Next year, 2023, will be my thirtieth year of Linux on the desktop, and the thirtieth year of being told it’s not possible to use Linux on the desktop, or to only use Linux on the desktop. Some of the people telling me this weren’t born when I started using Linux on the desktop.
Colorizer has evolved a lot – see what it can do now. Version 1.0 pre-release.
Scott talks with Kris Nova who has been building and scaling Hachyderm, a Mastodon instance that began in her basement and is now moving into the cloud. Nova shares her extensive knowledge on the technical challenges and solutions involved in creating and maintaining Hachyderm, as well as her insights on the importance of building and maintaining a welcoming and inclusive online community. If you enjoy this kind of interview, you're in luck!
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 Microsoft PowerShell on Rocky Linux. 9.
As a sysadmin, one obvious task is handling the packages, from installing to uninstalling them. When you want to install, update, remove, list, and track the different installed packages on the system, you must use a package manager for that particular distro.
Yum is the package manager tool for handling the packages in Red Hat Enterprise in Linux. There are different ways of uninstalling a package using the Yum package management tool. Take a look!
Discord is a widely used application for instant messaging, video, and voice calling, allowing users to communicate with people worldwide. During the early days, this software was designed for gamers. But nowadays, people use this application to create discussion groups and forums and share their thoughts on different aspects.
Colourful, no? But it's true. I've not been able to write up my Fedora 37 experience, nor upgrade Firefox (nor do further work on the JIT) because the Petitboot boot menu couldn't stop touching the main NVMe drive and making its older (Linux 5.5) XFS kernel module hang. If Petitboot can't start, your expensive POWER9 system is a brick.
In its most literal sense this article is largely a precautionary tale, because unless you're a long-term Fedora user like me with a continuously updated older installation, it's very unlikely you have an XFS volume in your OpenPOWER box. But if the antique kernel in Petitboot ever starts barfing on your own filesystems or a device you install, you'll be in this state too, so here's how I got the Talos II working again.
Last week, I unleashed “Lunduke’s Holiday BASH Animations” with two ASCII animations for your terminal: a Christmas tree and a Hanukkah Menorah.
Well. New Years Eve is coming up.
So I’ve added a new animation to the BASH script to help ring in the new year: Fireworks.
Tkinter is a Python library that is used to create graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is a standard Python interface to the Tk GUI toolkit, which is widely used in the Linux operating system. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Tkinter on a Linux system using either pip or apt-get.
Steam is considered the largest Linux-based gaming platform. Installing it on your PC allows you to play games on Linux just as quickly as on the Windows operating system. This tutorial will demonstrate how to install Steam on a Linux Mint PC.
Linux Mint is a community-driven Ubuntu-based Linux distribution bundled with a variety of free and open-source software. It can provide full multimedia support out-of-the-box for those who opt to include proprietary software such as multimedia codecs. Every Linux distro has several versions on the market.
Samba is a free, open-source tool suite that permits us to share files and printers between Linux and Windows workstations. Because most Linux file explorers include samba compatibility, a Samba share is quite simple to set up and use. However, in other cases, we can mount a Samba share at startup, just like a regular filesystem on a given mount point.
Have you ever considered utilizing a computer that is not yours, complete with your own files and settings? Any Linux distribution is capable of doing so. Yes! You may utilize your own customized Linux operating system on any machine with a USB drive. Fedora is among the most advanced and stable Linux distributions.
Linux veterans recognize that the keyboard is more potent than the mouse since many activities that require numerous mouse clicks can be performed with a single keyboard shortcut. Learning a few keyboard shortcuts may increase your productivity as a Linux user and win you considerable bragging rights in the Linux community.
In Linux, the `su` command allows a user to switch to a different user account. The `su` command can be followed by the name of the user to switch to, and will prompt the user for the password of the user they are trying to switch to.
The `su` command has a number of options that can be used to modify its behavior. One of these options is `-`, which stands for “login shell”. When the `-` option is used with the `su` command, it causes the su command to run a login shell for the specified user. This means that the user’s environment variables and profile scripts will be sourced as if they had logged in to the system normally.
The end of a year is a good time to sit, think and reflect on what a year it has been and what we hope 2023 will bring so here's some of what I want and what I think could happen.
I actually wrote a wishlist for the Steam Deck back in October, and funnily enough pretty much every single point there is still valid right now. Some points have had minor work but most of it hasn't been touched. I hope Valve are reading, because all of those points are what I regularly see people moan and gripe about too.
What else though for the wider picture?
Our entire DDNet team would like to wish you all a warm and safe journey throughout 2023. DDNet grew again massively this year and we welcomed many newcomers to the community. We hope that you will all continue enjoying your time on DDNet while we continue to serve the community and find new ways to enrich your experience in 2023.
I recently reported on the incredibly bizarre finances of Mozilla (the makers of Firefox). Payments to nonexistent companies, major payments to political extremists (that have no relation to their core business), a total reliance on a single customer… and that’s just for starters. The finances of Mozilla are absolutely wild.
