Summary: What happens when your medical records/data are accessible to a company based abroad after a mysterious NDA with the Gates Foundation? The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) does not mind.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification process means almost nothing. It’s just a glorified brand. Deep inside many people and organisations know it.
Dilbert on ISO 9000 Certification in 1996 (there are also 21 for ISO 9001)
Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ was good at gloating about “ISO” as in ISO certification (see our ISO wiki to understand what ISO truly is; ISO certification needs to be more widely condemned and exposed) while signing all sorts of dodgy deals and lying to clients (some, like the Gates Foundation, were never mentioned because of a mysterious NDA); security and privacy were systematically neglected and some qualified as criminal negligence (with fines/penalties likely an applicable liability if caught/reported)
THE past few days were spent explaining ISO certification in relation to Sirius. The next few days will be spent giving an example or a sub-set of examples of how Sirius handled sensitive data. It probably hasn’t improved at all since I left last month.
For some essential background, Sirius Open Source Inc. (not SIRIUS CORPORATION LIMITED) was grabbing Gates Foundation money back in 2019 — all this while registering in the US for this “first US client”, letting Windows users who adore surveillance get involved in decision-making while outsourcing more and more of what’s left of the company to dubious companies with NSA connections.
“While I’m not going to report this as a former insider, I do wish to explain what’s at stake here, at least as a cautionary tale.”The problem here is that Sirius had British clients with their clients’ data on the systems. Some was medical data. What does the law say about access from another country and why was Google (American company) getting/drowning in legal hot waters for involvement in the NHS?
What’s more, it’s not clear if ISO 9001 certifiation allows personal computers at home, purchased and maintained by staff along with many other uses and applications, to be used as work machines (deemed “Secure”? Really???). Remember that, as we noted repeatedly in the past, the managers never bothered supplying the staff with anything; the company does not even provide a chair and a desk, as already explained in length here (mostly back in December). Did that pass muster at ISO’s cash register (ISO just wants the money)?
“ISO doesn’t care; it has no quality control of its own; its workers are like corporate staff and they might not even care anyway; they got the money, and that’s what’s important to ISO.”Well, maybe in the ISO forms the company can pretend that those computers were supplied by the company to staff when in fact the staff receives almost nothing from the company except a very old phone (Cisco-branded, Ethernet only; maybe 2 decades old).
While I’m not going to report this as a former insider, I do wish to explain what’s at stake here, at least as a cautionary tale. ISO doesn’t care; it has no quality control of its own; its workers are like corporate staff and they might not even care anyway; they got the money, and that’s what’s important to ISO. Many questions remain, e.g. which actual shell was the certification for? Do they realise they deal with a hydra or a polymorphous entity here (some of its shells are based in another continent, without actual boundaries within the company)? Even the pension schemes seem to be struggling to keep track and they need to be lectured on how the company splits and then illegally compels staff to sign papers without legal advice (nor proper understanding), as we noted here before. It was covered a lot roughly one week ago.
“To be clear, NHS was not a client, except indirectly (contractors).”And sure, many lessons are to be learned outside the company, too. If regulators could find E-mails, they would not struggle to see incriminating stuff (we plan to add examples to the wiki), including NHS medical data “oopsies” (admission on the record, too), even for people do not consent to data sharing. ISO probably doesn’t care. As we said several times already, ISO only cares about money. With ‘anonymisation’ not working, accidents aside, there’s a big scandal brewing under the surface, but then again the privatisation of the NHS would likely misplace the blame. The media has several examples of known incidents and it’s a very big deal because the NHS has been pushing towards it, moreover offering to send some of this data abroad.
To be clear, NHS was not a client, except indirectly (contractors). But if someone wishes to find some major scandal/blunder, we welcome further investigation, i.e. people can do what ISO ‘cannot’ do because it would discredit ISO.
“There are 2 problems to track,” an associate noted, “one is the scam of the ISO 9000 certification. The other is the destruction of ISO as an organisation by Microsoft.” █
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to interview the SCALE Conference Chairperson Ilan. Then we discuss the latest beta release of KDE Plasma with Plasma 5.27. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!
