Summary: Clients of Sirius might wonder if they’re hiring a bunch of geeks or a love chain; nepotism has gone way to far in Sirius ‘Open Source’; my wife, who actually did graduate with a Computer Science degree, was disgusted by this and left the company last month
Summary: For quite some time now Sirius ‘Open Source’ has been hiring for technical roles people who are neither technical nor grasp (nor use!) Open Source; this was a recipe for disaster
THIS post may seem like it revisits a subject we covered here before, but today we provide some more in-depth details and name numerous different examples. Nepotism is rampant in many companies; but this is the story about a company where my wife and I spent a combined 21 years. So we know it very well (from the inside).
“He was not capable of solving any tickets, could barely even figure out how to access clients’ machines.”Let’s start with D. S. who seems to be related (family connection) to management, hence hired. He was not capable of solving any tickets, could barely even figure out how to access clients’ machines. Even coming late, despite this being the bare minimum! While proving the family connection was always tricky, the surname was a giveaway (the first name is a very common one). Not every time the surname matches does that imply a family connection (we previously gave the example of the CEO’s surname and a new hire with the surname; they were quick to point out in writing there was no connection!). Was that a nephew? More relatives as new/temporary recruits?
For those who like to pick on my wife for this, remember she was suitably qualified and educated (Bachelors degree in Computer Science).
“Nepotism hurts not just on the technical front.”If that’s not compelling enough an example, consider the manager who brought three romantic partners to the company (including a wife). There might be faction at play (Mr. Kink and ‘the Angels’), but it would not be a problem if the new arrivals had a relevant degree or relevant work experience. As we noted before, you risk having people who paste a wall of text into the command line (the client did notice this error and was very unhappy; not even history -c was run after this mistake).
Nepotism hurts not just on the technical front. It makes people unable to do the job or key aspects of the job; it moreover harms morale. Some people get special access and treatment owing to ‘bedroom politics’ rather than actual achievement or seniority. This is not good. It ruins companies.
“They don’t apologise and never face consequences. That too is connected to endemic nepotism.”Then there’s the immunity. When it comes to technical failures, procrastination, negligence etc. the Support Manager and the romantic partners never ever get reprimanded or criticised because he’s part of the inner clique; when he was a Support Engineer he got serious bollocking, in person, from our biggest client (at the time), right in front of the rest of the team. It was painful to witness and even seemed over the top, definitely inappropriate; either way, now he’s immune from criticism. As we noted in the last video (less than 24 hours ago), the rules apply only to “lesser” staff; the people at the top are immune from their own rules and they’re the ones monopolising actual enforcement. They don’t apologise and never face consequences. That too is connected to endemic nepotism.
“In the next part of this series we’ll travel back in time to 2010 and show how the CEO of the company married a manager 2 years after she had joined the company and after they had gotten a child (and a second pregnancy).”So we’ve thus far covered several examples of nepotism and kinship in the management. Had the technical qualifications been satisfactory, it would probably not be a problem (or a lesser problem).
In the next part of this series we’ll travel back in time to 2010 and show how the CEO of the company married a manager 2 years after she had joined the company and after they had gotten a child (and a second pregnancy). It wasn’t his first wife and wasn’t his first pair of daughters. It seems like in Sirius grasping the concept of nepotism would lead to inner conflicts over double-standards. █
Due to popular requests, System76 has been hard at work on a refreshed Pangolin laptop that will feature the new AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor with AMD Radeon 680M graphics, a 144Hz 15.6-inch FHD display, up to 32 GB DDR5 6400 MHz RAM, and up to 16TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD storage.
System76 promises a “buttery smooth experience” even when playing games (including those that demand higher framerate), watching movies, listening to music, or working on your favorite projects.
The System76 Pangolin line of laptops are lightweight notebooks with 15.6 inch displays, AMD Ryzen processors. And like all System76 computers, they come with a GNU/Linux distribution pre-installed.
When the Pangolin first launched a few years ago it initially shipped with an AMD Ryzen 4000U processor. Later that year System76 released an updated model with Ryzen 5000U chips. Now a Ryzen 6000U model is on the way.
Earlier today, System76 announced its AMD-powered Pangolin Linux laptop is getting a significant redesign. The computer comes with either Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS or the Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS. The laptop has a 144Hz 15.6-inch matte display with a max resolution of 1080p.
The refreshed notebook now comes equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800 processor and 32GB of RAM (LPDDR5 @ 6400 MHz). You can configure the computer with up to 4TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid state storage. You get three USB 3.2 Gen 1 (Type-A) ports and a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 (Type-C) port.
For network connectivity. you get both Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6E. The included Bluetooth is version 5.2. Both an SD card reader and an HDMI output are included as well. A 720P webcam adorns the top of the screen.
Quick video covering the newest release of Nobara OS. A great project aimed at making a distribution with a Fedora base easy to use for point-and-clickers, content creators and gamers.
In this video I explain how signed and unsigned binary work, the differences between them, aswell as the concept of buffer overflows and underflow.
In this video we’ll check out the latest version of NomadBSD! The number one portable FreeBSD OS with a ready made desktop has been updated and refreshed. A Yay or Nay? Let’s find out!
I’ve been mentioning Nala as an alternative to Apt for a while but I haven’t explained why until now. Nala is a front-end cli tool that works to manage your software and deb packages on Debian based distros.
So three months with the Steam Deck, Well, lets take a look and give a reaction to see how he felt about those 3 months with it!!
We occasionally talk about the possibility of RISC V on the desktop but what if I said that RISC V on mobile isn’t something too far away if Google has anything too say about it.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Toontown Rewritten on KDE Neon.
Today we will talk about when we first saw Linux, what we used, and what made us switch (or add it to our list).
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Nitrux d5c7cdff and some of the applications pre-installed.
System76, a company that focuses on Linux-first computers, designs keyboards now. The Launch Keyboard “launched” some time ago, and for some of you the lack of a numpad was a concern. Now, the “Heavy” variation of the Launch mechanical keyboard is available – and yes, it’s a full keyboard complete with a numpad.
Today, I’m taking a quick first look at the latest release of ArchCraft, an Arch-based Linux distro that features a highly customized openbox session, as well as a highly customized bspwm session. Archcraft is focused on being minimal, lightweight and stunningly beautiful.
So three months with the Steam Deck, Well, lets take a look and give a reaction to see how he felt about those 3 months with it!!
I'm announcing the release of the 6.1.5 kernel.
All users of the 6.1 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 6.1.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.1.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
The new Linux kernels are version 6.1.5 of the “stable” kernel and version 5.15.87 of the “longterm” kernel. As the names suggest, stable is intended as a kernel for everyday use, while the “longterm” variant is designed for applications that require a lot of uptime, such as in servers.
Discourse is an open-source forum platform known for its vast features and third-party integrations.
It is also one of the best open-source forum software you can deploy on your Linux servers to build a community.
The It’s FOSS Community forum is also powered by Discourse. If you have any questions or want to join in discussing Linux/Open-Source stuff with like-minded people, feel free to sign up on our community forum.
Now, moving on to Discourse’s latest release.
Most Linux distributions come with a file manager to give you easy access to the files stored on your system.
That’s because most distros come preinstalled with a desktop environment, and file explorer is an integral part.
But if you are one of those rare Linux users who take the matter into their hands and configure things as per your preferences, you can install and use another file manager.
But what choices do you have regarding the file manager on Linux?
I’ll answer to that question in this article. I have also added a few file browsers that work in the terminal.
Converseen image converter announced 0.9.10.0 release few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu via PPA.
Converseen is a free and open-source tool for converting or resizing a large quantity of photo images to another format with a few mouse clicks.
The new 0.9.10.0 release redesigned the Images Settings dialog. Previously, it automatically removes the metadata (information including date & time, device, and even location you capture the photo image) in output images, and replaces with only modified date and other non-sensitive data.
Now, it provides a “Remove image’s metadata” check-box. So, user can manually choose to either to remove the metadata information about the photo images in output files.
To make this even more appealing, the Standard Notes UI is very simple to use. One might even call Standard Notes pretty basic in its design. For many users, that simplistic design means the application has a very shallow learning curve. I cannot imagine anyone opening Standard Apps and not immediately feeling right at home with the tool. And because Standard Notes is available to install on Linux, MacOS, Windows, web, Android, and iOS, you can sync your notes to any device you use.
The one caveat to installing on Linux is that you’re limited to either an AppImage or a Snap package. I’ve tried both and found they perform equally as well. However, I do prefer the Snap package as it can be updated without having to download a new AppImage.
Emacs, Vim, and nano are the most prominent text editors in the Linux community. But there are several other lesser-known alternatives for you to use.
Terminal-based text editors are used for almost everything on Linux; from writing quick Bash scripts and configuration files to producing fully-fledged programs or even writing a novel.
While nano comes pre-installed on most distros, and Emacs and Vim have their own followings, there are other great terminal-based text editors out there.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snap on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Snap is a powerful package management system for Linux that makes it easy to install and manage software. Similar to AppImage or Flatpak the Snap Store provides up-to-date software no matter what version of Linux you are running and how old your libraries are
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 Snap package management on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).
ChatGPT Wrapper is an unofficial open source command-line interface and Python API for interacting with ChatGPT.
When you try to install a package or a tool, you get the following error: “dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run ‘dpkg –configure -a’ to correct the problem” as shown below when I tried to install the neofetch utility.
Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 4 with the EagleFX Broker on a Chromebook.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a Rumble comment and we would be happy to assist you!
Today we are looking at how to install Game Jolt on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to deploy NRPE agent as a Docker container. Docker containers have revolutionized how applications are deployed!
I mentioned in the post about upgrading my home internet that part of the work I did was creating a read-only Debian root with a squashfs image. This post covers the details of how I boot with that image; a later post will cover how I build the squashfs image.
First, David Reader kindly pointed me at his rodebian setup, which was helpful in making me think about the whole problem but ultimately not the direction I went. Primarily because on the old router (an RB3011) I am space constrained, with only 120M of usable flash, and so ideally I wanted as much as possible of the system in a well compressed filesystem. squashfs seemed like the best option for that, and ultimately I ended up with a 39M image.
I’ve then used overlayfs to mount a tmpfs, so I get what looks like a writeable system without having to do too many tweaks to the actual install. On the plus side I can then see exactly what is getting written where and decide whether I need to update something in the squashfs. I don’t boot with an initrd – for initial testing I booted directly off a USB stick. I’ve actually ended up continuing to do this in production, because I’ve had no pressing reason to move it all to booting off internal flash (I’ve ended up with a Sandisk SDCZ430-032G-G46 which is tiny). However nothing I’m going to describe is dependent on that – this would work perfectly well for a initial UBIFS rootfs on internal NAND.
In this tutorial you will learn how to install openssh server on Linux mint 21.
Created by CryoByte, CryoUtilities is a Linux application that will help assist with performance on the Steam Deck. Here’s how it works.
Setting a Sudo or administrator password on your Steam Deck will make so many of the different things you can do on Linux infinitely easier. Here’s how to quickly do that!
Linux is a little different from Windows, or even macOS. There’s not a lot of room for error once you start fiddling around with the administrative powers that Linux can offer. Not that things are easy to mess up, but it’s why the terminal will frequently request a Sudo password.
The file systems table (fstab) is a system configuration file, stored in the /etc directory on Linux, that contains information about various file systems and how the system should mount them during boot.
The Linux kernel uses information from the fstab file to determine which file systems to mount and where to mount them. Here’s everything you need to know about fstab and file systems on Linux.
Understanding the concept of sources.list in Ubuntu will help you understand and fix common update errors in Ubuntu.
There was a time when you needed to install third-party apps to view and type Emojis on Ubuntu.
Those days are long gone. Ubuntu now displays emoticons correctly out of the box. No special software is needed.
And there is also a built-in Emoji picker for typing emojis. You can use it to easily and quickly insert emojis into supported GTK 3 applications.
Let me show you how to use this Emoji picker.
The “jq” is a command that’s based on the JSON processor.
It allows you to transform, slice, map, filter, or perform other operations on JSON data.
By default, jq reads JSON entities (e.g., numbers, literals) from stdin.
You can use whitespace to separate entities like 1 and 2 or true and false.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to install jq on Ubuntu, test it, or uninstall it.
vcpkg is a C and C++ package manager to acquire and manage libraries.
You can download over 1,500 open-source libraries or add your own private libraries.
It’s maintained by the Microsoft C++ team and open-source contributors.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to install vcpkg on Ubuntu, test it, and uninstall it.
This is the first newsletter of the year 2023.
The new year brings new resolutions and if learning Linux is one of your resolutions, save this newsletter.
To help you improve your Linux knowledge, I am sharing a collection of free books, courses and other resources.