Which brings up a question:
How does that compare to the financial operations of other “non-profit” organizations in the Tech and Open Source world?
Are the finances of other organizations similarly corrupt and strange? Or is Mozilla… unique?
In order to (begin to) answer that question, I dove into the available financial data of the GNOME Foundation — the Non-Profit Foundation behind the GNOME Desktop Environment (among many other software projects).
4MLinux 42.0 BETA is ready for testing. Basically, at this stage of development, 4MLinux BETA has the same features as 4MLinux STABLE, but it provides a huge number of updated packages.
Road map: December 2022 -> BETA March 2023 -> STABLE July 2023 -> OLD STABLE November 2023 -> EOL
It's been kind of a wild ride getting the Talos II and the Blackbird upgraded to Fedora 37, but we're there, so it's finally time for a mini-review to summarize the current state. As I always like to remind folks, Fedora was one of the first mainstream distributions to support POWER9 out of the box, it's still one of the top distributions OpenPOWER denizens use and its position closest to the bleeding, ragged edge is where we see problems emerge first and get fixed (hopefully) before they move further downstream. That's why it's worth caring about it even if you yourself don't run it.
Another important reminder is both my 'Bird and T2 are configured to come up in a text boot instead of gdm and I start GNOME (Blackbird) or KDE (T2) manually from there. I still test GNOME on both systems, but I've pretty much entirely migrated over to KDE Plasma on the T2, so I'll talk about both the GNOME and KDE experience in this and future mini-reviews. I strongly recommend a non-graphical boot as a recovery mechanism in case your graphics card gets whacked by something or other. On Fedora this is easily done by ensuring the symlink /etc/systemd/system/default.target points to /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target.
The year 2022 gave me one of the happiest moments in my life, and I also felt proud as Anwesha joined the Ansible community team as a software engineer in Red Hat. Proud because she became the best example of someone to whom I taught things about computers (she has multiple mentors/friends who helped her during this journey). Though sometimes that created trouble at home, the output is super lovely. From a Masters in Law to a software engineer in Red Hat is a good story.
My original plan for 2022 was to work a bit less, but I failed for the simple reason that I forgot to mark “free” time in the calendar. Stupid. Be that as it may, it was mostly quite a good year for me, with a definite non-work-highlight being a three-week holiday with my offspring in the Spring.
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I did quite a bit of DNS work and trainings, and gave a few Ansible trainings, and in between I wrote the odd blogticle:
This year marked my tenth Ansible anniversary, and we created an Ansible reference sheet. I learned about using a lookup plugin for Ansible module_defaults, and jotted down some notes on Ansible local facts on Windows nodes. As you might know, I’m a fan of local facts, and we began collecting ideas for using local facts.
As we start 2023, it’s the perfect time to reflect on what the last few years have brought to us. The pandemic has brought us closer together globally. Conferences and meetings moved to virtual platforms lowering the geographic barrier to participating and collaborating. Many of us moved to remote work and embraced asynchronous communication with our teams. We have met people across the globe whom we would have never had the privilege to meet.
Programming is at the heart of open source software. Learning programming is a great way to explore new ideas and create programs that are useful for you. This year, Opensource.com authors shared many excellent articles about programming, from how new programmers can get started, to how experts can learn more about the details. Here are six articles to get you excited about programming:
I haven’t written in a while. I’ve been caught up in work. But between working, I’ve put together some new equipment in a couple of new racks. I bought an audio dampened 15U rack a couple of years ago or so, and into it I’ve placed the RAID array and an HP desktop form-factor ML110 server to drive the disks. The disk array controller is a two-port Broadcom / LSI SAS3008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-3. I’ve been thinking about getting the four-port variant, since I like this one and I’ve got another 7 drive bays in the chassis that don’t have disks in them.
Challenges in getting a Debian package. Debian Rust packaging team has a great collection of scripts for maintaining Debian Rust packages, but that depended on schroot and other tools that I haven't used usually. Getting that working first was a challenging. I had to get out of my podman container running sid inside user namespace, because schroot didn't work due to not being able to create devices files. That was okay, and I went back to my old chroot script which was doing something similar to schroot. Had to fix up /etc/passwd and /etc/group to match inside and outside. I broke gpg on the way, I had to fix the chroot script not to break PTTY by keeping /dev/pts. This I could probably have ignored if I had used schroot myself as well. Anyway, some maintenance of old scripts to get back up to speed...
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares an article listing "the five best Linux distros of 2022" — as chosen by the editor of the blog omg! ubuntu!
"Spoiler: they're not all Ubuntu-based!" the article begins, also noting that it's not a ranking of superiority of importance, but rather "giving a shoutout to some of the year's best Linux releases."
In 2022, information technology collided with geopolitics like never before. After Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, many nations decided that Vladimir Putin's regime and populace should be denied access to technology and even to services from the companies that make and wield it.
