cows 8,000 miles away.
However, there are companies which went to the cloud with great enthusiasm; however, they are now struggling with bloating costs of running their business in comparison to their in-house infra.
What is cloud repatriation?
Cloud repatriation means a reverse migration from public cloud by large enterprises to on-premises IT infrastructure. This is a remarkable trend that is gaining momentum with respect to public cloud these days.
Gregory Ain wanted to create social housing in Los Angeles. Dogged by the FBI, his hope for more egalitarian architecture never came to be.
The mandatory distribution requirement is based on life expectancy at your current age. This means, for example, if your life expectancy at 72 is ten years, then you have to withdraw (and pay taxes) on roughly 10 percent of the money in your IRA or 401(k). The actual calculations are somewhat more complicated, but this is the basic story.
Anyhow, the ostensible justification for raising the age for mandatory withdrawals was that people are worried about outliving their retirement funds. It is important to realize that this is not really the issue with mandatory withdrawals.
If Santos seemed almost too good to be true, it’s because almost his entire biography and résumé was a fiction. As the Forward reported on Wednesday, “Congressman-elect George Santos’s emotional narrative of having Jewish grandparents who fled Europe during World War II appears to be untrue, like much of the rest of his campaign biography, according to genealogy websites reviewed by the Forward.” It’s an open question whether Santos is even Jewish at all.
Soon after Elon took over Twitter and fired everyone, we wondered (somewhat jokingly) if there was anyone left at the company who was aware of the FTC’s consent decree with the company, signed originally in 2011, but which runs for 30 years, and which was updated back in May of 2022. These documents have some fairly strict requirements for the company around protecting the privacy of its users, and also limiting employees access to certain data.
Last week, I was in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. The weather had turned cold and I couldn’t help noticing what an inhospitable place it had become for the city’s homeless and dispossessed. Once upon a time, anyone was allowed to be in the train station at any hour. Now, there were signs everywhere announcing that you needed a ticket to be there. Other warning signs indicated that you could only sit for 30 minutes at a time at the food-court tables, while barriers had been placed where benches used to be to make it that much harder to congregate, no less sit down.
In 2020, I published a book about the Posadists, a communist sect from Argentina who believed that the extraterrestrial pilots of UFOs had come in peace to help us overcome the suicidal capitalist order that rules Earth. The Posadists were an apocalyptic cult with absurd ideas about nuclear war and comradeship with dolphins, but their party line on aliens was pretty sound.
Russian President Vladimir Putin named Dmitry Medvedev, currently the deputy chairman of the Security Council, to another post — the first deputy chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission of the Russian Federation. Putin’s decree on the matter has been published on the official web portal for legal information.
For Ukrainians, they will confirm the official Ukrainian perspective that, with the world’s preeminent military power irrevocably committed to offering unlimited miltary and economic support, perpetuating the war will be worth all the sacrifices which doing so will entail.
For Russians, they will confirm, dramatically, the official perspective that Russia is at war with the United States and NATO, not with the manipulated “brotherly people” of Ukraine, that this war is existential for Russia and that Russia cannot afford to lose this war.
We have requested Netflix and ITN remove any labels that state or imply that this series is a factual documentary or docuseries, reclassify the series as “science fiction,” and to balance the deleterious content in the show with scientifically accurate information about our human past.
(2) Netflix identifies and advertises the series as a “docuseries,” a genre that implies its content is grounded in fact when the content of the show is based on false claims about archaeologists and archaeology; and [...]
From the United States to Brazil and Israel, a barrage of election-related misinformation hammered voters around the world in 2022, but many pushed back against the conspiracy-laden Trumpian tactic of sowing distrust in the democratic process.
A tsunami of falsehoods flooded Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube — from “deep fake” videos to doctored photos seeking to manipulate voters — with pro-democracy activists accusing the platforms of doing too little to combat the menace.
The bevy of bad internet regulation proposals coming out of Congress hasn’t stopped. In 2022, the EARN IT Act was re-introduced. This wrongheaded bill would have allowed states to strip away critical legal protections for any websites, apps, or platforms, as long as state lawmakers linked their proposals to child abuse. If passed, the EARN IT Act would encourage censorship and prod companies away from using encryption.
Either way, in October, we again wrote about another story by Baker-White, now at Forbes, talking about how ByteDance appeared to use TikTok data to try to spy on certain US citizens, though the details were vague. As we said at the time, this seemed like the sort of thing that should spur people to pass a comprehensive federal privacy law, not that that’s happened. Instead, we’ve just been getting more and more performative nonsense focused exclusively on TikTok, rather than on the underlying problem.
Now, Baker-White has the third piece in this trilogy that ties them all together. Apparently one of the US citizens ByteDance was trying to spy on… was Baker-White herself, and it was because of the original Buzzfeed article, as the company sought to track down how the initial info was leaked. It’s quite a story and you should read the whole thing, though here’s just a snippet.
With an entire newsroom in exile, over a dozen media licenses revoked and more than 120 journalists fleeing, journalists and analysts say Nicaragua is witnessing one of its worst periods for press freedox
Mr. Chagutah says Zambia has become the 25th country in sub-Saharan Africa to abolish the death penalty for all crimes.
The regression of women’s rights is the latest in a series of moves made by the Taliban in line with their hardline interpretation of Sharia law. The Taliban were in power in Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, when they were forced out by a U.S.-led invasion. After two decades of occupation, U.S. forces left Afghanistan in August 2021, with large majorities of Americans “expressing negative views of the Biden administration’s handling of the situation in Afghanistan,” according to Pew Research Center. Disapproval largely centered around criticism that Biden should have started the evacuations earlier or in a more orderly manner. Within ten days of the American troop withdrawal, the Taliban had laid siege to the country, regaining power with shocking speed.