In This Video We Are Looking At The 2023.01 version has been announced from the development series of the Debian GNU /Linux based Polish distribution SparkyLinux.
Today we look at NixOS to see that it is quite different from other Linux distros. This follows the immutable principles, meaning that the core of the operating system is protected from any writing. All packages are isolated from all others and include their own dependancies.
Have you ever thought your linux terminal was too depressing, have you ever wanted to start your day with an inspirational quote, well Please the todo list app is here to do exactly that.
In this video I discuss how several news medias have announced that Apple will no longer pursue scanning peoples iCloud accounts for CCAM and a blog post that appears to be showing that Apple is indeed scanning local filesystems on Mac OS without users consent (iCloud and analytics turned off)
In This Video We Are Looking At Freespire 9.0, Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on the Debian operating system. Xubuntu is an operating system that is based on Ubuntu, but using the Xfce desktop environment instead of GNOME.
Uptime-Kuma is a self-hosted monitoring tool similar to “Uptime Robot”. It’s a great open-source alternative to uptime robot. It’s very lightweight and fast, the UI is nice and modern.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to configure DHCP server on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, a DHCP server is a network protocol that assigns an IP address and other network configurations to the devices automatically, it works by sending and receiving DHCP messages between devices and the DHCP server, DHCP server maintains a pool of IP addresses and assigns them to devices, DHCP servers can be configured to assign an IP address based on device MAC address, it also can provide additional information to devices using DHCP options.
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 and configure the DHCP server on Rocky Linux. 9.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Skype on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Skype is a commercial telecommunications software that specializes in videotelephony, conferencing, and voice calls using VoIP technology. Skype also offers additional features such as screen sharing, file transfer, and the ability to call landlines and mobile phones with a paid subscription. It is available for a wide range of devices, including Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.
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 Skype voice-over-IP messenger on Rocky Linux. 9.
Since it came to the scene in 2017, PipeWire saw itself as a powerful contender to replace PulseAudio, but it still had a lot of kinks to work out with its stability. Now that it has gained a strong reputation as a more established audio service for Linux many years later, users are now getting curious on whether the upgrade to PipeWire is really worth it. In this article, we’ll give you the most updated information on PipeWire’s merits versus PulseAudio and show you how to install it properly in your system should you choose to do so.
You can improve the security of your Linux system by installing and implementing SELinux. This provides an extra layer of protection by isolating applications on the system and securing the host.
By default, Ubuntu uses AppArmor, another Mandatory Access Control system. To make your Linux system more secure, you can make use of SELinux instead. Let’s see how you can install and configure SELinux on Ubuntu using a few basic Linux commands.
How do I shrink physical volume in Linux? In this tutorial, you will learn how to reduce or shrink Physical Volume in Linux. In a Linux system, a hard drive,
The most fundamental part of Linux administration and troubleshooting is to check the IP configuration of a system to make sure the system has a valid IP and is accessible on the local network.
The ip command in Linux is a powerful tool that not only displays the current IP address of a system but also allows you to view and manage the current configuration of network interfaces, IP addresses, routes, and ARP tables.
If you bought a Google Stadia controller and joined the cloud gaming platform, you probably know that it is now retired. Subscribers were informed in the final quarter of 2022 of the impending demise of Google Stadia, and refunds processed.
Google Stadia closed on January 18th, 2023, potentially leaving many wireless game controllers locked to an unavailable server. However, Google sensibly avoided a potential PR storm by releasing a Bluetooth update for the devices.
Learn how to generate code using tools provided by Fabric8 Kubernetes Client, including Fabric8 CRD Generator and Fabric8 Java Generator. (Part 4 of 5)
If you’ve begun your journey as a developer, chances are pretty good you’ll need to know how to use Git. Here’s an introductory guide that walks you through the basics on Linux.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Nobara Project 37
Today we are looking at how to install mGBA 0.10.0 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 video, we are looking at how to install WebStorm on KDE Neon.
Today we are looking at how to install Sublime Text on a Chromebook.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a Rumble comment and we would be happy to assist you!
Please use the video as a visual guide, and the commands and links below to install it on your Chromebook.