The USA, meanwhile, extended its restrictions on technology exports to China, citing its belligerence and repression of human rights.
The bans appear to have been somewhat effective: China and Russia both started efforts to replicate technology they could no longer easily, or legally, obtain.
Before Christmas, I decided to work on a small project that would automatically change the emoji on my website. I am calling this project seasonal.js. Using seasonal.js, you can change all of the emojis on a web page that use a pre-defined CSS class. seasonal.js contains a default JSON object of various events that are relevant to me, from my birthday (assigned a party emoji) to Boxing Day (assigned a box emoji). You can change this object to include events that you want to celebrate on your website.
The Advent of Code is not a sprint: it's a marathon: sometimes you've got to stop and smell the roses.
In that one, we have to apparently cosplay as an IBM mainframe and just.. crunch them numbers. This doesn't look fun, and I can't think of a clever twist to make it fun, so let's try to make it short and sweet.
In a world where simple tasks have hundreds of dependencies and most of them are not documented, everything falls to chaos. The monolithigarchy dictates that your build times must be slow so that They (the dependocracy) can win over your hearts and minds with video games that you play during your compile times. One person gets mad about their string padding library being used by corporations without paying and then the entire internet explodes for a few days. This is unsustainable.
Today I found myself nerd-sniped by a bit in Golang is evil on shitty networks (via), and wanted to know where a particular behavior was added in Go's network code. The article conveniently identified the code involved, so once I found the source file all I theoretically needed to do was trace it back in history. Until recently, my normal tool for this is Git's 'blame' view and mode, often on Github because Github has a convenient 'view git-blame just before this commit', which makes it easy to step back in history. Unfortunately in this case, the source code had been reorganized and moved around repeatedly, so this wasn't easy.
Recently I started a discussion about modeling secular trends using flexible models in the context of cluster randomized trials. I’ve been motivated by a trial I am involved with that is using a stepped-wedge study design. The initial post focused on more standard parallel designs; here, I want to extend the discussion explicitly to the stepped-wedge design.
This is the second report on the R-spatial evolution project. The project involves the retirement (archiving) of rgdal, rgeos and maptools during 2023. The first report set out the main goals of the project. Here we report on progress so far, steps already taken, and those remaining to be accomplished. We feel that anyone planning training or teaching for the Northen hemisphere Fall semester/term should plan to have ceased using the retiring packages before work begins after the summer; sp will use sf for functions previously using retiring packages in June 2023.
A linear model with complex interaction effects can be almost as opaque as a typical black-box like XGBoost.
XGBoost models are often interpreted with SHAP (Shapley Additive eXplanations): Each of e.g. 1000 randomly selected predictions is fairly decomposed into contributions of the features using the extremely fast TreeSHAP algorithm, providing a rich interpretation of the model as a whole. TreeSHAP was introduced in the Nature publication by Lundberg and Lee (2020).
Whereas the direction of main effects can be interpreted from the sign of the estimate, the interpretation of interaction effects often requires plots. This task is facilitated by the R package sjPlot (Lüdecke, 2022). In Bernabeu (2022), the sjPlot function called plot_model served as the basis for the creation of some custom functions. Two of these functions are deciles_interaction_plot and sextiles_interaction_plot. These functions allow the plotting of interactions between two continuous variables. In the case of deciles_interaction_plot, one of the variables is divided into ten bins, known as deciles, and the other variable is unchanged. In the case of sextiles_interaction_plot, one of the variables is divided into six bins, or sextiles, and the other variable is unchanged.
It is not just a quick introduction, but a REAL one, a practical one. Even those who do already know statistics will find that they learn from this tutorial.
The mapBliss package is a R package which I developed which allows for users to make custom souvenir quality maps of their flights, road trips and favorite cities by utilizing the power of the leaflet and other R packages (for a full list, see the Github README here).
Happy 2023! As the year starts, let’s take some time to share our goals for CircuitPython in 2023 and beyond. Just like past years (full summary 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022), we’d like everyone in the CircuitPython community to contribute by posting their thoughts to some public place on the internet by Wednesday January 18th, 2023.
Z shell is an efficient, powerful, and interactive Unix shell. It's easy to install, configure, use, and learn on any Linux platform including Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, and more.
Here's how you can install Z shell and Oh My Zsh on your Linux machine.
That simple line has been crashing systems in the Linux world for years — It is known as the (infamous) “BASH Fork Bomb”.
When run in a GNU/BASH shell, this BASH variant of the Fork Bomb will bring your average Linux system to its knees, lickety-split. A mere handful of characters that can cause a computer to cry “Uncle.”
But what, exactly, is a “Fork Bomb”? How do they work? And where on this green Earth of ours were they first created?
Come with me on a journey into the history, design, and usage of one of the most dastardly ideas in all of computing… of The Fork Bomb!
I've been using vim for nearly as long as I've been writing code. My first introduction to it was being thrown in the deep end in 2009 by my Intro to CS lab assistant, who told us to write our programs using vi1 on the department servers. Why he told us that, I have no idea. But I got used to switching into and out of insert mode, and also how to save and quit.