A hundred days after they began, the longest running anti-government protests in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution have shaken the regime, but at a heavy cost to the people.
More than 500 protesters, including 69 children, have been killed, according to the Human Rights Activists’ News Agency (HRANA). Two protesters have been executed and at least 26 others face the same fate, after what Amnesty International calls “sham trials”.
The movement amounts to the most serious challenge to the regime’s control of the country since the early days of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The protests are also the longest running since the Green Movement arose after the disputed 2009 presidential election. Unlike the earlier revolt, however, the current movement is leaderless—and more explicitly revolutionary in character.
Freya was planning a Christmas vacation to a small seaside town when she received a notification: Airbnb had not only canceled her booking but also suspended her account. When she asked why, Airbnb asked her to verify her identity, which she did by submitting her photo ID.
This happens every two years when a Democratic President is in office. And finally the US news media seems to be getting a clue as to why. More about that in a moment.
Notwithstanding Fox “News” hysteria about a “caravan” of immigrants heading for the border during Obama’s last year as president, in the months leading up to the 2016 election, by that time, as Politico noted:
In other words, in less than seven hours on the first workday of the New Year, that CEO will have made as much as the average U.S. worker will make all year.
I took a look at the even wider disparities for various types of essential workers. My calculations are based on average S&P 500 CEO pay of $18.3 million in 2021 (the most recent figure available), which works out to $8,798 per hour, or $147 per minute.
“How Christian of you, Greg Abbott,” Rep. Joaquin Castro said sardonically. “Being a heartless POS isn’t going to make you the next Republican president.”
Ed Yong, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer at The Atlantic, talks about his recent book, “An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.”
In this special broadcast, we speak with Reed Brody, the international human rights lawyer who has been called “the dictator hunter” for his role in bringing historic legal cases against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and others. Brody’s new book is just out, titled “To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré.” Habré, a former U.S. ally, was convicted in 2016 by the Extraordinary African Chambers in the Senegalese court system and sentenced to life in prison.
For the millions of people incarcerated in the U.S., freezing temperatures amid failing infrastructure can be deadly.
The DSA overhauls the EU’s core platform regulation, the e-Commerce Directive, and is intended to be an important tool in making the internet a fairer place by setting out new legal responsibilities for online platforms and educating users on why content is removed and what they can do about it. The powers of Big Tech are also reined in as the DSA subjects “very large online platforms (VLOPs)” to comply with far-reaching obligations and responsibly tackle systemic risks and abuse on their platform. These risks cover a variety of aspects, including the dissemination of illegal content, disinformation, and negative impact on fundamental rights. VLOPs also face oversight through independent audits, which will assess whether platforms respect the obligations under the DSA.
Whilst the obligations placed on intermediary services depend on the role, size, and impact of the service in the online ecosystem, the DSA introduces all-encompassing protections on user rights to privacy by prohibiting platforms from undertaking targeted advertising based on sensitive user information, such as ethnicity or sexual orientation. More broadly, the DSA increases the transparency about the ads users see on their feeds as platforms must place a clear label on every ad, with information about the buyer of the ad and other details. Despite being in its infancy, this provision is already inducing tension as companies like Twitter – whose primary source of income is obtained through ad revenue – have publicly affirmed their intention to further amplify targeted ads on the platform, in potential contravention of the DSA.
The DSA’s emphasis on greater transparency and user rights also includes requirements on platforms to explain their content curation algorithms in more detail and in user-friendly language. This aims to ensure that users can better understand how content decisions – which should be non-arbitrary – are made, and how they can pursue reinstatement should platforms make mistakes. The DSA also requires platforms to give users the option to choose a content curation algorithm that is not based on profiling.
The NFL will now take in $120 billion over the next decade, not only from legacy TV companies like NBC, CBS, Disney and Fox, but arguably the three most powerful companies in technology today: Apple, Amazon and Google.
The UK Government’s Intellectual Property Office published new piracy guidance this week claiming that Netflix password sharing is illegal.
As I said, much of this statement reflects what was on the site before, but now it covers the music as well as the lyrics. He’s also basically put up everything you need. You can download the music as MP3s, you can stream albums, you can download lyrics as PDF files. It’s… pretty comprehensive. And pretty impressive.
Of course, there’s also this semi-ominous warning: [...]
With the addition of more than a dozen new members, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) will soon close the book on a record year and a string of coalition successes. Through agreements with domain registries, collaboration with governments, and partnerships with enforcement agencies, including Interpol, ACE hopes to continue down this path in the year ahead.
For services that prefer not to be overwhelmed by DMCA notices or taken offline unexpectedly, ‘offshore hosting’ is usually considered a positive step. For a major anti-piracy group tackling pirate IPTV providers, ‘offshore hosting’ enforcement challenges warranted a recent “call to action” at the UN-mandated Internet Governance Forum.
when i seen anyone sewing with an overlocker (serger) i am amazed at what these do: securing the seam, the fabric edge, and cutting off excess fabric.
i reached the tipping point and bought a Bernina L460. another contender was a Bernette air threading overlocker. i stuck with the L460 decision because it has the same motor control as my Bernina 570QE – stitch by stitch from the foot controller, quieter operation.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Summary: What’s left of Sirius ‘Open Source’ (about a handful of people working full-time) is mostly people who don’t care about “Open Source” (or Free software)
The following was in the official site of Sirius ‘Open Source’ before the company turned rogue:
They took that down almost a decade ago. They’ve since hired people who have no clue what “Open Source” (let alone Free software) is, even for technical roles.
The people who currently run Sirius think that software freedom or digital security is “hobbyist” and “paranoid” (actual quote). Uploaded one month ago by Vladimir Berezhnev:
Sirius isn’t run by grow-ups.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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