Google Chrome is a popular web browser that is widely used for browsing the internet, streaming videos, and running web-based applications. If you want to install Google Chrome on Pop!_OS, you can follow a few simple steps to download and install the browser. In this article, we will walk through the process of installing Google Chrome on Pop!_OS, including downloading the installation package, installing dependencies, making the package executable, and using the “dpkg” command to install the package.
If you are running XAMPP on Ubuntu Linux and want to install WordPress on it, then here are the steps to follow, given in this guide.
XAMPP is not a new software that needs a detailed introduction. It has been around for quite some time, now. The main purpose of XAMPP is to provide a single package that offers an AMPP stack (Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl). In the XAMPP, ‘X’ stands for Cross-Platform (X).
This free software is available for Windows, macOS as well as Linux. Here in this tutorial, we learn the steps for installing WordPress on Xampp which is already running on Ubuntu.
VirtualBox is a popular virtualization software by Oracle which is available for Linux, mac and Windows systems. It is flexible and brings many features to take advantage of your virtualization. It’s the best and easy way to experience Ubuntu in Windows without installing it. However, I strongly recommend installing Ubuntu physically as a dual-boot to enjoy its advantage.
The steps outlined below assume that you are installing Ubuntu for the first time in Windows. Hence the steps are a little descriptive and a bit lengthy. Furthermore, the following steps should work for Windows 10 and Windows 11 as host machines.
When working with a system, it is often important to know the technical specifications of your hardware. One important piece of hardware in any computer is the graphics card, also known as a video card or GPU. This tutorial will outline how to display graphics card information on Ubuntu, using a variety of different tools. It will cover both the command line and graphical user interface methods of viewing this information, as well as provide examples for each tool.
Groups are an essential part of the Linux permission structure and a powerful way to manage file access on your system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Helpy Customer Helpdesk on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Helpy Helpdesk is a customer service software that provides businesses with an effective way to manage customer inquiries and support tickets, streamline customer communication and enhance customer satisfaction.
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 Helpy Customer Helpdesk 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 osTicket on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, osTicket is an open-source and one of the most widely used ticketing systems by small and medium-sized businesses. One of the main features of osTicket is its web-based interface, which allows users to create, track, and respond to customer support tickets. The interface is intuitive and easy to use, and it includes tools for managing and organizing tickets, such as the ability to assign tickets to specific users or teams, set priorities, and track the status of tickets.
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 osTicket customer support and ticketing system 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.
Kora is a fancy new SVG-based icon set for the Linux desktop. It comes with 3 themes: Kora, Kora Light, Kora, Light Panel, and Kora Pgrey. Here’s how to set up each of these themes on your Linux desktop.
How to Install the VMware Workstation 17 Player on Debian 11
In this tutorial post, we will show you the method to install the VMware Workstation 17 player on Debian 11 and its derivatives.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to create your own docker image with a dockerfile.
In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to install the Flask application on Ubuntu 22.04 with Apache Web server and mod WSGI.
Flask is a very popular web framework written in Python and used by many developers worldwide. The Apache is the Web server where requests are coming to the application, and the Mod WSGI is the Apache module that implements a WSGI-compliant interface for hosting Python-based web applications.
Installing Flask with Apache and WSGI on Ubuntu 22.04 is a process that may take up to 30 minutes. Let’s get started!
The ribbon interface in Microsoft Office is a sweet spot for many users. The tabbed ribbon interface groups specific options inside a single tab.
This guide explains what is Go Programming language and how to install Go language in Linux and finally how to create a test program in Golang with a simple example.
Recently, with the Steam Next Fest, I revived my taste for demos: small doses with lots of flavor. And I have been playing them when I have the opportunity. Hence, I am happy I discovered Star Fetchers, developed by Svavelstickan, released in 2020 on Steam. It is a 1-hit kill hack & slash 2D platformer inspired by grindhouse movies, that works great on Linux with any Proton.
The art looks like it was made in MS Paint Pinta, but there are so much attention to detail, to properly set the world, and the game physics. All done so well, that gives the game its authenticity and uniqueness.
While all contributors are on the deck working to finalize the Godot 4.0 release (currently at beta 11), some of us are still backporting important bugfixes to the current stable branch, Godot 3.5.
It had its first stable release in early August, and a first maintenance release in late September, and so far so good, most users seem to be pretty happy with 3.5.1.
But since then, quite a few bugfixes have been queued in the 3.5 branch, so it’s time to wrap up a new 3.5.2 maintenance release. We had a first Release Candidate on December 15, and after fixing one regression and backporting a few other fixes, it’s time for a second RC build to validate the update.
Please give it a try if you can. It should be as safe to use as 3.5.1-stable is, but we still need a significant number of users to try it out and report how it goes to make sure that the few changes in this update are working as intended and not introducing new regressions.
The SteamDeck might be my favorite electronic gadget, off-the-shelf device I have purchased, possibly ever. The newness has long worn off but the amount of use has maintained or perhaps expanded as it has moved into the home theater arena as well.
One drawback of being a fairly early adopter of the Steam Deck was the lack of accessories, things like docks and cases were not available so my SteamDeck largely stayed in its travel case if I was not immediately using it. I wanted to avoid any sort of tragic end to the delightful handheld machine.
Akademy 2023 will be a hybrid event, combining on-site and remote sessions, and will include talks, workshops, Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetups, training and coding sessions. The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the global KDE community to discuss and plan the future of the community and its technologies. Many participants from the broad Free and Open Source software community, local organizations and software companies will also attend. The call for papers will open soon, and the registrations shortly after. We will soon update Akademy’s website, in the meanwhile follow us on Twitter and Mastodon to keep up to date with Akademy’s news.
Endless Computers is preparing a new version of its Endless OS distro, an easy-to-use OS for computing novices of all ages. It’s a unique distro which shows how desktop OSes may evolve.
Endless is an American company – since 2020, a nonprofit foundation – which strives to bring computers, and computer literacy, to people who don’t yet have access to it. Its flagship product is Endless OS, a rather different sort of Linux distribution. It also offers the Endless Key, a bootable USB flash drive with Endless OS on it, and the inexpensive Endless Laptop.
It’s the distro that we are mainly looking at today, though. Endless OS combines several mainstream components, such as Debian and GNOME, to create something quite different. It’s probably the most widespread and least experimental immutable desktop Linux. Although the hard disk layout is fairly standard (a single root partition, formatted with the standard Linux ext4 format), the root directory is read-only. Yes, even for the superuser. Although the OS is based on Debian, you won’t find the apt or dpkg commands or any other command-line package management tools whatsoever.
In my last post, I was trying out Debian. I had some idea that I wanted to try out something dead simple. I think that idea lasted for about a month, before I went back to Gentoo again.
Arch Linux mourns the sudden loss of Jonathon Fernyhough, known in our community as jonathon, who passed away on Saturday night.
Jonathon was an active participant and contributor to Arch Linux, several derived distributions, the AUR and through personal repositories. He was enthusiastic, helpful and eager to contribute towards improving the free and open source software community as a whole.
On behalf of the wider Arch Linux community, our condolences go out to his family and friends.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.
Here are the release notes from Cockpit 283 and cockpit-machines 281:
Services: Create timer to run every minute
In the Timers part of Services page, the create timer dialog can create systemd timers to run in “minutely” mode, which runs a command every minute on the specified second.
UnityX (formerly UnityX 10) was initially designed as the next major release of the Unity desktop environment used by the Ubuntu Unity official flavor. However, it would appear that UnityX is now being developed as a flavor of the upcoming Unity 7.7 release that will offer more customization options.
While it will look pretty much the same as Unity7, this new flavor comes with some interesting benefits over Unity7, such as Compiz-free use, the ability to use a window manager of your choice (yes, you’ll be able to use Wayland), replace or remove the top panel, as well as the ability to adjust the opacity of the Unity Dash and Launcher.
A small update rolling out to the Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS distro could make a big impact on system performance.
Pop!_OS now enables zram support by default — and to quote Sytem76 themselves the feature “actively compresses memory in the background, increasing the amount of free memory your system has available. This results in increased FPS in games, or faster simulations and compiler runs.”
Pretty nice, eh?
Instead of moving infrequently used data to a separate swap partition on disk (which is slow), zram compresses data, and keeps it in RAM (which is faster). On systems with lower amounts of RAM available zram allows more available memory to be used for runnings apps and games.
The Raspberry Pi is one of the most pocket-friendly single-board computers out there.
You can get the tiniest Raspberry Pi Zero for $5 or purchase the Raspberry Pi 4 (with 1 GB RAM or more) starting at $35.
However, that is not the end of it. You will need certain accessories to make it functional for a project you want to use it with.
Arduino has launched the MKR IoT Carrier Rev2 board for Arduino MKR boards with a Bosch SensorTech BME688 4-in-1 pressure, humidity, temperature, and gas sensor replacing the HTS221 humidity sensor and LP22HB barometric pressure sensor, and the LSM6DSOX taking the place of the LSM6DS3, among other some other small changes.
First sold as part of the Arduino Oplà IoT Kit, the Arduino MKR IoT Carrier eventually became available on its own in February 2021 offering a display, sensors, and I/Os for Arduino MKR boards with wireless connectivity. The company has now introduced a second revision for the Arduino MKR IoT Carrier with new sensors and repositioning of some of the components following customer feedback.
Espressif Systems has finally launched the ESP32-C6 WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0 LE, and 802.15.4 IoT microcontroller by making the ESP32-C6-WROOM-1 module available on Aliexpress for $14.25 as well as the ESP32-C6-DevKitC-1 development board that’s out of stock on the official store at the time of writing. but somehow listed in another store for $16.22 plus shipping.
Besides the availability announcement, another surprise is the 802.15.4 radio for Zigbee and Thread that was not part of the original ESP32-C6 announcement in April 2021. The ESP32-C6-DevKitC-1 development board comes with a module with 8MB flash, exposes most of the I/O’s from the ESP32-C3, and comes with two USB-C ports, two buttons, and an RGB LED.
After finishing his recent Binbot 9000, James Bruton noticed a serious problem: the robot can’t climb stairs. That is an issue when his home does, in fact, contain stairs. Bruton has plans to build a beverage delivery robot and didn’t want to make the same mistake again. So to test the concept, he developed this prototype stair-climbing robot.
This robot climbs stairs using an interesting series of mechanisms. It has three wheeled sections, and the first and third sections can lift up relative to the middle section. The front two sections have differential drive motors, while the rear section only has freewheeling omniwheels. A sliding lead weight on top helps the robot shift its center of gravity, so it can balance on whichever wheels it needs to at any given time. Finally, the rear section slides forward and backward on rails, so the robot can move forward as it moves up each step.
This Adafruit OV5640 Camera Breakout with 120 Degree Lens has a nice quality OV5640 camera with a 5 Megapixel sensor element, 120-degree wide angle lens, and all the support circuitry you need.
LibrePhotos is a free web-based self-hosted photo manager app that enables you to organize your photos, upload raw images, backup them, and share them with your friends, publicly or with LibrePhotos users.
It also uses a face detection and face classification libraries that auto-discover portrait images and faces.
If the photo contains a geolocation, LibrePhoto can easily extract the location and perform a reverse geocoding using the Mapbox library that allows your first 50.000 geocode for free every month.
Thursday, January 12, 2023 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced Erin Rose Glass as its first keynote speaker for LibrePlanet 2023, the fifteenth edition of the Free Software Foundation’s conference on ethical technology and user freedom. The annual technology and social justice conference will be held March 18 and 19, 2023, online and in the Boston area, with the theme “Charting the Course.”
Erin Rose Glass is a researcher and educator who encourages the use of ethical technology that puts user freedom and community values front and center. Glass believes that students should have the opportunity to learn with free software. Otherwise, they “leave the classroom having missed the opportunity to know and experience ethical forms of software practice, leaving them ill prepared to face our current technological political challenges,” she states.
Join the FSF and friends on Friday, January 13, from 12:00 to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.
Our goal in bringing Rust into Chromium is to provide a simpler (no IPC) and safer (less complex C++ overall, no memory safety bugs in a sandbox either) way to satisfy the rule of two, in order to speed up development (less code to write, less design docs, less security review) and improve the security (increasing the number of lines of code without memory safety bugs, decreasing the bug density of code) of Chrome. And we believe that we can use third-party Rust libraries to work toward this goal.
Rust was developed by Mozilla specifically for use in writing a browser, so it’s very fitting that Chromium would finally begin to rely on this technology too. Thank you Mozilla for your huge contribution to the systems software industry. Rust has been an incredible proof that we should be able to expect a language to provide safety while also being performant.
The Chrome team is excited to announce the promotion of Chrome 110 to the Beta channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. Chrome 110.0.5481.30 contains our usual under-the-hood performance and stability tweaks, but there are also some cool new features to explore – please head to the Chromium blog to learn more!
Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Beta 110 (110.0.5481.29) for Android. It’s now available on Google Play.
You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.
Coming one month and three weeks after LibreOffice 7.4.3, the LibreOffice 7.4.4 point release brings even more bug fixes to make the LibreOffice 7.4 office suite series more stable and reliable for everyday use in offices or at home.
LibreOffice 7.4.4 includes a total of 114 fixes for bugs or other issues, which should improve document interoperability, as well as the core components of the LibreOffice office suite.
LibreOffice 7.4.4 Community, the fourth maintenance release of LibreOffice 7.4, the volunteer-supported office suite for personal productivity on the desktop, is immediately available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows (Intel and Arm processors), macOS (Apple M1 and Intel processors), and Linux.
I have been updating the text layout roadmap for librsvg, and part of this involves describing how some of the current code works — for example, how a <text> element gets broken up into a tree of Chunk and Span structures.
Notice how those links go to the generated documentation for the library’s internals. In the HTML, rustdoc adds “source” links that in turn take you to the actual source code for that item.
Aside: Chunk has documentation, but Span doesn’t; I haven’t gotten around to writing it yet. Linking to the documentation for the library’s internals helps me see what things are undocumented yet. Maybe a struct Point { x: f64, y: f64 } doesn’t need much documetation, but something more complicated like Span definitely does!
A Python list is an ordered and changeable collection of data objects. Unlike an array, which can contain objects of a single type, a list can contain a mixture of different types. A list in Python is used to store the sequence of various types of data. A list can be defined as a collection of values or items of different types. Python has a great built-in list type named “list”.
Let’s investigate how to generate random numbers without external dependencies in Rust.
There are many approaches to creating realistic-looking materials for 3D objects. However, not all of them are suitable for transmission over the Web, and many have a prohibitively steep learning curve. Physically Based Rendering (PBR) has emerged as an artist-friendly, intuitive, expressive, and robust technique for adding materials to 3D objects.
The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group has embraced this approach, and over the past few years, they have created formal glTF extensions for a variety of PBR materials. glTF’s growing set of PBR material extensions allow artists to create strikingly realistic 3D objects – suitable for cross-platform applications including browsers, mobile devices, native applications and more – that will perform consistently across a wide range of viewers and devices
The latest HTTP version is called HTTP/3 and is being transferred over QUIC instead of the old classic TCP+TLS duo.
Plus what makes things worse, that Youtube through it’s policy of placing LiveStreams “OnTop” of all other videos, actively promotes this “Not So Happy New Year” Bitcoin scam.
Kontron D3724-R mSTX is an upcoming industrial Mini-STX motherboard powered by an AMD Ryzen Embedded R2000 Series SoC and designed for applications with high graphical requirements such as casino gaming, medical displays, thin clients, and compact industrial PCs.
The motherboard supports up to 32GB RAM, SATA & NVMe storage, and is equipped with up to three DisplayPort outputs, one HDMI port, as well as eDP and dual-channel LVDS interfaces to support up to four independent 4K displays.
Canalys’ PC market analysis for Q4 2022 and the full 2022 is out and there are two ways to look at the numbers. While 2021 was a great year for the PC market, fuelled by the pandemic, 2022 saw the enthusiasm cool down. Overall, PC shipments are down 16% year-on-year, but when compared to 2019 (pre-pandemic), they are actually 7% up.
Notebooks took the biggest hit with 30% fewer sales in Q4 2022 while for the full 2022, the decline is 19%. Desktops fared slightly better with a 24% decline in Q4 2022 and a 7% decline year-over-year.
When Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing speaks, the datacenter sector of the IT industry listens because, with few exceptions, this foundry etches the compute, networking, and storage engines that power the datacenter. And the rest of the entire IT industry also listens, particularly the smartphone industry and a good portion of the PC industry (the part not controlled by Intel), because TSMC is also for the most part their foundry.
So TSMC is perhaps the best indicator of how the semiconductor industry is doing, and what it will be doing based on the capital expense and revenue guidance that TSMC gives.
In the fourth quarter ended in December, TSMC’s revenues rose by 26.7 percent to $19.93 billion, and the company brought an incredible 47.3 percent of revenue – that is $9.43 billion – down to the bottom line. If this were any other business, we would be telling you that within a few years, TSMC would have competition crawling all over it with such high profits.
Essentially, everyone in the country is at risk for infection now,
even if they’re super careful,
up to date on vaccines,
or have caught it before
The number of severe infections and deaths remains relatively low,
despite the high level of infections,
Juniper Networks has released security updates to address vulnerabilities affecting multiple products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
Last year, I spent a lot of time researching the security of applications built on top of XMPP, an instant messaging protocol based on XML. More specifically, my research focused on how subtle quirks in XML parsing can be used to undermine the security of such applications. (If you are interested in learning more about that research, I did a talk on it at Black Hat USA 2022. The slides and the recording can be found here and here).
At some point, when a part of my research was published, people pointed out other examples (unrelated to XMPP) where quirks in XML parsing led to security vulnerabilities. One of those examples was a vulnerability dubbed Psychic Paper, a really neat vulnerability in the way Apple operating system checks what entitlements an application has.
It’s that time of year again! Time to look back on the success and challenges of the past year, both of which we saw much of in 2022. Another year of a global pandemic, an uncertain economy, and more colorful geopolitical issues. But also stronger open source communities, more innovation, and integration across verticals as the industry marches toward digital innovation. That said, read below for my predictions as we head into 2023 and a look back at where we netted out on 2022 predictions.
[..]
With further technology export and import bans and increased geo-specific regulation (e.g. EU), Open Source will remain the neutral platform where innovation happens. OSS development will continue to comply with the changing legislation, allowing country-specific requirements (security, data, federation, compliance, etc.) and be upstreamed into Open Source Networking and connectivity projects.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (emacs, libxstream-java, and netty), Fedora (mingw-binutils, pgadmin4, phoronix-test-suite, vim, and yarnpkg), Red Hat (.NET 6.0, dbus, expat, java-1.8.0-ibm, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, libreoffice, libtasn1, libtiff, postgresql:10, sqlite, systemd, usbguard, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), and SUSE (net-snmp, openstack-barbican, openstack-barbican, openstack-heat-gbp, openstack-horizon-plugin-gbp-ui, openstack-neutron, openstack-neutron-gbp, php7, php74, php8, python-future, python3, samba, SDL2, and w3m).
Malicious actors are actively attempting to exploit a recently patched critical vulnerability in Control Web Panel (CWP) that enables elevated privileges and unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) on susceptible servers.
Tracked as CVE-2022-44877 (CVSS score: 9.8), the bug impacts all versions of the software before 0.9.8.1147 and was patched by its maintainers on October 25, 2022.
Drupal has released a security update to address a vulnerability affecting private vocabulary modules for Drupal 8.x. An unauthorized user could exploit this vulnerability to bypass access permissions to create, modify, and delete private vocabulary terms.
CISA released twelve Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on January 12, 2023. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.
A few months ago, the Linux Foundation (LF) announced its intent to launch the Open Wallet Foundation (OWF) in early 2023. The OWF aims to develop open source software, key building blocks, and best practices that anyone can use to build multi-platform, interoperable, secure, and privacy-protecting digital wallets that will support a wide variety of applications from identity credential to payments.
I’ve been really intrigued by digital wallets, a fairly complex and poorly understood subject. To learn more, I read “The Current and Future State of Digital Wallets,” a comprehensive report on digital wallets published in April of 2019 by technologist and entrepreneur Darrell O’Donnell. The report was sponsored by a consortium of Canadian companies that recognized that digital wallets were a major requirement to be able to properly manage our digital identities, — arguably the toughest challenge in the continuing evolution of the internet and the digital economy.
I couldn’t agree more – what we see is a deep embarrassment. No one needs to starve or be homeless. But I have a small bone to pick.
[...]
Capitalism – as distinguished by its suffix -ISM, is a system in which CAPITAL is given preference to everything else. Right there it’s a hint that it is not ‘free market’ anything. Money talks.
Consider socialism – a system in which the well-being of individuals is given preference. I am not talking about fake socialism – like USSR. Even the so-called socialism in some of the more enlightened European countries – that is just a band-aid on top of highly capitalistic economic system.
But even in a socialist-leaning country you are likely to get some kind basic social needs covered – be it medical, housing or financial if you are in trouble. In a capitalist country you are likely to get squat, while a large corporation that basically warehouses people will get billions from the government.
I had someone recommend me the band Spiritbox recently and I’ve been listening to them almost nonstop all week.
I’ve only been exploring metal and some of its subgenres since early last year and I’m still a little picky about which bands I’ll get into. Some bands end up sounding like mush to me for a couple reasons. Sometimes it’s untiring double kick drums, sometimes it’s not enough variation, sometimes it’s just muddy mixing.
Of all the substances which can exist in the universe, which ones are found on Earth, and which ones aren’t?
Of those which are, which ones are abundant and which are rare? Which ones participate in biogeochemical cycles and which ones don’t?
Of those which are abundant and are of practical use to human civilisation, which ones are just lying around on the ground free for the taking and which ones are deeply embedded in ecosystems which we cannot help but seriously damage by extracting and using them, no matter how gently we do it?
[...]
The answers to these questions, and others like them, are of existential importance to human civilisation. From the answers to these questions follow, inescapably, the answers to questions of the form “for how many years can a population of X humans with an average lifespan of Y and a per-person material/energy/land footprint of Z sustain itself before hitting some kind of limit?”.
Note that these questions of existential importance are not political questions! The answers to all of them are exactly the same under capitalism as they are under socialism or anarchism or your favourite trendy -ism that I haven’t heard of yet. The answers to these questions were fixed – in some cases literally set in stone – before any humans were around to believe in -isms.
Recently, work has felt fairly meh and sloggy. I had a few months of
fairly mundane, day dragging, irritating busy work while waiting for
big decisions to be made. The past few days has been spent doing
quarterly planning and it looked like another 3 months of meh and
sloggy waiting around work. Then I got a call.. I am moving on to
another programme and it is a great one which seems reasonably well
resourced. The change in mood and what not is crazy. I have been
looking forward to being in the office again.
“OK, people, it’s getting to be a lot of responsibility to distribute resources and tasks fairly and efficiently. Not sure any one person can do it. We all remember when Grunk was in charge of that mysteriously decreasing cookie jar.”
“Maybe what we need isn’t a person, but an automatic system, like a protocol or a set of game rules.”
“How about I do it? Market capitalism is my name. I use an invisible hand of supply and demand to set prices.”
“OK, impressive! You’re hired.”
Cryptoboosters like to refer to this sort of data as proof that Bitcoin (and its underlying proof-of-work algorithm) isn’t actually an outrageous energy-guzzling carbon-emitting monster. (Although such people are a bit quieter nowadays, perhaps due to the ongoing crypto collapse[b].)
In theory the above test implies that the #!/bin/sh line is optional in a shell script. In practice this is an inadequate test; the shell that is running the script adds complexity.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Recently: Turning Linux.com Into a Shrine for Microsoft
Summary: Serial defamer [1, 2] of GNU’s founder Richard Stallman (Mr. Perlow, who also worked for Microsoft) is publishing for Black Duck, a Microsoft proxy created by a Microsofter to attack the GPL (even Simon Phipps considered Black Duck’s ilk too unsavoury for the OSI and therefore kicked them all out); Linux.com is run by Linux-hostile agenda pushers, thanks to the Linux Foundation‘s greed and unprincipled leadership (many of whom Microsofters already)
As the technology landscape evolves, the importance of Linux and open-source talent in the workforce has become increasingly clear. These professionals possess a unique set of skills and experience that allow them to adapt to new technologies quickly and create innovative solutions. However, recruiting and retaining top Linux and open-source talent can be a challenge. In this article, we’ll explore the strategies and best practices that companies can use to attract, recruit and retain top Linux and open-source talent. From understanding the open-source culture and mindset to providing opportunities for open-source contributions within the company, we’ll cover it all. By implementing these strategies, companies can build a strong and talented team of Linux and open-source professionals, and ultimately gain a competitive edge in today’s tech-driven world.
Kubernetes has been widely adopted, and many organizations use it as their de-facto orchestration engine for running workloads that need to be created and deleted frequently.
Therefore, proper scheduling of the pods is key to ensuring that application pods are up and running within the Kubernetes cluster without any issues. This article delves into the use cases around resource management by leveraging the PriorityClass object to protect mission-critical or high-priority pods from getting evicted and making sure that the application pods are up, running, and serving traffic.