At my internship in 2011, I learned to use vim in earnest. The project I worked on thrashed system memory by running HBase in a test suite over and over, and my work would routinely crash Eclipse2 as a result. I don't remember if my mentor suggested it or if I used vim on my own, but he did encourage it. He urged me to learn proper vim and disable the arrow keys to get used to navigating with the hjkl keys. That got me to learn it quickly through immersion and I fell in love.
Uber are undoubtedly a company engaged in extremely dodgy activity. But, on the other had, they're ridiculously convenient.
A few months ago, we landed in a foreign country, opened the same Uber app as we used back home, and booked a cab. It just worked. I didn't need to register for a different version. I didn't need to create a new account. I didn't need to add a new credit card. That's the sort of seamless experience which can only come from a centralised service.
But, hey, we're all moving to a ReDeCentralised Federated Future. Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna' be fooled again! So let's think about how a decentralised Uber would work.
As I wrote about in The Social Pendulum we see a swing to extremes of culture. We've had a decade-or-so of big central social networks. Now we're swinging the other way.
When the Zoom lags, some participants might be panicking more than others: Gen Z.
They’re most likely to feel plagued by technological issues at work, according to HP’s global survey of 10,000 office workers around the world. That might be surprising considering the youngest generation is digitally native, often assigned the job of explaining newfangled gizmos or devices to their older peers at work. But that can put Gen Z under pressure.
While 1 in 5 young office workers report feeling judged for having tech issues, only 1 in 25 of their older coworkers feel the same way, according to HP. They’re also 10 times more likely to feel shame when having these tech snafus than their peers over age 40.
Once again, here are the books I read this year, and especially the ones I’d recommend.
One interesting thing I noticed about this year: in years past, I mentioned trying to read more books written by women. Well this year, without consciously trying, 9 out of the 13 books I read were written by women. I’d pat myself on the back, but if I did a full accounting of all the books I’ve read in my lifetime, I probably have a huge deficit to make up.
Americans wasted a whopping 3.4 billion hours in 2021 thanks to traffic, according to research from connected car analytics company INRIX, which also noted that this equates to 36 hours lost per person. The numbers are clear: Even with drops in traffic thanks to new travel patterns in the wake of the pandemic, we still lose an entire workweek each year to traffic.
This is one of the things that resonates with me most. Mostly because I had worked with my boss a lot over the course of many years so we had worked together on a rather extensive list of projects. One thing I had started to notice over the last few years is that no matter how bad some of these projects had gone, My bosses memories of them always seem to paint the project in a very positive light whereas my memories were usually more negative.
Meanwhile the ex-clients generally had very negative memories too. I know because I was still working with some of them on my own and we'd occasionally chat about the past. Of course now I realize that that my boss was painting themselves in a positive light. In every story they tell, they are the hero. There can be no other version of it. At least not in their deeply disturbed worldview.
Needless to say, I won't be working with this person again. Especially now that I have fully realized how I was being treated. I'm also not going to belabor this issue or go too deeply into specifics as I know that despite protests saying otherwise, this person deeply desires any kind of open line of communication with me. I will not give them that.
Enjoy the silence asshole because I sure will.
I have a blog. It is successful. So let me tell you how to start yours by describing exactly how to make a copy of mine. Wouldn't that be an incredibly useful and creative blog post? One minor problem… two actually. First, my blog is definitely not successful (and that's a feature, not a bug) and second, there are many, many good ways to start a blog. So, let me just write down some of the ways you can start a blog—a successful one—in 2023.
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You're basically in the camp I'm in. I can't afford to spend a lot running a server for my stuff just for fun but I do have enough skills to make and run my own blog. I'd say your best options are to pick a CMS—I'd go file based if I were you—and then I'd host my site on a relatively cheap VPS. You can keep a personal site up for less than $5/m, domain included which to me sounds like a reasonable price to pay.
My favourite category of television show is 90s sitcoms. I greatly enjoy Frasier and Seinfeld. I have watched both series many times, although on many occasions I have had the show on in the background before I go to sleep. I enjoy going to sleep after watching something funny. I remember reading an article in The Atlantic at the beginning of the pandemic that spoke about the comfort of watching shows you have already seen before. This idea just came to mind again.
I maintain a public list of television shows that I want to watch. I keep this record to remind me of what I have found in the past that I thought I may enjoy. This makes it easier for me to decide what to watch should I choose to watch a television show (or indeed a movie). But, despite having a list of things I want to watch, I keep re-watching Seinfeld and Frasier (even if only in the background).
Suppose you’re in the market for a new selfie stick for an upcoming vacation. You see two models online—one that extends to 24 inches and the other to 16. Seems obvious that you’d pick the longer one, right? Bigger and better panoramic pics!
Well, not necessarily.