The biggest change in the Wine 8.0 is the completion of the conversion to PE format, which took more than four years. This allows the developers to build all of Wine’s modules in the PE format, which offers many great features like copy protection, support for 32-bit apps on 64-bit systems, Windows debuggers, x86 apps on ARM systems, and more.
This major change in Wine 8.0 also comes with a special syscall dispatcher that’s used for PE to Unix transitions to minimize the performance impact of the new architecture, especially for the OpenGL and Vulkan libraries. So, as you can imagine, this is a huge milestone for Linux gaming.
Developers have just uncorked a brand new release of Wine, the open source compatibility layer that allows Windows apps to run on Linux.
A substantial update, Wine 8.0 is distilled from a year’s worth of active development (roughly 8,600 changes in total). From that, a wealth of improvements are provided across every part of the Wine experience, from app compatibility, though to performance, and a nicer looking UI.
If you sample the fortnightly dev releases of Wine nothing you will be familiar with, and already benefitting from the bulk of “what’s new” in this update. Most users, however, will be coming to the new release afresh.
Notable highlights in Wine 8.0 include the completion of PE conversion, meaning all modules can be built in PE format. Wine devs say this work is an important milestone towards supporting “copy protection, 32-bit applications on 64-bit hosts, Windows debuggers, x86 applications on ARM”, and more.
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 8.0
is now available.This release represents a year of development effort and over 8,600
individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that
are listed in the release notes below. The main achievement is the
completion of the conversion to PE format.The source is available at:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/8.0/wine-8.0.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git
repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
The developers of Wine have announced version 8.0 of the Linux Windows compatibility layer. The new version boosts support for 32-bit Windows apps on 64-bit machines as well as 3D graphics acceleration.
Wine is a free and open source compatibility layer that makes it possible to run some Windows applications on computers running Linux, FreeBSD, or some other operating systems. It’s also the foundation for the Proton software that Valve uses to allow Steam Deck users to play Windows games on the Linux-powered handheld.
Back in the day, people often scoffed at the idea of switching to a Linux-based operating system due to a lack of software. While that is still true for some people — especially business users — it is less of a concern these days since so many things are done through the web browser. For many consumers, just having the Google Chrome browser on, say, Ubuntu, is more than enough to accomplish all of their wants and needs. Not to mention, there are many quality Linux apps like GIMP and DaVinci Resolve.
But OK, lets say you really want to use a Linux-based operating system, but there’s some Windows-only software that you absolutely cannot live without. Thankfully, you may still be able to ditch Windows and upgrade to something like Freespire or MX Linux. How? Thanks to the excellent Wine! This compatibility layer can sometimes enable you to run certain Windows software on Linux. Today, version 8.0 is released, and Microsoft should be very worried.
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 8.0 is now available.
This release represents a year of development effort and over 8,600 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes below. The main achievement is the completion of the conversion to PE format.
The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.
Wine 8.0 has been released after being in development for a year. This release includes over 8600 changes, the main highlights being the completion of the conversion to PE format, and work on WoW64 support which will allow running 32bit Windows applications without installing 32bit libraries.
Version 8.0 of the WINE Windows compatibility layer has been released. The headline feature appears to be the conversion to PE (“portable executable”) modules…
The biggest new feature in the DXVK 2.1 release is HDR support. HDR can be enabled for games on systems supporting HDR10 color spaces by setting the DXVK_HDR=1 environment variable or by setting the dxgi.enableHDR = True option in DXVK’s configuration file.
However, as no major Linux desktop environment currently supports HDR, users need a Gamescope session with the –hdr-enabled option enabled. Also, HDR support is only supported with the open-source AMDGPU graphics driver and some kernel patches from the Josh Ashton‘s branch.
Last year GNOME developers landed a grant from the German government to help fund work on adapting GNOME Shell to mobile devices.
Though much of that effort is in (active) development, it appears to be going well.
You don’t have to take my word for it, mind – you can see for yourself.
Endless OS‘ Cassidy James Blaede recently shared a 27-minute hands-on video. In it, he demonstrates how GNOME Shell for mobile looks, works, and performs at present.
We’re talking the full run of typical tasks here: opening apps, closing apps, switching apps, getting notifications, taking screenshots, changing wi-fi network, dealing with an especially needy on-screen keyboard — the works.