FreeBSD vs. Linux – Networking, HDMI sound output through TV speakers on FreeBSD 13, Getting started with tmux, Samba Active Directory, OpenIKED 7.2 released, FreeBSD Plasma 5 GUI Install, DHCP server howto in German, and more
joel loves his cast iron and hates servicenow.
Linux Saloon, the Tux Digital online Linux User Group, is returning for a live show on the 14th of January and I am quite excited for it. In an effort to improve things a bit. I have taken the time to better focus my organization effort of the show. I have set up a public calendar so people will know when the show will be taking place. This was a recommendation [complaint] I received on multiple occasions. I did want to have a purely open source option but my time constraints has sort of precluded that at this time. If you are interested, you can subscribe to this calendar.
Lots of voicemail feedback in this episode. Our listeners have been saving up feedback on 2-in-1 convertible laptops, accessibility, minions, gremlins and suggestions.
The world got a special Christmas present from Linus Torvalds this year in the form of the 6.2-rc1 kernel prepatch. By the time the merge window closed, 13,687 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline for the 6.2 release. This was the busiest merge window since 5.13 (which brought in 14.231 changesets) in mid-2021, and quite a bit busier than 6.1 was — but comparable to the late 5.x releases. Just under 4,000 of those changesets were pulled after the first-half summary was written; there were quite a few significant changes to be found in those late-arriving patches.
The kernel project tries hard to avoid duplicating functionality within its code base; whenever possible, a single subsystem is made to serve all use cases. There is one notable exception to this rule, though: there are three object-level memory allocators (“slab allocators”) in the kernel. The desire to reduce the count has been growing stronger over the years, and some steps have been taken in 6.2 to eliminate the least-loved allocator — SLOB — in the relatively near future.
The job of a slab allocator is to provide the kernel with (usually) small chunks of memory in an efficient way. The heavily used kmalloc() function is implemented by the slab allocator, but there is also a lower-level API specialized for the management of numerous objects of the same size. It is quite common for a kernel subsystem to need to allocate instances of a given structure, for example; all of those instances are normally the same size and can be managed in a slab.
The kernel’s oldest slab allocator is typically just called SLAB (though the name is not an acronym); it has been there in one form or another since nearly the beginning. SLAB is intended to be a general-purpose allocator suitable for most workloads, and serves that purpose reasonably well.
The Linux security module (LSM) subsystem has long had limitations on which modules could be combined in a given running kernel. Some parts of the problem have been solved over the years—”smaller” LSMs can be combined at will with a single, more complex LSM—but combining (or “stacking”) SELinux with, say, Smack or AppArmor has never been possible. Back in October, we looked at the most recent attempt to add that ability, which resulted in patches to add two new system calls for LSM. By the end of December, the number of new system calls had risen to three.
The underlying problem that Casey Schaufler is trying to solve is the handling of the multiple security contexts and how to report them to user space; that is one of the barriers to stacking two or more context-using LSMs. These contexts are a string representation of the information used by an LSM to make its access-control decisions. Schaufler’s efforts to fully solve the LSM-stacking problem have now stretched over the last ten years.
New kernel functionality written in Rust will be proposed for inclusion into the mainline. While the initial support for Rust kernel code landed in the 6.1 kernel, it was far short of what is needed to add any interesting functionality to the kernel. As the support infrastructure is built up in coming releases, though, it will become possible to write a useful module that can be built for a mainline kernel. A number of interesting modules exist now and others are in the works; they just need the kernel to provide the APIs they depend on.
Pushing a module written in Rust for the mainline seems almost certain to spark a significant discussion. While many kernel developers are enthusiastic about the potential of Rust, there are others who are, at best, unconvinced. This latter group has gone quiet in recent times, presumably waiting to see how things play out. After all, as Linus Torvalds has said, the current Rust code is an experiment; if that experiment does not go well, the code can be taken out again.
The merging of a Rust module that people will actually use will be a tipping point, though. Once this code is merged, taking it back out would create the most obvious sort of regression; that, of course, is something that the kernel community goes far out of its way to avoid. So the merging of user-visible functionality written in Rust will mark the point where the Rust code can no longer just be torn out of the kernel; it will be a statement that the experiment has succeeded.
Anybody who is still unsure of the benefit of Rust support in the kernel will have to speak out before that happens, and some of them surely will. Reaching a consensus may take some time, to put it lightly. So, while it seems likely that this discussion will begin in 2023, it is far less likely that any user-visible functionality written in Rust will actually be merged this year.
Linux kernel 6.0 was released about three months ago on October 2nd, 2022, with new features like support for NVMe in-band authentication, async buffered writes when using both XFS and io_uring, io_uring zero-copy network transmission support, or support for PCI buses in the OpenRISC and LoongArch architectures.
Unfortunately, Linux kernel 6.0 is a short-lived branch, not an LTS (Long-Term Support) one, which means that it’s only supported with maintenance updates for a few months. Today, Linux kernel 6.0 reached end of life with the 6.0.19 update, which is the last stable release in the series.
Hello everyone,
The bugfix release 22.3.3 is now available.
If you find any issues, please report them here:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/new
The next bugfix release is due in two weeks, on January 25th.
Cheers,
Eric
---
Adam Stylinski (1):
nv30: Fix an offset for vbos being applied to a buffer twice
Asahi Lina (1):
kmsro: Fix renderonly_scanout BO aliasing
Daniel Schürmann (1):
aco: fix reset_block_regs() in postRA-optimizer
Danylo Piliaiev (1):
tu: Fix varyings interpolation reading stale values
Emma Anholt (2):
zink: Only expose PIPE_CAP_IMAGE_ATOMIC_FLOAT_ADD if we can actually add.
zink: Only expose PIPE_CAP_SHADER_ATOMIC_INT64 if we can do shared and ssbos.
Eric Engestrom (6):
docs/relnotes: add sha256sum for 22.3.2
.pick_status.json: Update to 38d6185432d1f19a5653b3892069cd350187f5b8
gen_release_notes: strip second newline in new features
meson: add missing dependency
docs: add release notes for 22.3.3
VERSION: bump for 22.3.3
Felix DeGrood (2):
anv: Emit CS stall on INTEL_MEASURE timestamp
hasvk: Emit CS stall on INTEL_MEASURE timestamp
Gert Wollny (1):
virgl: Use virgl host side shader stage IDs when reading caps
Iago Toral Quiroga (1):
v3dv: fix alpha-to-one for single sample setup
Konstantin Kharlamov (5):
bin/gen_release_notes.py: do not end "features" with "None"
bin/gen_release_notes.py: do not fail on confidential features
bin/gen_release_notes.py: don't fail if "Closes" refers to an MR
bin/gen_release_notes.py: parse "Fixes" tags as well as "Closes"
bin/gen_release_notes.py: read Closes/Fixes tags case-insensitively
Lionel Landwerlin (4):
anv: don't nullify entries
anv: check that push range actually match binding considered
anv: return properly typed value for no ubo promoted
anv: use the null surface with unused push descriptor binding table entries
Lucas Stach (1):
etnaviv: blt: properly use upper half of clear value
Marek Olšák (1):
radeonsi: rewrite si_update_ps_colorbuf0_slot to fix crashes and recursions
Maíra Canal (1):
v3dv: initialize fd variable for proper error handling
Mike Blumenkrantz (5):
zink: only update framebuffer object during swapchain update if framebuffer exists
zink: protect against invalid scissored renderpass clears
lavapipe: add some safety asserts when beginning rendering
zink: stop using VK_PIPELINE_CACHE_CREATE_EXTERNALLY_SYNCHRONIZED_BIT
zink: set surface->dt when updating swapchain
Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer (4):
egl: handle NULL loaderPrivate in dri_is_thread_safe
util/00-mesa-defaults: add Limbo workaround
mesa: add missing count_scale attribute
mesa: add missing count_scale attributes
Qiu Wenbo (2):
vc4: Fix RADDR_A field extraction of branch instruction
vc4: Fix running process_mux_deps on irrelevant type of instructions
Rhys Perry (1):
aco/gfx11: update s_code_end padding
Ruijing Dong (5):
gallium: add film_grain_target into av1 dec desc
frontends/omx: initialize film_grain_target
frontneds/va: use current_display_picture from VA for film grain
frontends/va: pass in film_grain_target as new output
radeonsi/vcn: av1 film_grain output fix
Samuel Pitoiset (4):
radv: fix missing initialization of radv_resolve_barrier::dst_stage_mask
radv: fix multiple resolves in the same subpass
radv: fix returning VK_PIPELINE_COMPILE_REQUIRED from library
radv: fix re-emitting tessellation domain origin when it's dynamic
Sil Vilerino (1):
frontends/va: Update state var frame_num disregarding cap check
Tapani Pälli (1):
iris: let isl set tiling mode for external resources
Timothy Arceri (2):
util/00-mesa-defaults: add Metal Slug XX workaround
util/driconf: add Dune: Spice Wars workaround
Väinö Mäkelä (1):
intel: Fix a hang caused by invalid dispatch enables on gfx6/7
Xaver Hugl (1):
driconf: add a workaround for plasmashell freezing
Yiwei Zhang (2):
lvp: properly ignore sampler write for immutable sampler
venus: properly ignore the sampler for immutable sampler
git tag: mesa-22.3.3
This NVK driver is not from NVIDIA but is instead a new Mesa driver but is a serious effort to see if they can get it into a state where it’s usable like what the RADV is to AMD hardware.
Converseen is a free and open-source batch image converter for Linux systems. Using Converseen, you can convert, resize, rotate and flip many images with a single click. Furthermore, Converseen can transform an entire PDF file into images with the characteristics per user preferences.
A new minor release, Converseen 0.9.10.0, is now available, which brings updated WebP image support.
DNS clients, which are built into most modern desktop and mobile operating systems, enable web browsers to interact with DNS servers.
This article selects our favorite DNS servers. Our verdict is captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style chart. We only feature free and open source software in this article.
You can use the @supports rule to check whether a browser supports a specified font technology or font format.
Here’s how to build a responsive navigation menu using absolutely no JavaScript.
The Linux ls command is a handy tool for listing files inside a directory. In the past, we have covered how to list and sort files by last modification time using the ls command.
In this article, we will go a step further and explore ways that you can list all the files in a specific directory and sort them by file size.
Want to find out all the users who logged into your system? Don’t raise your finger; raise your pinky instead.
Confused about what I am talking about? Let me explain what I mean. In Linux, there are numerous tools to show you all the logged-in users on the target machine, including built-in and external tools.
The finger is one of the external tools used to list all of the logged-in users in the target machine, and fetching user related information like home directories, default shells, home phone numbers, etc. is part of this tool.
Unfortunately, this tool is not shipped by default in many Linux distributions (although it is available in Linux repositories), but you don’t have to be downhearted as you can utilize its alternative pinky.
OBS Studio provides users with intuitive free, open-source software for broadcasting and recording high-quality display and audio performances on any Linux Mint system. With this tutorial, you will discover how to import the official LaunchPAD PPA to install OBS Studio on Linux Mint, providing you with the newest version of the software. Even better, this guide also covers OBS Studio updates and removal if you no longer require it.
Do you need to remove specific files with and without extensions using wildcards in the Linux command line? We’ll cover it here with step-by-step instructions on deleting files with a certain extension quickly and easily.
For users who are starting their journey on a Chromebook, we have compiled various basic resources to help you navigate Chrome OS. You can follow our guide to learn how to delete apps on a Chromebook. Apart from that, you can find out how to restart a Chromebook in three simple ways. And in this guide, we bring a tutorial on how to delete files on your Chromebook. From local files to Linux and Google Drive files, you can delete them with ease on Chrome OS. Apart from that, you can also restore the files if you inadvertently deleted a file. So on that note, let’s go ahead and learn how to permanently delete files and folders on a Chromebook.
In this guide, we will cover how to install brave web browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) step by step.
Brave is a free and open-source web browser, which allows us to surf internet more securely. Brave offers great privacy to our browsing data and does not allow third party to access this data.
In this part of the Podman series, let’s see about creating and deleting containers.
In case you didn’t know already, Podman is a Docker alternative for managing containers. It follows a similar command structure as Docker.
In this guide, we will discuss some useful examples of the screen command. By the end of this guide, users will be able to work with multiple shell sessions using a single Linux terminal window.
As Linux users, we often need to work on long-running tasks, such as – downloading or copying large files, executing time-consuming database queries, and so on. Sometimes these important tasks get terminated abruptly due to a session timeout.
To mitigate such scenarios, we can use the screen command, which is a full-screen software program that can be used to multiplexes a physical console between several processes (typically interactive shells). It offers a user to open several separate terminal instances inside a single terminal window manager.
In this tutorial, we are going to show you the ten most used Docker commands you should know.