When presented with this exact scenario in an experiment, most people did indeed choose the longer stick, whereas only 15 percent initially chose the shorter one. However, when the short version was labeled as “newer,” twice as many, about 31 percent, chose it—even though all of the other product information remained the same. Why? Because consumers gravitate to merchandise labeled as “updated,” even if the items are not necessarily improved, according to the results.
"Once something says ‘revised’ on it, it makes you suspend critical judgment."
2022 was a calm year and my first normal-ish year after COVID disruptions. My year was defined by a significant career change and reduced public engagement. I spent most of my time outside of work running and only entertained a small number of projects.
After completing the Paparoa Track on December 14, six of our group were dropped off in St Arnaud to prepare for the Travers-Sabine Circuit. We spent two nights at Nelson Lakes Motel, with a rest day on December 15 to do laundry, buy a few more supplies, pack for the circuit, and generally relax (including watching Morocco vs France in the football World Cup).
On December 16 we got up early and took a boat across Lake Rotoiti to Coldwater Hut where we started the track. That day we marched for several hours up the Travers Valley, all the way to Upper Travers Hut at the head of the valley. It was a long, tiring walk with heavy packs containing supplies for six days, but not especially difficult. As forecast, the weather was foggy and a bit drizzly but not bad and when we reached Upper Travers we had some good views of Mt Travers and surrounding slopes still with patches of snow. The second day we crossed the Travers Saddle — a more difficult walk, starting with a steep 500m-vertical climb to the saddle, followed by a 1km-vertical desent to the East Sabine River and a walk to West Sabine Hut. This day the weather was pretty good and we had some great views from the saddle.
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISC) have developed an energy-efficient computing platform that uses memristors instead of the conventional CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) fabrication process for building electronic circuits.
Unlike CMOS, which processes and stores data in different locations in an integrated circuit and consumes more energy for communication, memristors process as well as store data in the same location, resulting in improved speed and efficiency.
“We are resolving this problem by performing both computation and storage at the same physical location,” said Sreetosh Goswami, assistant professor, CeNSE (Centre for Nano Science and Engineering) at IISC.
The original mission of the Mars Helicopter (named Ingenuity) was to successfully complete a single 30-second long flight on Mars. That happened back in April. After several more successful flights, Ingenuity’s 30-day mission came to an end, but the helicopter was doing so well that NASA decided to keep it flying. Several months later, JPL promised that Ingenuity would “complete flight operations no later than the end of August,” but as of late November, the little helicopter has completed 17 flights with no sign of slowing down.
These more daring flights required the Ingenuity team to search for level airfields that are free of rocks that could damage the helicopter during landing. Because Jezero Crater, which the helicopter and Perseverance are exploring, is rather rocky, those flat, safe airfields have been hard to find. The new software will use Ingenuity's downward-facing camera to detect risky objects before landing and steer Ingenuity to avoid them, allowing the chopper to use smaller airfields.
"While in flight, Ingenuity will identify the safest visible landing site," the Ingenuity team said in a statement (opens in new tab). "When preparing to land, Ingenuity will then divert over to this selected site."
The software will also make Ingenuity more confident in flight. Since the helicopter was designed to fly over flat fields, its cameras previously could get confused by seeing a hilly landscape underneath. The old software would think the helicopter was veering, which would make it actually veer while in flight in a misguided attempt to stabilize its course.
The year began right as the James Webb Space Telescope was unfurling its sunshield — the giant, nail-bitingly thin and delicate blanket that, once open, would plunge the observatory into frigid shade and open up its view of the infrared universe. Within hours of the ball dropping here in New York City, the sunshield could have caught on a snag, ruining the new telescope and tossing billions of dollars and decades of work into the void. Instead, the sunshield opened perfectly, getting the new year in physics off to an excellent start.
A medical robot can guide a flexible needle through the lungs of living pigs without direct human control. Over several additional tests on lungs removed from the pigs, the robot placed the needle more precisely than human doctors using a standard straight-needle procedure.
“There are many procedures, including biopsy or directed drug delivery or localised radiation cancer treatment, that involve using a needle to get to a specific target to perform the procedure where you’re manoeuvring that needle inside tissue,” says Ron Alterovitz...
The startup world's dirty not-so-secret is that most startups fail. Startups are risky ventures and their investors know it, so they cast a wide net, placing lots of bets on lots of startups and folding the ones that don't show promise, which sucks for the company employees, but also for the users who depend on the company's products.
You know what this is like: you sink a bunch of time into familiarizing yourself with a new product, you spend money on accessories for it, you lock your data into it, you integrate it into your life, and then, one morning – poof! All gone.
Now, there are ways that startups could mitigate this risk for their customers: they could publish their source code under a free/open license so that it could be maintained by third parties, they could refuse to patent their technology, or dedicate their patents to an open patent pool, etc.
All of this might tempt more people to try their product or service, because the customers for digital products are increasingly savvy, having learned hard lessons when the tools they previously depended on were orphaned by startups whose investors pulled the plug.