Let me start with some history for those unfamiliar with what Freespire is. Freespire’s roots lead back to Lindows, an easy-to-use Linux-based operating system with excellent Wine integration and easy application support. However, the distro was renamed Linspire after a Microsoft lawsuit.
Then, Freespire derived from Linspire as a free desktop-oriented Ubuntu-based Linux distro powered by Xfce, composed mostly of free and open-source software. Nowadays, the project is sponsored by Linspire, a commercial desktop-oriented Linux distro owned by PC OpenSystems LLC.
Yesterday, the Freespire development team announced the release of the brand-new Freespire 9.0, so let’s take a brief look at it.
The openSUSE Project was inspired by Fedora’s efforts to make Cisco’s OpenH264 codecs and FDK AAC available to its users that members reached out to Cisco’s open-source team to do the same for its user base.
An obstacle to overcome is the current limitation for free redistribution of the codecs is 100,000 users, so board member Neal Gompa openSUSE’s Leap release manager Lubos Kocman proposed a way to simplify the codec installation in openSUSE.
The codec library, which supports H.264 encoding and decoding, is suitable for real-time-application use like WebRTC. The simplification of the installation will make out-of-the-box use much easier for openSUSE users.
Tails 5.9 mainly focuses on bug fixes from the previous release and comes with updated versions of the Tor software.
Tails is a privacy and strongly security-focused Linux distribution designed to be run on a live USB drive, allowing users to boot the operating system on any computer while leaving no trace of their activity on the host computer.
The distro routes all internet traffic through the Tor network, providing a high level of anonymity and including a wide range of privacy and security tools such as the PGP email client, the Electrum Bitcoin wallet, and the VeraCrypt disk encryption software.
Yesterday, the Tails Project announced the general availability of Tails 5.9 with yet another dose of novelties and bug fixes. So, let’s have a look at them.
Tails 5.9 has been released with an apology from the developers behind the project. They said that Tails 5.8 users had been affected “badly” by issues but they’ve now addressed most of them in this update. To be fair, the 5.8 update was one of the largest since the project began, so it’s not surprising, with so many moving parts, that issues were detected.
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Dennis Braun (snd)
Raúl Benencia (rul)The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Gioele Barabucci
Agathe Porte
Braulio Henrique Marques Souto
Matthias Geiger
Alper Nebi Yasak
Fabian Grünbichler
Lance LinCongratulations!
DMA uses memory controllers separate from the CPU to accelerate data movment between memory locations, or between peripherials and memory. The RP2040 has 12 DMA channels which can stream an agregate of over 100 megabytes/sec without affecting CPU performance, in many cases. There are a huge number of options available to set up a DMA transfer. You can think of a DMA channel controller as a separate, programmable, processor with the main job of moving data. Memory on the rp2040 is arranged as a bus matrix with separate memory bus control masters for each ARM core and for the DMA system, and several memory bus targets accessed by the masters. Each bus target can be accessed on each machine cycle.
Here we use the DMA subsystem to produce a complete computing system, independent of the main ARM cpus. The DMA machine makes use of memory-copy ability, transport_triggered operations, and self-modifying code. The code consists of a sequence of DMA block descriptors stored in an array. The implemented operations are Turing Complete, and run at about the speed of an Arduino. About 8 million DMA blocks/second can be fetched/executed. There is a history of using only memory-moves to build a general cpu. In 2013 Stephen Dolan published x86 mov is Turing-Complete describing an example of a one-opcode machine. The paper Run-DMA by Michael Rushanan and Stephen Checkoway shows how to do this with one version (Raspbery Pi 2) of ARM DMA. The DMA system on the RP2040 has more transport-triggered functions and is a little easier to build. Joseph Primmer and I built a DMA processor using the Microchip PIC32 DMA system. Addition and branching had to be based on table-lookup. See DMA Weird machine.
The Google Stadia controller is a favorite, even with Stadia being shut down days ago. There are instructions from Google on switching the controller from WiFi to Bluetooth mode to game on other devices.
Vintage computing start-up ∀2 Retro Computing has launched a shiny new video card designed for the classic Apple II family of eight-bit microcomputers — powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico, mounted above a surprisingly thin add-in board.