Docker is an open-source platform service used for running applications in isolated environments called containers. The containers have their own structure, with encapsulated services that can not interfere with the work of the main server. In this tutorial, we are going to use the Ubuntu 22.04 OS, but you can choose any Linux distro you want.
First, we will install the docker and then show you the ten most used docker commands. Let’s get started!
The Steam Deck comes with a desktop mode that might resemble Windows, but it actually has little to do with Microsoft’s operating system. The Steam Deck’s desktop mode is entirely different under the hood.
This interface is instead known as KDE Plasma. If you like it, you don’t have to stick with it on your Steam Deck alone. You can install it on your desktop or laptop as well.
Today we are looking at how to install MuseScore 4 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In this post, you will learn how to install PHP 8.2 on Debian 11. PHP is a programming language for the web and is the most popular of them all.
Although Debian 11 is a very robust system, this is achieved by including somewhat outdated software and now that Debian 11 is almost two years old, many packages may already be obsolete. A case in point would be PHP.
Debian 11 includes by default version 7.4 of PHP that although it enjoys support and is good, some applications already require higher versions. So, here we have the problem.
Telegram is a popular free cross-platform, cloud-based instant messaging system. Telegram is famous for providing end-to-end encrypted video calling, VoIP, and file sharing, amongst many other features. The following tutorial will teach you how to install Telegram on Manjaro Linux with cli commands and utilizing either the default repository, which often has the most up-to-date version, or using the Arch Linux user repository with Manjaro’s package manager.
FreeTube provides unprecedented freedom and control over your online video experience. It is free to use and open-source, giving users the power to take back their browsing privacy and watch videos without advertisements. It prevents Google from tracking your browsing activity with its cookies or JavaScript code so that you can enjoy a stress-free online experience. This guide will show you how to install Freetube on Manjaro Linux with CLI commands using Pamac and the AUR.
Wadjet Eye Games publish some really good stuff and now you can easily pick up a load of them, thanks to this very good Humble Bundle. They’ve been good to Linux gamers too, publishing many Linux games and getting some classics upgraded too.
I have to admit, not many platformer-likes catch my attention nowadays but Kandria certainly looks the part. This new Native Linux game just launched from the tiny team at Shirakumo Games, the lead of which is also part of Shirakumo Collective who do some open source software too (including their game engine).
3 Minutes to Midnight is an upcoming comedy adventure game from Scarecrow Studio. It was funded on Kickstarter and their latest development update sounds great.
We’ve been talking a lot about video game exclusivity over the past couple of years. The sudden uptick in concern over a longstanding practice that ebbs and flows with time is largely related to industry consolidation of studios coming out of the COVID pandemic. In times of financial stress in an industry, that is often when bigger companies gobble up smaller companies that can’t survive whatever the crises is. In this case, Microsoft began gobbling up studios, with Sony following suit. Suddenly everyone had to wonder if certain titles were going to be exclusive to those platforms. The wishy-washy responses to public concern by those big companies far from helped.
You can use a lot of external controllers with the Steam Deck but the current system to interact with them isn’t great. The Controller Tools plugin could solve some issues, at least until Valve give this section a little more love.
The votes for the opening round of our Readers’ Choice Best Linux Distro have been counted and MX Linux becomes the distribution to beat in the second and final round of voting that will begin at noon Eastern Time on Thursday.
In all, there were 788 votes cast in the preliminary round of voting that began on January 4 and closed at noon on Wednesday after running for a week. 749 of the votes in this qualifying round were placed in our official voting platform, with 39 write-in votes cast in the comments section on the polls page. Two of the write-in votes were disqualified, one for listing more than one distro, the other for listing a distro that was included in the official poll.
Todd Mortimer (mortimer@) has committed (to -current) retguard for amd64 system calls: [...]
High-performance container runtime technology provider Sylabs announced this week that its SingularityCE offering is now accessible for Enterprise Linux users through the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository.
Maintained since 2017 by Sylabs and supported by a community of developers, Singularity is an open-source container runtime designed for users who run mission-critical data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and compute-driven analytics on performance-intensive systems. The widely-adopted runtime implements a unique security model to mitigate privilege escalation risks and provides a platform for capturing a complete application environment into a single file.
Hello, I’m Tanushree Banerjee from India. I’m delighted to be selected as an Outreachy intern for the December 2022 cohort. I’ll be working on designing icons for Fedora’s chat system.
The CentOS Automotive SIG does not have a formal membership process. The mailing list currently has 106 subscribers representing at least 32 organizations, though not all subscribers use corporate emails and some are participating as individuals.
This article discusses both how and why to scale your infrastructure automatically so that you aren’t paying for resources you don’t need. This is the last installment in the SaaS architecture checklist series.
If you are a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider, it is important to manage operational expenses while ensuring that your platform’s capacity can always meet the needs of your users. Whether the traffic to your SaaS peaks on a predictable schedule (for example, office hours on weekdays or seasonal shopping) or whether you are planning for growth, Kubernetes has features to make sure you have the right level of capacity at any given time.
SaaS revenue typically comes through recurring fees that scale based on metrics such as the number of users, quantity of data stored or processed, access to advanced features, and other similar points of value. While each SaaS provider decides on their own pricing model and consumption metric, there is one common goal: The more your SaaS gets used, the more revenue you make.
People who are later in their careers can help you see the bigger picture and help you focus on what matters. People with experience understand that if you waste too much time focusing on things that don’t matter, you could fail to achieve your full potential.
In 2022, we watched as the evolving cybersecurity landscape opened the door to new vulnerabilities and attack methods. Attackers are evolving, and the IT security climate is evolving, too. With that in mind, it’s time to take stock and refocus on security goals for IT teams and their larger organizations in 2023.
The Fedora community is currently discussing a proposal to start supporting a unified kernel image (UKI) for the distribution; these images would combine several pieces that are generally separate today (e.g. initrd, kernel, and kernel command line). There are a number of advantages to such a kernel image, at least for some kinds of systems, but there is worry from some about where the endpoint of this work lies. There is a need to ensure that Fedora can still boot non-unified, perhaps locally built, kernels and can support other use cases that unification might preclude.
A feature proposed for Fedora 38 would add “phase 1″ of UKI support; it was posted on behalf of feature owner Gerd Hoffmann to the distribution’s devel mailing list on December 22. Currently, a new initial RAMdisk (initrd) containing files needed early in the boot process is built on the local Fedora system whenever a new kernel or other boot-relevant component is installed. But, since the Fedora private key is not present on the local system, the newly built initrd cannot be signed with it. So the goal is to move away from locally building an initrd, at least for some kinds of installations.
During the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9, we decided to switch to OpenSSL 3.0 even though we were not sure that it would be finalized early enough. This decision was made to significantly reduce our maintenance burden during the 10+ years of RHEL 9 support.
Following the announcement of the beta of the Red Hat Insights malware detection service in August, we are pleased to announce that this service is now generally available. The malware detection service is a monitoring and assessment tool that scans Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for the presence of malware, utilizing over 180 signatures of known Linux malware provided in partnership with the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence team.
Information technology is undergoing a remarkable evolution, with deployment and maintenance scenarios changing day by day. Processing and managing data and devices at the edge is increasingly required, so technologies need to adapt to support and encourage the adoption of such strategies.
Red Hat OpenShift is capable of covering needs ranging from the management of an infrastructurally-agnostic application platform to deployment on-premises or in the cloud, whether private, public or hybrid.
The Red Hat build of OptaPlanner is now available in Red Hat Application Foundations, enabling application developers to turn data and constraints into a best-fit solution. Using the lightweight, embeddable planning engine from the open source OptaPlanner project, customers can build scalable planning applications that efficiently solve complex optimization challenges such as rostering, vehicle routing, scheduling, or many other constraint satisfaction problems.
In order to deal with the complexity and pace of an ever-changing world, businesses— especially those in asset-intensive industries— are turning to digital solutions to deliver better results with greater competency. According to industry analyst firm IDC, “By 2026, 75% of large enterprises will rely on AI-infused processes to enhance asset efficiency, streamline supply chains, and improve product quality across diverse and distributed environments.”1 And, with remote work environments increasing, optimized business processes are even more critical as organizations need to make informed decisions in situations where employees may not be located where operations are happening.
Like digital drawing or photography? This wallpaper competition may feature your photos in the official Ubuntu 23.04 release.
Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” release is due in April 2023. Following the schedule, the official wallpaper competition is now open before the upcoming BETA release.
Here’s how to participate.
The Ubuntu team put up a call for all artists, graphic designers, and Ubuntu fans everywhere to submit images to the official wallpaper competition for the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” operating system release.
With only three and a half months before the release of Ubuntu 23.04, the Ubuntu devs need your help to deliver yet another beautiful set of wallpaper for the next Ubuntu Linux release. Therefore, you are invited to submit your artwork to the official wallpaper competition.
Maintainers are an important topic of discussion. I’ve read a few perspectives, but I’d like to share mine as one of the lesser-known maintainers in the open source world.
Who am I, and what do I do? I have many job titles and, in many ways, wear many hats. I’m the “architect” for the Yocto Project and the maintainer and lead developer for both OpenEmbedded-Core and BitBake. I’m the chair of the Yocto Project Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and a member of the OpenEmbedded TSC. I am also a Linux Foundation Fellow, representing a rare “non-kernel” perspective. The fellowship was partly a response to an industry-wide desire for me to work in a position of independence for the good of the projects and communities I work with rather than any one company.
The different roles I’ve described hint at the complexities that are part of the everyday tasks of maintaining a complex open source project. Still, to many, it could look like a complex labyrinth of relationships, directions, and decisions to balance.
One of the earliest predecessors of what would come to be the super-slim, internet-enabled portable workstation we now call a “laptop” was a Personal Word Processor. And Redditor /Maz_Baz has restored one such retro beauty to functional glory with a Raspberry Pi.
We aren’t saying that appliances are a scam, but we have noticed that when your appliances fail, there’s a good chance it will be some part you can no longer get from the appliance maker. Or in some cases, it’s a garden-variety part that should cost $2, but has been marked up to $40. When [Balakrishnan] had a failure of the timer control board for a Whirlpool washing machine, it was time to reverse engineer the board and replace it with a small microcontroller.
Getting started as a contributor to an open source project shouldn’t feel like getting bad customer service: “Please hold while we connect you with the first available representative,” followed by mind-numbing elevator music on an infinite loop. Nor should new contributors feel they have to scale Mt. Annapurna and go before a wizened greybeard to get their first commit accepted. Too often, junior coders are scared away from open source altogether because everything they do is exposed for all to see.
When I was first starting in open source, after more than a decade of producing closed source, proprietary code for Fortune 500 software companies, I made some (ill-conceived) contribution suggestions to a widely known open source project, and I was taken aback by the abrupt nature of my interactions with the others involved. They were always too busy, or too uninterested, to look at what I was working on, let alone help me.
So what should starting in open source feel like?
We at G-Research are partnering with Major League Hacking (MLH) to bring more coders into open source. We aim to get them started with good, productive experiences so we can build a talent pipeline for the entire open source universe and keep it full for years to come.
In the summer of 2022, the UK government and NHS England published its Open Source Policy, stating that open source technology is:
The public statement by NHS England is just the latest development in a broader trend: The wholehearted embrace of open source software by the healthcare sector. And no wonder; open source presents myriad opportunities for this most complex of industries, with potential solutions across various sub-sectors. Yes, open source is now powering everything from medical wearables to healthcare human resource management.
Information technology is playing an increasingly vital role in every sector of the economy, with the healthcare industry no exception. One of the most important developments in this field is the growth of health informatics—in other words, the acquisition and analysis of all types of patient data, including test results, scans, and electronic health records (EHR).
Informatics is all about providing better health outcomes for patients, but essential to this are standardization and interoperability—and this is where open source can make a big difference because of its truly collaborative and “open” nature.
In some conversations, I realized that I had left out at least one resource that I really like. I’ve received lots of praise for implementing this one. It replaces expensive software that doesn’t work as well.
I’ve had a few posts make it to the front page of Lobsters. Lobsters supports webmention, yet I never received a webmention for those two posts. I checked the logs and yes, they were received but I rejected them with a “bad request.” It took a bit of sleuthing, but I found the root cause—the URL of my post was, accoring to my code, invalid. Lobsters was sending in a URL of the form https://boston.conman.org//2023/01/02.1—notice the two slashes in front of the path. My code was having none of that.
In light of some recent news surrounding the MSI Afterburner software, it’s another reminder that it’s quite important for people to directly support projects they use and enjoy. No this isn’t me asking you to support my Patreon or anything.
We see the same thing in FSFE. Employers and clients always ask us to sign employment contracts and Non-Disclose Agreements (NDAs). As professionals, we make a concious choice to read and sign those agreements and be bound by them.