But very few startups do this, because their investors won't let them. That brings me to the other dirty not-so-secret of the startup world: when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company's assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.
By this point, most of the people in the queue had given up, and another checkout had opened next to us. There were so many people behind us, we decided to stay put. But this meant watching this person work in vain to get a virtual card working on their phone.
There are a couple of lessons here. Test and validate your new payment stuff before trying it at a packed supermarket! Keep carrying your cards, even if you have them in your bag. Added convenience is fine, but what’s your plan B when it fails?
Back in 2007, “Apple Computer, Inc.” dropped the word “Computer” from their name. Becoming, simply, “Apple”.
Since then Apple has transformed, radically, into a company that is almost unrecognizable. Their approach to both hardware and software has changed so fundamentally that, if it were not for the big “Apple” logo on their products, you would be forgiven for not recognizing them as being made by the same company.
Unfortunately, these changes have not resulted in Apple making better products. The reality is quite the opposite. Any bright spots in the Apple product line is in spite of — not because of — Apple’s abandoning of what made them great in the past.
Let’s look through a handful of examples that showcase this dramatic shift.
A crypto-stealing phishing campaign is underway to bypass multi-factor authentication and gain access to accounts on Coinbase, MetaMask, Crypto.com, and KuCoin and steal cryptocurrency.
The threat actors abuse the Microsoft Azure Web Apps service to host a network of phishing sites and lure victims to them via phishing messages impersonating bogus transaction confirmation requests or suspicious activity detection.
For example, one of the phishing emails seen in the attacks pretended to be from Coinbase, which says they locked the account due to suspicious activity.
With a new Apple security flaw in the news, it’s a good time to revisit the question of what speculative execution is and how it works. This topic received a great deal of discussion a few years ago when Spectre and Meltdown were frequently in the news and new side-channel attacks were popping up every few months.
Speculative execution is a technique used to increase the performance of all modern microprocessors to one degree or another, including chips built or designed by AMD, ARM, IBM, and Intel. The modern CPU cores that don’t use speculative execution are all intended for ultra-low power environments or minimal processing tasks. Various security flaws like Spectre, Meltdown, Foreshadow, and MDS all targeted speculative execution a few years ago, typically on Intel CPUs.
Trail of Bits recently completed a security review of cURL, which is an amazing and ubiquitous tool for transferring data. We were really thrilled to see cURL founder and lead developer Daniel Stenberg write a blog post about the engagement and the report, and wanted to highlight some important things he pointed out.
In this post, Daniel dives into cURL’s growth since its last audit in 2016: the project; the codebase; and then into the work with Trail of Bits. He touched on both the engagement experience and the final report.
In Australia’s previous government, attorney general George Brandis struggled to define metadata in one of the defining moments in modern political TV history. At one point he said it was details on an envelope, before recanting, then saying it was, sort of. His argument, when he eventually got to it, was that metadata was meaningless without the contents of the envelope anyway, and that security professionals were overplaying their significance.
This was, to use the technical term, nonsense. An envelope from a suicide line, then a GP, then a psychologist, can be interpreted pretty easily. PGP email has the same weakness.
LastPass’s most recent security disclosures are worrying for this reason. While attackers can only hope to brute force the leaked binary blobs containing credentials (assuming we trust their implementation), the service is unique among password managers in that it doesn’t encrypt the URLs of sites themselves. This has been known about for years, and it still floors me. I’m practically parquet at this point.
German security researchers studying biometric capture devices popular with the U.S. military got more than they expected for $68 on eBay.
Universities are literally awash in data. From administrative data offering information about students, faculty and staff, to research data on professors’ scholarly activities and even telemetric signals — the functional administrative data gathered remotely from wireless networks, security cameras and sensors in the course of daily operations — that data can be an invaluable resource.
But a new study by researchers at UCLA and the MIT Press, published Dec. 23 in the journal Science, finds that universities face significant challenges in capturing such data, and that they severely lag the private sector and government entities in using data to solve challenges and inform strategic planning.
“This new research shines a bright light on the ways in which universities are data rich and data poor — and sometimes intentionally data blind,” said Christine L. Borgman, distinguished research professor at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies and one of the study’s authors. “They are struggling to capture and exploit the true value of their data resources and reluctant to initiate the conversations necessary to build consensus for data governance.”
Whistleblower Troy Stolz’s defamation trial against ClubsNSW has run overtime and will continue early next year as the Court hears evidence from Stolz’s former managers regarding bullying and harassment claims and the Clubs CEO’s attempts to enforce damage control in the wake of the Stolz revelations. Callum Foote reports.
After five days of gruelling cross-examination by counsel for pokies lobby ClubsNSW, Troy Stolz ended back in hospital on the weekend getting blood clot needles. The whistleblower has Stage 4 cancer.
Meanwhile, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet has upped the ante in his efforts to introduce cashless gaming card reforms and ClubsNSW has threatened to campaign against MPs who support reform.
Labor opposition leader Chris Minns has continued to be criticised for refusing to take a significant position on gambling reform.