“Extending the great work of Mark Aikens,” ∀2 Retro Computing’s David Kuder explains, referring to the earlier AppleII-VGA add-in card, “the ∀2 Analog is a VGA video solution for your Apple II computer. We’ve added support for 16-Color 140×192 and Monochrome 560×192 ‘Double-HiRes,’ 80×48 ‘Double-LoRes,’ and 80 column modes for Apple IIe computers.”
The work is under a GNU General Public License v2.0.
Did you know that you can program other boards on the Arduino IDE? If you’re in need of a 3.3V logic microcontroller platform but can’t use PlatformIO, this one’s the guide for you!
With an ESP32, you can power 3.3V TFT displays, low-power sensors, and cheap camera modules that would otherwise break on an Arduino’s 5V circuits.
Carl Bugeja designs circuit boards with a low-resistance copper layer which is used to pass current to heat the board and reflow the top surface mount components on top.
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978 and it had a huge influence on computing. I’m reverse-engineering the 8086 by examining the circuitry on its silicon die and in this blog post I take a look at how conditional jumps are implemented. Conditional jumps are an important part of any instruction set, changing the flow of execution based on a condition. Although this instruction may seem simple, it involves many parts of the CPU: the 8086 uses microcode along with special-purpose condition logic.
[...]
The 8086 die under a microscope, with main functional blocks labeled. This photo shows the chip’s single metal layer; the polysilicon and silicon are underneath. Click on this image (or any other) for a larger version.
[...]
The 8086 uses a hybrid approach: although the 8086 uses microcode, much of the instruction functionality is implemented with gate logic. This approach removed duplication from the microcode and kept the microcode small enough for 1978 technology. In a sense, the microcode is parameterized. For instance, the microcode can specify a generic Arithmetic/Logic Unit (ALU) operation, and the gate logic determines from the instruction which ALU (Arithmetic/Logic Unit) operation to perform. More relevant to this blog post, the microcode can specify a generic conditional test and the gate logic determines which condition to use. Although this made the 8086′s gate logic more complicated, the tradeoff was worthwhile.
It looks like an ordinary toolbox, but when you open up the Arduino Launch Control System, you’ll find a safe method for triggering model rocket launches. The system uses two separate power supplies. Both must be on for a successful launch and one requires a key. To trigger a 10-second countdown, the operator must hold down two buttons. Releasing either button will stop the countdown.
Hi, everyone! We’ve just released Chrome 109 (109.0.5414.117/.118) for Android: it’ll become available on Google Play over the next few days.
The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) sets out a number of cybersecurity and vulnerability management requirements for manufacturers (Annex I) and will require products to be accompanied by information and instructions for users (Annex II). Software vendors will also be required to conduct a risk assessment and produce technical documentation (Annex V) to demonstrate compliance.
Currently, the text implies that if a developer or supplier derives commercial benefit from OSS, it would be subject to the Cyber Resilience Act. It even implies, in relation to the distribution of software, that open source producers or developers could be held liable if their open source projects are used commercially.If the Cyber Resilience Act becomes EU law without clarification, the impact on several European-based open source projects, such as products based on LibreOffice technology, could have devastating (unintended) consequences.
Making updates to edge and embedded systems has historically been a painful process. Often, this involves working with multiple microcontrollers from different brands with different capabilities. Usually, each has its own custom bootloader, so it can be updated each board, one by one, with a specific firmware.
Another common issue is updating the system without physical access to the board.
Luos has developed an open source generic bootloader that addresses these issues by updating all the boards of your system through one connection to your device and without requiring physical access to the other boards. It can work for every microcontroller unit (MCU) covered by the Luos library. It allows for flexibility and adaptability in edge and embedded systems development, making managing and updating distributed systems easier. This article explains how the Luos bootloader works.
If you’ve been looking for a practical example of using GNU Radio, you should check out [Daniel Estévez’s] work on decoding telemetry captured from the Lunar Flashlight cubesat. The cubesat is having some trouble, but the data in question was a recording from the day after launch. We aren’t sure what it would take to eavesdrop on it live, but the 3-minute recording is from a 20-meter antenna at 8.4 GHz.