In FSFE, we are volunteers. We never consented to a bond of secrecy. The FSFE President, Matthias Kirschner, has tried to unilaterally create a bond of secrecy. If we did not consent to be part of a secret society then his insistance on such terms, without consent to such terms, is as undignifying as the unilateral actions of a rapist.
[...]
Much of what Kirschner writes is nonsense. In a volunteer organization promoting transparency, there is no such thing as FSFE-internal information. It is an absurd accusation.
Catholics believe that Jesus Christ was reincarnated at Easter. When you read the overbearing demands of Matthias Kirschner, who do you feel has been reincarnated in Berlin?
I never signed an NDA with the FSFE. The community elected me as the fellowship representative. I had an obligation to publish information for the community.
I often find myself wanting a simple case-like macro where the keys are regular expressions. regex-case is an attempt at this.
I use CL-PPCRE for the usual things regular expressions are useful for, and probably for some of the things they should not really be used for as well. I often find myself wanting a case like macro, where the keys are regular expressions. There is a contributed package for Trivia which will do this, but Trivia is pretty overwhelming. So I gave in and wrote regex-case which does what I want.
I also learned that the div instruction on x86 provides the remainder so there is potentially some benefit to combining the operation. I suspected that LLVM was probably able to optimise the separate operations and a trip to the Compiler Explorer confirmed it.
Advent of Code gets harder and harder, and I’m not getting any smarter. Or any more free time. So, in order to close out this series anyway, I’m going to try and port other people’s solutions from “language X” to Rust. That way, they already figured out the hard stuff, and we can just focus on the Rust bits!
In the State of the dora DevOps Metrics in 202211 Which is otherwise excellent, and I recommend reading it. In particular, the discovery around the uselessness of mean time to recovery was important to me, in that sense of “oh man, this is obvious and I should really have realised it sooner, on my own, instead of blindly trusting an authority on it. ” article, Logan claims that change failure rate cannot be measured consistently across an organisation. I disagree.
A new release of our linl package for writing LaTeX letters with (R)markdown is now on CRAN. linl makes it easy to write letters in markdown, with some extra bells and whistles thanks to some cleverness chiefly by Aaron.
This version add extended header and footer placement support thanks to an included copy of wallpaper.sty as added in a nice PR by Iñaki. As the previous release was well over three years ago, we also enhanced continuous integration in the process. The repository README.md shows some screenshots of input and output files.
The wish for a “None-aware” operator (or operators) is longstanding within the Python community. While there is fairly widespread interest in more easily handling situations where a value needs to be tested for being None before being further processed, there is much less agreement on how to “spell” such an operator (or construct) and on whether the language truly needs it. But the idea never seems to go away, with long discussions erupting every year or two—and no resolution really in sight.
Regardless of the cause of the failure, the NOTAM system has long been a source of frustration for pilots and others in the aviation industry who say it overloads them with information that’s irrelevant to their flight and makes it difficult to identify actually useful information.
For a data format, yaml is extremely complicated. It aims to be a more human-friendly alternative to json, but in striving for that it introduces so much complexity, that I would argue it achieves the opposite result. Yaml is full of footguns and its friendliness is deceptive. In this post I want to demonstrate this through an example.
Whether you’re a fan of compelling Tool songs, or merely appreciate mathematical beauty, you might be into the spirals defined by the Fibonacci sequence. [RuddK5] used the Fibonacci curve as the inspiration for this fun clock build.
About two years ago, [Hyperspace Pirate] set to work on building his own two-seater submarine, because who doesn’t want to have a submarine when you have just moved to Florida? In the linked video (also attached below), he describes the reasoning behind the submarine design. Rather than going with a fully sealed submarine with ambient pressure inside and a hull that resists the crushing forces from the water, he opted to go for a semi-wet ambient pressure design.
Jeff Beck, one of the originators of the British Invasion, and a pioneer of fusion died this week at the age of 78. I wrote this profile of Beck after seeing his band perform in Portland in 2011.
The band emerges together into a wavering blue light. The pianist, Jason Rebello, climbs behind his racks of keyboards and synths and begins to fiddle with a glowing MacBook Pro. The young bassist, Rhonda Smith, is dressed for battle in desert fatigues and combat boots. She picks a few thick notes before the wall of amps, her back to the audience. The legendary Narada Michael Walden, grown as muscular as Aaron Neville, slides behind his arsenal of drums, cymbals and chimes. He begins laying down a complex and funky groove. His kit rattles from the seismic force of his blows.
When you think of Tomy — more properly, Takara Tomy — you think of toys and models from Japan. After all, they have made models and toys as iconic as Transformers, Thomas, Jenga, Boggle, and Furby. They also made figures associated with Thunderbirds and Tron, two favorites in our circles. However, their recent design for SORA-Q is no toy. It is a tiny lunar rover designed at the request of JAXA, the Japanese space agency. The New Yorker recently posted about how this little rover came about.
If you’ve ever wanted to work for NASA, here’s your chance. Well, don’t expect a paycheck or any benefits, but the Agency is looking for volunteers to help process the huge amount of exoplanet data with their Exoplanet Watch program. If you have a telescope, you can even contribute data to the project. But if your telescope is in the back closet, you can process data they’ve collected over the years.
Two U.S. universities have recently taken the cultivation of ignorance to new lows, although at this point one hesitates to make any assumption as to where the bottom lies.
AMD said “customers experiencing this unexpected limitation should contact AMD support”, but if you head to the support page, and call the US support phone number, it directs you to the warranty claims page on the website. On that page, it guides you through a wizard and determines if you didn’t buy the AMD card from AMD.com itself, you have to contact the partner manufacturer (even though in this case it’s the reference design, just packaged by Sapphire).
For the vision impaired, there are a wide variety of tools and techniques used to navigate around in the real world. Walk-bot is a device that aims to help with this task, using ultrasound to provide a greater sense of obstacles in one’s surroundings.
Back in the before time (you know, before COVID-19 arrived three years ago), I routinely used to address dubious arguments that naturopaths made about their medical pseudospecialty. Because I’m a cancer surgeon, what most irritated me about naturopaths were how these quacks falsely claimed expertise in oncology (even pediatric oncology), a problem that has over the years led to my seeing a (fortunately) small but (unfortunately) steady stream of patients whose breast cancers would have been easily treatable when diagnosed but had been allowed to grow to become locally advanced or even metastatic because they had wasted time—sometimes years—being treated by naturopaths. Of course, it’s not limited to just cancer, but the increasing acceptance of naturopaths in academic medicine, to the point where some hold senior faculty positions in, for example, a department of family medicine at a very reputable medical school, where they invite homeopaths to lecture residents and medical students.
We speak with one of the 7,000 nurses on strike now in New York City at two hospital systems that account for more than a quarter of all hospital beds in the city, and a journalist who has documented how hospital CEOs are boosting their own pay by millions of dollars while slashing charity care. The strike began Monday after nurses failed to reach a new contract agreement with Mount Sinai Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center, with higher wages and better staffing among their main demands. “If we do not address this, we will continue to see nurses leaving the workforce because of unsafe staffing,” says Sasha Winslow, a striking nurse at Montefiore Medical Center. The Lever’s Matthew Cunningham-Cook details his investigation into how hospital CEOs have received millions in raises and perks while medical staff have been pushed to the breaking point during COVID.
He cited last year’s Russian attacks against Ukraine’s largest private energy investor DTEK as an example of when cyberattacks are used in conjunction with kinetic warfare.
This past week, the Linux Foundation lost a dear friend, colleague, and true champion of the open source and energy community. With a heavy heart we share the news that LF Energy founder and executive director Shuli Goodman passed away from cancer on the 3rd of January. Shuli will be fondly remembered and sorely missed by all in our community, most especially by her wife Karen, her son Dakota, her soul-sister Lucy, and the many young people whom she helped nurture and grow. Our hearts go out to them at this difficult time.
Janine Jackson interviewed FlyersRights‘ Paul Hudson about the airline meltdown for the January 6, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
After canceling nearly 17,000 flights around the Christmas holiday—the worst customer service meltdown in the history of the U.S. airline industry—Southwest announced this week that it is promoting several of its executives, a move that watchdogs decried as a slap in the face of the travelers impacted by the company’s incompetence and greed.
Coincidentally, the final draft of the bill was hidden from lawmakers until the very last moment—in violation of the Duma’s own rules: [...]
For at least 3 months in early 2020, France-based EncroChat wasn’t in sole control of its communication services. Its servers had been compromised by European law enforcement — a joint effort involving law enforcement agencies located in France, the UK, and the Netherlands.
[...] We also look at why this saga should serve as a lesson to both Europe and the US that appeasement doesn’t work with Turkey’s Erdogan.
We go to Peru for an update after Peruvian authorities declared an overnight curfew in parts of southern Peru as mass protests continue following the ouster and arrest of leftist former President Pedro Castillo. At least 17 people were killed Monday after security forces opened fire at anti-government protesters in the city of Juliaca, and over 40 people have been killed across Peru over the last month, with human rights groups accusing the authorities of using indiscriminate force against protesters. The country’s crisis started in early December when then-President Castillo attempted to dissolve Congress and rule by decree, resulting in his arrest and replacement by his vice president. We are joined from Desaguadero, Peru, near the Bolivian border, by Ollie Vargas, a journalist with Kawsachun News, who says protesters are demanding new elections, the resignation of Castillo’s successor Dina Boluarte and the formation of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. A major contributor to the current crisis is “the extreme weakness of the political system in Peru” in which many politicians lack any real connection to their constituents, adds Peruvian sociologist Eduardo González Cueva.
Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates call for a ‘dramatic’ increase in military aid so Ukraine can make gains this year.
Twenty-one years after the George W. Bush administration opened the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—and 13 years after then-President Barack Obama signed an executive order for its closure—more than 150 groups on Wednesday implored the Biden administration to “act without delay” to close the notorious lockup.
A group of corporate Democrats led by Rep. Jared Golden of Maine sent a letter Wednesday defending the out-of-control U.S. military budget and expressing concerns about looming attempts by House Republicans to cut it, even as several GOP lawmakers insisted the Pentagon would be safe from their coming austerity spree.
Writing for the Washington Post on Monday, Jennifer Rubin charged that the potential Freedom Caucus proposal to freeze federal spending at 2022 levels, which, if implemented across the board, could wipe out $75 to $100 billion in increased Pentagon spending included in the recent budget bill, could have “serious national security ramifications.”
On August 20, a group of Kenyans filed a case against Britain at the European Court of Human Rights. They were seeking justice for the atrocities the British committed against them during the colonial era. They are seeking $200 billion in reparations for the crimes perpetrated in the tea-growing regions in the Kenyan Highlands. Unsurprisingly, Britain has failed to address, leave aside apologize for, these atrocities in Kenya.
To be fair, the British have apologized for one of their darkest acts in Kenya. In 2013, the government “finalized an out-of-court settlement with thousands of Kenyans who were tortured in detention camps during the end of the British colonial reign.” The British were crushing the Mau Mau — Kenyan rebels from the Kikuyu tribe — who fought in the 1950s and 1960s. It took years before the historic apology and the unprecedented settlement was finalized in 2013.
If you believe that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, then perhaps you should read no further. And, if you believe that Vladimir Putin will allow the United States and Europe to bring Ukraine into the Western security orbit, then once again you should read no further.
But if you acknowledge the provocations that the United States has made in dealing with Russia over the past 20 years, then consider the possibility that U.S. concessions could provide an opening for high-level talks with the Kremlin and perhaps a cease-fire. One way to slow the spiral of horrific fighting and Western delivery of increasingly lethal military weaponry, which now includes more sophisticated armored combat vehicles and mobile artillery, is to start talking.
THE UKRAINE SOLIDARITY NETWORK (U.S.) reaches out to unions, communities and individuals from diverse backgrounds to build moral, political and material support for the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Russia’s criminal invasion and their struggle for an independent, egalitarian and democratic country.
The war against Ukraine is a horrible and destructive disaster in the human suffering and economic devastation it has already caused, not only for Ukraine and its people but also in its impact on global hunger and energy supplies, on the world environmental crisis, and on the lives of ordinary Russian people who are sacrificed for Putin’s war. The war also carries the risk of escalation to a direct confrontation among military great powers, with unthinkable possible consequences.
Overnight, RIA Novosti published a photo on Telegeram which purports to show Wagner PMC founder Evgeny Prigozhin in the salt mines beneath Soledar.
The Kremlin has denied reports from Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate that the Russian FSB banned draft-eligible Russian citizens from leaving Russian territory beginning on January 9.
The BBC Russian service spoke to relatives of draftees from the Samara region who were killed or wounded in a January 1 strike by the Ukrainian military on a Russian base in Makiivka.
Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of jailed Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny, wrote on Instagram that her husband, who was moved to a “punishment cell” by prison authorities on December 31 and remains there to this day, has had a fever for at least a week. She said that Alexey first told her he was sick on January 2.
Valery Gerasimov, the head of the Russian Army’s General Staff, has been named the new commander of Russia’s forces in Ukraine, RIA Novosti reported on Wednesday, citing the Russian Defense Ministry.
In the statement announcing the school’s closure, Clemensen said Agapé spent 30 years providing “over 6,000 boys with an opportunity to get their life back on track and toward a bright future.” But a January Rolling Stone report found that hundreds of students given Agapé’s specific brand of “opportunity” considered the schools’ staunch Baptist beliefs, military-esque hierarchy, and extreme punishments bordering on torture.
CBC’s Great Lakes Climate Change Project is a joint initiative between CBC’s Ontario stations to explore climate change from a provincial lens. Darius Mahdavi, a scientist with a degree in conservation biology and immunology and a minor in environmental biology from the University of Toronto, explains how issues related to climate change affect people across the province and explores solutions, especially in smaller cities and communities.
As German police began forcibly removing hundreds of climate protesters occupying a depopulated village slated for future coal mining, more than 700 scientists and celebrities on Wednesday urged authorities to enact a moratorium on evictions from the hamlet.
The founder and honorary president of the Global Warming Policy Foundation has announced he will be retiring from parliament.
Lord Nigel Lawson, who was chancellor under Margaret Thatcher, is leaving the House of Lords, according to the Telegraph.
More than 300 environmental and Indigenous rights groups said Wednesday that the Biden administration must take a number of concrete actions to protect the nation’s public lands and waters from fossil fuel industry exploitation and bring U.S. policy into line with climate science—and the president’s own campaign pledges.
As the death toll from the extreme weather facing California this week rose to at least 17 and thousands in the state were displaced by mudslides and flooding, scientists from 16 international universities and institutes published a study Wednesday showing that a major driver of extreme weather—the heating of the world’s oceans—was worse than ever in 2022.
For anyone with even the slightest bit of engineering interest, wind turbines are hard to resist. Everything about them is just so awesome, in the literal sense of the word — the size of the blades, the height of the towers, the mechanical guts that keep them pointed into the wind. And as if one turbine isn’t enough, consider the engineering implications of planting a couple of hundred of these giants in a field and getting them to operate as a unit. Simply amazing.
Fisheries officials have long known that trawlers involved in illegal fishing turn off their automatic identification systems (AIS) to cloak their activities.
Researchers using Global Fishing Watch data have specified for the first time that West Africa is among the world’s hot spots for AIS disabling. The region is mostly targeted by China’s distant-water fishing fleet, the world’s largest.
The study, which tracked AIS disabling between 2017 and 2019, showed that up to 6% of global fishing is hidden due to the practice. West Africa accounted for the third-highest number of AIS-disabled hours tracked in the study, trailing only the northwest Pacific and the coast of Argentina. The practice is commonly known as “going dark.”
Just over 3,000 employees will be let go, the source, who could not be named, said on Jan. 9.
The cuts began in Asia on Wednesday, where Goldman completed cutting back its private wealth management unit and let go 16 private bank staff across its Hong Kong, Singapore and China offices, a source with knowledge of the matter said. About eight staff were also laid off in Goldman’s research department in Hong Kong, the source said, with layoffs ongoing in the investment bank and other divisions.
The world’s largest asset manager has forecast systemic economic chaos. The reality is even worse.
On Tuesday, Cameron Winklevoss publicly accused Barry Silbert, the CEO of cryptocurrency conglomerate DCG, of engaging in an elaborate fraud to illicitly pump up the bitcoin holdings of its subsidiary Genesis Global Capital. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice have both opened early-stage investigations into DCG and Genesis, likely to look into similar claims.
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 created a $350 billion fund to help state and local governments mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic and facilitate economic recovery. Nearly two years later, however, more than $150 billion remains unspent even as employment in the public sector and caring professions remains below pre-pandemic levels.
Everyone who carefully follows the news about the economy knows that we are in the middle of the Second Great Depression. On the other hand, those who read less news, but deal with things like jobs, wages, and bills probably think the economy is pretty damn good. We got more evidence on the pretty damn good side with the December jobs report and other economic data released in the last week.
The most important part of the jobs report was the drop in the unemployment rate to 3.5 percent. This equals the lowest rate in more than half a century. While many in the media insist that only elite intellectual types care about jobs, not ordinary workers, since the ability to pay for food, rent, and other bills is tightly linked to having a job, it seems that at least some workers might care about being able to work.
Congress initially responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by enabling U.S. public schools to provide free breakfast and lunch to all 50 million children, but Republicans blocked a continuation of the program last summer—and now, districts and kids are suffering.
The broadcaster, funded by the US government, was forced to relocate from Russia after its office was closed by the authorities.
In December, 2021, RFE/RL was declared an “extremist organisation” in Belarus and the distribution and use of its news reports became a criminal offense. Two journalists from the Belarusian service, Ihar Losik and Andrey Kuznechyk, remain unlawfully imprisoned.
Having fought for labor rights under a dictatorship, the Brazilian president once again faces a violent far-right movement bent on blocking his pro-worker, pro-democracy agenda.
Good news is easier to notice if you consider the alternatives. On Monday, the Biden offered “unwavering” support of Brazil president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the aftermath of a right-wing coup. It’s easier to imagine earlier presidents, not just Republicans like Donald Trump but also Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, taking a very different stand when a socialist government in Latin America is facing a right-wing attempt at regime change. Powered by RedCircle
Brazilian authorities on Tuesday issued arrest warrants for a pair of government security officials, focused attention on people accused of bankrolling Sunday’s anti-democratic assault, and asked a federal court to freeze the assets of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, who remains in Florida—escalating the crackdown on suspected participants in and supporters of the January 8 coup attempt against recently inaugurated leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Buenos Aires—The Argentinians along Avenida 9 de Julio were singing, as they had been for the better part of a month. On December 20, two days after their country won its third World Cup title—and first in 36 years—an estimated 5 million people poured into the byways of Buenos Aires to serenade each other with impromptu renditions of the national team’s unofficial anthem, “Muchachos.”1En Argentina nací Tierra del Diego y Lionel De los pibes de Malvinas Que jamas olividaré Ne to lo puedo explicar Porque no vas a entender Las finales que perdimos cuantos años las lloré…2In Argentina I was bornland of Diego and LionelOf the young men of the MalvinasWho I will never forgetI can’t explain it to youBecause you won’t understandThe finals that we losthow many years I cried over them…3
The names of 2,977 people are engraved on the bronze parapets of the 9/11 Memorial at 180 Greenwich Street in Manhattan, and the entire footprint of the Twin Towers is now part of a great national place of remembrance. As a New Yorker at the time, I remember making my way down to the site in the first few weeks afterwards to bear witness to what had just happened and to honor the dead, the acrid smell of the gigantic pile of rubble burning in my nose, attaching itself to my clothes.1
The latest iteration of Washington’s regime-change efforts against the democratically elected Venezuelan government came to an end. On December 30, an opposition-controlled parliament whose term ran out two years ago voted to end the US-backed “interim government” headed by Juan Guaidó.
However, one of the paper’s authors warned that “it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election.”
U.S. Rep. George Santos on Wednesday told reporters he has no intention of stepping down from public office after several Republican officials in his home state of New York demanded his resignation over his record of “deceit, lies, [and] fabrication,” as Nassau County Republican Committee chair Joseph G. Cairo, Jr. said.
Progressive U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar said Wednesday that the only reason why Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is moving to ban her from her House committees is because she is Muslim.
Progressive Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California told lawmakers Wednesday during a closed-door meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus that she intends to run for Senate, Politicoreported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
A few recent headlines reveal the painfully inhumane, dangerously volatile state of U.S. relations with its own home region, the continent of North America. A record-breaking 2.76 million border crossings from Mexico filled homeless shelters to the bursting point in cities nationwide in 2022. This year, the possible cessation of Covid restrictions could allow tens of thousands more migrants, now huddling in the cold of northern Mexico, to surge across the border, as some are already able to do. Most of those refugees are Central Americans, fleeing cities ravaged by gang warfare and farms devastated by climate change. The inept U.S. response to such a disturbing world ranges from the Biden administration’s nervously biding its time without a plan in sight to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s cutting an ugly scar through a pristine national forest by building a four-mile border “wall” out of rusted shipping containers (which he now has to dismantle).
A few recent headlines reveal the painfully inhumane, dangerously volatile state of U.S. relations with its own home region, the continent of North America. A record-breaking 2.76 million border crossings from Mexico filled homeless shelters to the bursting point in cities nationwide in 2022. This year, the possible cessation of Covid restrictions could allow tens of thousands more migrants, now huddling in the cold of northern Mexico, to surge across the border, as some are already able to do. Most of those refugees are Central Americans, fleeing cities ravaged by gang warfare and farms devastated by climate change. The inept U.S. response to such a disturbing world ranges from the Biden administration’s nervously biding its time without a plan in sight to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s cutting an ugly scar through a pristine national forest by building a four-mile border “wall” out of rusted shipping containers (which he now has to dismantle).
Meanwhile, miserable millions in Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince are struggling to survive in the world’s worst slums, ravaged by recent earthquakes and roiled by endemic gang violence. While the U.N. Security Council debated launching an international military intervention to address what its secretary-general called “an absolutely nightmarish situation,” the U.S. expelled another 26,000 Haitian asylum seekers without hearings in 2022. The harshness of that was caught in September 2021 when Border Patrol horsemen used “unnecessary force” to herd Haitians back across the Rio Grande. Elsewhere in the Caribbean, Washington’s recent economic sanctions on communist Cuba — imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden — have sparked the flight to the U.S. of 250,000 refugees last year, more than 2% of the island’s population.
When I was growing up everyone was engaged in politics and, generally, people felt that they had some say in what happened to them. That has diminished significantly. And we now find ourselves living in an era in which power has been severed from politics, with disastrous consequences. The vast discrepancies in wealth we now witness is but one by-product of the diminished vision of human existence that now constitutes Liberal society. And it is the diminished nature of that vision that tellingly reveals that Western Liberalism is in its terminal phase.
The quality of human life has become degraded as a result of grotesque forms of exploitation. As all of our responsibilities and relationships and even our identity have been infiltrated and dissolved by the market in its constant search for more profitable ways to re-order human existence. We are, thus, caught up in a meaningless flux of dissolution and re-appropriation, constantly trying to adapt and reshape ourselves to fit the needs of the market. And because economic concerns have become primary, what is now permitted to constitute our moral compass is largely derived from the market. As Zygmunt Bauman points out in ‘Liquid Modernity’, “any imaginable mode of human conduct becomes morally permissible the moment it becomes economically possible.” Which means that all protest is not only impermissible, it’s immoral.
The filibuster has proved more pernicious to democracy than any other procedural rule of Congress. It’s time for it to go.
These claims may seem excessive in view of the real accomplishments of the 117th Congress, e.g., bills supporting a major upgrade of the nation’s infrastructure as well as substantive action in combating climate change. One can also note bills that expanded protections for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence, designated lynching as a federal hate crime, and protected same-sex and interracial marriage, to name just a few.
The recognition that makes true crime fans relate to crimes they see in the news can also mean that people often make false assumptions about how they would react when placed in the same shoes, according to Golub.
The Iranian state transferred two demonstrators, Mohammad Brokhni and Mohammad Qubadlu, to solitary confinement in what has been perceived as a move to carry out the death penalty against them.
Iran is weaponising the death penalty, attempting to crush dissent by frightening the public with the execution of protesters, the United Nations said Tuesday.
The Islamic republic has been rocked by a wave of protests since the death in custody on September 16 of Mahsa Amini, following the 22-year-old’s arrest for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code for women.
Separately on Tuesday, the Islamic Republic issued another protest-related death sentence, bringing to 18 the number of those sentenced to death since nationwide protests started some four months ago. This includes four executions.
The need for academics to recommit to these principles was reflected in the list of attendees, many of whom had suffered job loss, punitive disciplinary proceedings, ideologically motivated censorship, or social ostracism within their professional milieus. These included Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University whose research questioned the efficacy of COVID lockdowns. For over two years, Bhattacharya told us, he faced hostility in the workplace and challenges to his funding sources. You only learn how much academic freedom you really have, he told us, once you take a controversial position.
Dozens of Iranians gathered Sunday outside the French embassy in Tehran protesting against cartoons of the Islamic republic’s supreme leader by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
The magazine on Wednesday published caricatures of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in support of the months-long protests in Iran, sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, following her arrest for allegedly violating the country’s strict dress code.
Iran has warned France over the “insulting and indecent” cartoons, which appeared in a special edition to mark the anniversary of the deadly 2015 attack on the magazine’s Paris offices.