Stolz presented to the Maitland hospital emergency with chest pains, and shortness of breath and was treated for deep vein thrombosis. These were the upshot of complications related to the chemotherapy treatment he is currently undergoing.
Kevin Gallagher was paid $37m over five years, more than Santos booked in profits, while they paid zero tax, raked in $20bn income from government gas permits, and never complained once about the $50bn of public subsidies to the fossil fuel sector. What’s the scam? The scam is that Santos boss Kevin has had an embarrassing hissy-fit, invoking Venezuela, Nigeria and a “Soviet-style” intervention by Labor to introduce timid gas price caps (at a high $12gj) which ease power bills for ordinary Australians but don’t touch the 80% of gas exported by Santos and other cartel members at all. Not a peep from Kevin either and his corporate welfare cronies when the government was intervening to hand-out $2bn in subsidies to build Darwin’s Middle Arm gas port to help Kevin and co make millions from gas fracking in the Beetaloo Basin at the expense of the public and the planet.
The government’s Energy Price Relief Plan bill has passed in a tumultuous final day of parliament for 2022 after the Greens secured funding to help people on low incomes transition away from gas appliances and electrify their homes. But the question of the cartel behaviour by gas companies remains, reports Daniel Bleakley.
In early December, the nation’s energy ministers met to drive the final nail into the coffin of the Scott Morrison’s much-maligned “CoalKeeper” scheme, agreeing to a totally new scheme to support clean energy storage.
[...]
As Queensland Minister for Energy Mick de Brenni proclaimed after the recent meeting of the nation’s energy ministers: “Angus Taylor and Scott Morrison’s CoalKeeper is dead”.
Like ‘CoalKeeper’, the government’s new Capacity Investment Scheme will underwrite dispatchable power to support the entry of more intermittent renewables into the grid. Unlike CoalKeeper, it will only support low-carbon dispatchable power like batteries and pumped hydro and, therefore, won’t face accusations of propping up coal-fired power longer than it would otherwise exist.
Right now my phone is sitting next to me untouched. But have I really protected myself from its distractions or its ability to impact my mind? The answer is no, according to a well-known study in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research from 2017 entitled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.”
Court documents reveal that pubs and pokies baron Bruce Mathieson's Endeavour Group may have underpaid $700,000 in stamp duty when buying the Captain Cook Hotel in Sydney. Callum Foote reports.
Brexit’s a dud. The UK economy has shrunk. Almost 17 million Brits live in poverty. And there are large lessons in it for Australia. Michael West reports.
[...]
The British pound has cratered, rendering imports more expensive, inflation is in double digits, debt at record levels, trade has been hammered; the UK Office for Budget Responsibility, the body which produces economic forecasts for the government, expects Brexit to reduce Britain’s output by 4% over 15 years compared to remaining in the EU trading bloc.
As Prem Sikka, accounting professor and Labour member of the House of Lords, puts it, “The UK has become a poor country with a lot of very rich people in it. “Just 250 people have wealth of €£710.723bn whilst average real wage of workers is less than what it was in 2007.
“Some 16.65 million live in poverty. The poorest 20% in Ireland have a standard of living almost 63% higher than the equivalent poorest in the UK. Most people don’t have the spending power to rejuvenate the economy and no major political party is pursuing equitable distribution of income and wealth.”
Donald Trump knowingly committed dozens of brazen tax frauds during the six years when he ran for office and was President. Trump biographer and tax avoidance expert David Cay Johnston reports.
Donald Trump knowingly committed dozens of brazen tax frauds during the six years when he ran for office and was President, my analysis of the Congressional report on his tax returns and other documents shows. This explains why he fought all the way to the Supreme Court in a failed effort to keep his tax information secret. One technique he used at least 26 times between 2015 and 2020 was as simple as it was flagrant. Trump filed sole proprietor reports, known as Schedule C, that showed huge business expenses despite having zero revenue. That created losses which Trump used to offset his income from work and investments, thus lowering his income taxes. Additional Schedule Cs had expenses exactly equal to revenues while only a few showed profits.
Here's the inflation story you're expected to believe (advance warning: this story is entirely false): America gave the poors too much money during the lockdown and now the economy is awash in free money, which made those poors so rich that now they're refusing to work, which means the economy isn't making anything anymore. With all that extra money and all those missing workers, prices are skyrocketing.
Union-brawling Qantas chief Alan Joyce has capitulated to pay rises of up to 33% over five years in a deal struck with the Aircraft Engineers' Association. Michael Sainsbury with the scoop.
[...]
Licensed aviation engineers are an increasingly rare breed both in Australia and worldwide. Their average age is 54 and the company has all but stopped training apprentices over the past 13 years. Nevertheless, for those who remain, this is substantially above the standard offer of 9% over five years he has been telling the market he won’t budge on for Qantas staff. Unions have been pushing back against the broad offer which effectively lowers the real wages of the company’s staff by 10-15% as it charges towards a record half-year profit of up to $1.4 billion for the six months to December 31. Qantas deals with multiple unions including the Australian Federation of Air Pilots, the ALAEA, the Transport Workers Union, the Flight Attendant’s Association of Australia (FAAA), the Transport Workers Union, the Australian Services Union (ASU) and the Australian and International Pilots Association (AIPA).
As I’ve explained in the past, at the end of each calendar year I always like to make a small round of personal donations to projects and organizations that are important for my personal digital life.
Aged care homes and retirement villages are being targeted to harvest votes from Australia's elderly. Is it systemic, or just a few anecdotes? Dr Sarah Russell looks at the evidence.
Some aged care homes and retirement villages are actively disenfranchising older people in what could be described as a corruption of the political process. These providers allow only some candidates to distribute election material within their premises. They also control which candidates meet their residents.
I first became aware of the disparity of access during the 2013 federal election campaign. While spending time with my mother in a residential aged care home, I noticed that only one candidate visited the home. When I asked whether other candidates would be visiting, I was told that only this candidate had been “invited”.
Josh Frydenberg as treasurer and secret treasurer Scott Morrison made a motza for foreign vulture funds in last year's takeover boom and record Aussie assets sell-off. Who knew what when, and why are we flogging essential monopoly services to cuff-linked tax crooks?
Two months after losing his seat at the federal election, former treasurer Josh Frydenberg landed on his feet with Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Goldman Sachs was a banker to most of the large foreign takeovers that the Treasurer approved during his time. And there were some monsters: Afterpay, AusNet, Spark Infrastructure and Sydney Airport among them.
Once famously labeled the “Giant Vampire Squid wrapped around the face of humanity”, Goldman made a truckload of money from the decisions of Scott and Josh’s Treasury.
So, Australia’s reputation as an attractive destination for foreign capital was surely burnished during the Treasury stewardship of the dynamic duo. Burnished that is, as a destination for easy-pickings.
Sadly for Australians however – as opposed to Wall Street – we are too attractive; chumps and fools for foreign vulture funds with a penchant for snatching our assets on the cheap: things the public have already paid for, built, privatised and subsidised – and then plonking them in tax havens.
The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
I haven’t felt strongly about sideloading software on phones either way; maybe I should have. But Bruce Schneier’s latest submission to the US Senate Judiciary Committee makes a compelling case for granting third party access.
Mobile tech is a duopoly run by two companies – Google and Apple – with a combined market cap of $3.5 trillion. Each company uses a combination of tech, law, contract and market power to force sellers to do commerce via an app, and each one extracts a massive commission on all in-app sales – 15-30%!
This is bad for users and workers. Many companies' gross margins are less than 30%. In some categories, that means there's no competition. Take audiobooks: publishers wholesale their audiobooks to retailers at a 20% discount, so a retailer that sells its audiobooks through an app, paying a 30% commission, will lose money through every sale.
My interest in understanding incentive structures is a recurring theme here, whether it be digital privacy or software development. If shorter, shallower tracks are easier to produce, get higher play counts, and therefore generate more money, the industry will trend in that direction.
As people waken round the world to a brand new year, so the public domain wakens to thousands more works having entered its ever-expanding expanse, including Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and the works of M. C. Escher and Edward S. Curtis. Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, where a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose. Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain, but there are three definitions which cover most cases. For these three systems, newly entering the public domain today are: works by people who died in 1952, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (e.g. UK, Russia, most of EU and South America); works by people who died in 1972, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (e.g. New Zealand, and most of Africa and Asia); films and books (incl. artworks featured) published in 1927 for the United States.
So another year Gregorian Calendar style has begun. Hello New Year! And a Happy New Year to all, who adhere to this calendar. Good day to everyone!
New Year's Eve was unusually warm, we watched the fireworks from our
balcony, my brother wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Even at midnight we
had around 12 ÃÅ¡C. Now the thermometer on the balcony displays 15 ÃÅ¡C.
In an old deep cavern, occupied centuries ago by a dangerous clan of Dwarves, you see the small two-doored entrance of a construction of some sort.
When you enter the construction, you see before you a very massive staircase sculpted directly on the rock. There’s no inscription, no statues, no symbol, nothing. And yet, you sense something malevolent, just like if every vein of the rock around you was full of a long-forgotten dark energy.
It's been, yikes, over a year since I did some short album reviews. I stopped writing but I didn't stop listening. In fact, the quest I embarked on some years back to expand my musical horizons and to be less passive in my consumption of music has been an unmitigated success. I listen to and enjoy a much wider range of musical styles and eras today than I ever have in the past. And I'm not done yet!
Hello New Year! And a Happy New Year to all, who adhere to this calendar. Good day to everyone!
As a flatpak user, but also someone with a slow internet connection, I was looking for a way to export a flatpak program to install it on another computer. It turns out flatpak supports this, but it's called "create-usb" for some reasons.
Been playing with Sonic-PI which is an easy to use (and install) live coding music environment.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.