Iran announced Thursday the closure of a Tehran-based French research institute in protest against cartoons of the Islamic republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei published by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
Charlie Hebdo published the caricatures of Ayatollah Khamenei in a special edition marking the eight anniversary of a attack on its Paris office by militant Sunni Islamists claiming to be avenging the magazine’s decision to publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed. Twelve people were killed, including five of the magazine’s cartoonists.
“The ministry is ending the activities of the French Institute for Research in Iran (IFRI) as a first step,” the Iranian foreign ministry said in a statement, a day after Tehran had warned Paris of “consequences”.
Charlie Hebdo published dozens of cartoons about Mr. Khamenei on Wednesday and said they were part of a competition it launched last month to support anti-government protests in Iran sparked by the death of a young woman in September.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian tweeted in response that “the insulting and indecent act of a French publication in publishing cartoons against the religious and political authority will not go without an effective and decisive response”.
Reuters also reported that Iranian authorities summoned France’s envoy in Tehran to protest against the cartoon.
Elon Musk insisted that a key reason he took over Twitter was in support of “free speech.” As we noted, it was pretty clear that he never really understood what free speech actually means. Musk likes to say that his focus as the owner of Twitter has been to allow all legal speech, but as we’ve shown, Musk himself has been shown to have a transparently thin skin, and an unwillingness to take any kind of criticism. So, it was hardly a surprise that, even as he brought back serial fabulists and literal Nazis to the platform, he ramped up efforts to remove his critics — especially those in the media.
In Iran, the anti-government protests of 2022 have continued into the new year. Reporting on one of the biggest international stories of the moment is an ongoing challenge for BBC Persian Service journalists, who are not allowed into the country, suffer daily harassment, and whose families back home are persecuted.
According to the Dicle Fırat Journalists’ Association (DFG), 87 journalists remain behind bars on January 10, Working Journalists’ Day. These include 16 journalists who were arrested in Amed on June 16, 2022, and 9 journalists who were arrested in Ankara on October 29, 2022.
Mesopotamia Agency (MA) Editor-in-Chief Diren Yurtsever, who was sent to Sincan Women’s High Security Closed Prison after being arrested as part of an Ankara-based investigation, Berivan Altan, Ceylan Şahinli, Deniz Nazlım, Emrullah Acar, Hakan Yalçın and Selman Güzelyüz, and JINNEWS reporters Habibe Eren and Öznur Değer delivered a message to mark the January 10.
The latest to be sentenced was sports journalist Ehsan Pirbornash, reformist newspaper Hammihan reported on Wednesday. It did not identify the charges against him but said he must serve 10 years in prison out of an 18-year sentence.
In late October, more than 300 Iranian journalists and photojournalists signed a statement criticizing authorities for “arresting colleagues and stripping them of their civil rights after their detentions.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that the Russian government must pay a total of 15,000 euros (about $16,120) to Novaya Gazeta in compensation for declaring multiple articles published by the newspaper to be libel.
Moscow—Since the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022, the media landscape here has changed dramatically. New legal initiatives followed the beginning of the “special operation in Ukraine” (as it is dubbed by Russian law), as did the draconian implementation of restrictive regulations. Almost 300 media entities have been banned in 2022, more than a hundred journalists have been placed on the “foreign agents” list. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis.
Demands for an investigation into the murder of two environmental defenders in Guapinol, Honduras continued to mount Wednesday amid growing doubts that they were killed during what local police and prosecutors claimed was an attempted mugging.
Black Belt Eagle Scout is the alias of Katherine Paul, an indigenous multi-instrumentalist andsinger-songwriter. Her third studio album, “The Land, the Water, the Sky,” will be released onFebruary 10.
In a press statement, she declared “I created The Land, the Water, the Sky to record and reflect upon my journey back to my homelands and the challenges and the happiness it brought.”
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday said two pro-forced pregnancy proposals put forward by House Republicans would be “doomed” in the upper chamber of Congress, as advocates warned that even though the bills stand no chance currently of being passed into law, the misinformation contained in the legislation will still endanger pregnant people and providers.
Question: How many legs does a dog have if you count the tail as a leg? Answer: Four — calling the tail a leg doesn’t make it one.
The Supreme Court is the place labor rights go to die. It has been that way since John Roberts became chief justice in 2005. During his tenure, the court has issued a string of anti-employee decisions and taken particular glee in union-busting. If you are a worker or a union whose case ends up before his court, you’ve already lost. The only question is how much collateral damage that court will do to organized labor en route to ruling in favor of corporations and paymasters.
Museums and other American institutions hold the remains of more than 100,000 Native American individuals and several hundred thousand funerary objects, despite a 1990 law requiring that they be “expeditiously” returned to tribes.
ProPublica reported on how institutions amassed these remains in the context of violent colonization and created a tool allowing readers to explore the data.
U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly refused to.
Last year BMW took ample heat for its plans to turn heated seats into a costly $18 per month subscription in numerous countries. As we noted at the time, BMW is already including the hardware in new cars and adjusting the sale price accordingly. So it’s effectively charging users a new, recurring fee to enable technology that already exists in the car and consumers already paid for.
One amusing consequence of Gough’s oversight is that after Minecraft was sold in 2014 to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, the latter was almost certainly infringing on Gough’s copyright by selling the game without any licence from him. But rather than taking the obvious route of suing the company for a few million dollars or more, Gough did something remarkable. He dedicated it to the public domain, waiving all his rights under copyright: [...]
2022 was quite a year for the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture Program, thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In this blog post, we take a look back at some of the year’s highlights in our program’s four components: Policy, Infrastructure, Capacity building, and Community engagement.
Sony is patenting a technology that can detect and blacklist pirate apps on media players and smart TVs. Through the use of monitoring software, third-party applications sideloaded onto these and other devices can be blocked, effectively protecting rightsholders against online piracy.
As you’re probably aware, now that it’s January, we’re running our annual public domain game jam, for games based on works from 1927. This is the 5th year we’ve done this, ever since the public domain (finally) returned to the US after decades with no works ever reaching the public domain, due to never-ending copyright term extension. Many people have noted that the terms seemed to extend just as Disney’s Mickey Mouse was about to enter the public domain. And while some scholars dispute the claim that Disney was the main lobbying force behind extensions, it’s uncanny how often the extensions seemed timed to Mickey’s unshackling.
I just finished part 1 of The Get Down over on the streaming service.
It’s a series made in 2017 about urban youth in the Bronx in the
1970′s and early hip hop and disco culture. I am enjoying it so far
and really dig the soundtrack and the visuals. Too bad it only lasted
1 season/11 episodes.
For quite a while, the West has imposed its order and dominance over 2nd and 3rd world countries. I want to touch on a few points in this area.
What’s interesting is that the latest military strategy papers – revised because of the Ukraise crisis – are vage and often mention regaining some status in the world for their nation.
I couldn’t find the air hose for my compressor. I haven’t used it since before COVID, and it was leaking like a racehorse after a good meal. It’s entirely possible I tossed it. Or it could be hidden away somewhere. So I ordered a $20 1/4″ hose from Amazon… I just need to drive some brads and staples — how bad could it be?
“A sail without a hull” is the phrase i use to describe people giving (usually well-meaning) advice without first addressing the issues that will allow that advice to be effective. i started using this metaphor a few years ago, based on my own experiences.
i’ve found that a number of us have spent many years having our experiences and feelings not heard and/or validated – indeed, often having them regularly _in_validated. In response, we’ve developed a highly defensive mindset as a form of basic self-protection against being constantly gaslit, a mindset typically requiring significant ongoing amounts of psychological energy.
There’s really only one “ugh” class this semester. It’s officially called “Software Business” but the professor has also called it “Creating Software Ventures”. He seems so focused on how to make yourself as rich as possible by coming up with a good startup idea that you can exponentially grow and eventually sell. Nevermind long term viability, or trying to make something genuinely cool or useful for the sake of it. I like money as much as the next guy, but making it your sole focus and dumping your time and effort into a risky startup that probably isn’t even that original? That’s exhausting to even think about. Not to mention there’s something gross about trying to pitch it as a path to success to a bunch of students who have little to no real world work experience.
I was really hopeful during the “downhill battle” era for FOSS and commons.
[...]
I feel that we who went through edit autoexec.bat, notepad
index.html, ./configure && make have a different perspective on this. That’s not to say that those three were good things, they were bad, but they were markers; I’ve just noticed that more people from that era share the perspective of how messed up the current tech stacks are. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
The advantage of the current era is easier UI. Silents and boomers were overjoyed in the era of iPhone and Facebook since they were finally “let in”, and millennials and younger grew up in a Truman Show world where Insta and YouTube were as established and inescapable as TV, radio, roads, and grocery stores had been for us. It’s like that old story of what a fish thinks about water.
While it’s pretty cool that Fairphone 2 has been supported for so long it’s still not enough. I can’t find it now but I read somewhere that the average smartphone should be used for at least 25 years to be sustainable, because the production of electronics is so resource and energy intensive.
At the next event where an electronics company reveals a new product I want someone in the audience to ask “How many decades will you be supporting it?”
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
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QmTk1YucWTWE4ry9W9y5Avf859oQbEpAu5GKmYb7ZLaSV7 |
IRC log for #boycottnovell(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmNdKcTyg6ZLW2dmeu8eVWCpwdsSSP9tCigv4gQfpY9R9B |
IRC log for #boycottnovell(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmUcx3scWYMRSkBr1YHM4KSx676j1ihNrpUziAbckrCBSB |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social(full IRC log as HTML) |
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Qmb8Pvht3stSgPoP8bKsnadKrVhtFQYVhnxUNRsGpg2XCT |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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Qme5ZZ4xxmuXaUcJ7FUxGxqp8XuenXEa2r9VswfvNRnUSB |
IRC log for #techbytes(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmRo7CBMhCf1TdfUVxYjzBLLsYE1EP6DAwF1oVY4921wfM |
IRC log for #techbytes(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmTJjVQ7ByzfYEgU9G2BY3HDf45qJzPYa5hfU2FKBAnGPy |
IRC log for #techrights(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmbBVJPSHsm6iuU9hTMdKQXHCcLUcEsEieN2B4JJbAuDiX |
IRC log for #techrights(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmX5ndeauKAo3xFdzTzTsARtiZpVM2fQU4VMFwTJCmVmc2
This has just been posted in thelayoff.com:
Summary: Over the past few days our articles about these January layoffs were accessed tens of thousands of times; it’s darn clear many Microsoft insiders are desperate for answers. Nadella’s language this month suggests he wants to downsize.
Video download link | md5sum 0b5cee9f48792260e28e59272e7fbb14
The Very Ugly Collapse of Sirius
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ series is now dealing with the more interesting “stories from the trenches”; with over 20,000 views of the Wiki alone after less than 40 days (see above) it seems clear that people are interested in the 21 years of experience my wife and I had inside a company that claims to be “Open Source” (things changed for the worse, so we must investigate/examine why, knowing this can happen to other companies including large ones such as Red Hat)
THIS week the series entered its final phase. We shall be gathering remaining material/stories and explain them in a more generalised context, seeing that some readers (whom we heard from) experienced similar things in present or past workplaces. There are things here that people can relate to even if they worked for other companies in other countries.
“Funny how Microsoft likes to complain about you behind your back… to your boss.”Some time this month we shall cover a likely illegal contract-signing ‘ceremony’ and explain the context of Sirius ‘expanding’ to the US (because it was failing in the UK and the marriage of the CEO was collapsing). The above video explains how both my wife and I were being bullied by management just weeks or at most a month after a shell was created in the US after the Gates Foundation had secretly (under NDA) offered money to the CEO. Only a few years prior to that he told me (face to face in Alton Towers) that Microsoft had contacted him over the phone to complain about me (regarding things I wrote in Techrights). Funny how Microsoft likes to complain about you behind your back… to your boss. I only found out and wrote about it years later. It was risky to even mention this, but I did it anyway.
Therer’s a lot more information in the above video — stuff that wasn’t covered in the text earlier on. We’re far from done here and there’s still an ongoing fact-finding investigation. █
“Those with long memories might suggest a parallel between Rick’s position and mine when in 1997, I was sitting on the XML Working Group and co-editing the spec, on a pro bono basis as an indie consultant. Netscape hired me to represent their interests, and when I announced this, controversy ensued. Which is a nice way of saying that Microsoft went berserk; tried unsuccessfully to get me fired as co-editor, and then launched a vicious, deeply personal extended attack in which they tried to destroy my career and took lethal action against a small struggling company because my wife worked there. It was a sideshow of a sideshow of the great campaign to bury Netscape and I’m sure the executives have forgotten; but I haven’t.”
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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