The Dev channel is being updated to OS version: 15320.0.0, Browser version: 111.0.5544.0 for most ChromeOS devices.
The Stable channel has been updated to 109.0.5414.119 for Mac and Linux and 109.0.5414.119/.120 for Windows, which will roll out over the coming days/weeks. A full list of changes in this build is available in the log.
The Extended Stable channel has been updated to 108.0.5359.215 for Windows and Mac which will roll out over the coming days/weeks.
The board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced it has adopted updated bylaws for the nonprofit effective Feb. 1, 2023.
The update to the by-laws most importantly enacts a strengthened approval process for drafting and publishing licenses by the FSF. It also formalizes the union staff seat that was introduced on March 21, 2021, and makes various minor improvements to the text. This is part of the preparations for the process of expanding the board.
FSF president Geoffrey Knauth said: “These are the first changes to the bylaws in twenty years and constitute an important step to strengthen and modernize our governance as we prepare to expand the board in the months ahead.”
The beings after the Anthropocene will be formed of inorganic matter they will be not unfeeling they will study us the way we study the natural world they will have libraries and zoos stocked with us
those following them will be made of cloud
A few years after the Vietnam War, a war in which I, along with a few million others, were war resisters, a relative drew a caricature of a general adorned with medals, one of which was a baby dripping with blood and hanging from a ribbon on his chest. The artist screwed up a bit and also hung a ribbon around the general’s neck that mistakenly depicted a Mercedes symbol rather than a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) peace symbol. The artist may have thought of the My Lai massacre in the drawing, as that was the most publicized massacre of scores of massacres in Southeast Asia and particularly in Vietnam. Cambodia would soon outpace Vietnam in mass murder as the Khmer Rouge took control of the nation. While most would have picked up the error, a Mercedes represents the kind of ostentatious consumerism that most in the peace movement, at least in the late 1960s and early 1970s, would have immediately noticed. Once a person knows how to pay attention critically, then all kinds of hypocrisy becomes apparent. We now live in a society where all kinds of hypocrisy and mayhem are not universally apparent, but adored.
Art aside, the following comment I made in response to a New York Times article reporting that the US had warmed to providing more arms to Ukraine (“U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea,” January 18, 2023) for use in the Crimea was removed from the Times comments about that article. “Just about now the US needs to be promoting an off ramp from this awful war, not fanning the flames of more war.”
New evidence and understandings about the structure of successful early societies across Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere are sweeping away the popular assumption that early societies tended toward autocracy and despotism.
Archaeology has a more valuable story to tell: Collective action and localized economic production are a recipe for sustainability and broader well-being. The Mesoamerican city of Monte Albán, which was a major regional urban center for 1,300 years, is a shining example. It is a powerful case study that early investments in public infrastructure and goods foster longer-term sustainability.
So much of what I write in this journal is about the deep and heavy challenges facing our world. I want to share a few thoughts about what keeps me going through all this, in hopes that they will be helpful to you, my dear readers.
First, there is a thought from Buddhist psychology that if there is too much of one thing, deliberately add in the opposite. Now consider the word discouragement. That’s easy to feel these days, and it’s a hindrance to getting stuff done. Within that word is its own opposite, courage. That’s a quality we think too little about nowadays. But it is vital. We need a certain moral courage to confront the realities of the day. That is the balancing element that overcomes discouragement.
Faculty members at the University of Illinois Chicago suspended their strike on Sunday after reaching a tentative deal with school administrators that includes minimum salary increases for both tenure-track and non-tenure-track staff.
It’s not news that EVGA is getting out of the GPU card game, after a ‘little falling out’ with Nvidia. It’s sad news nonetheless, as this enthusiastic band of hardware hackers has a solid following in certain overclocking and custom PC circles. The Games Nexus gang decided to fly over to meet up with the EVGA team in Zhonghe, Taiwan, and follow them around a bit as they tried for one last overclocking record on the latest (unreleased, GTX4090-based) GPU card. As you will note early on in the video, things didn’t go smoothly, with their hand-lapped GPU burning out the PCB after a small setup error.
Riding a bike is a pretty simple affair, but like with many things, technology marches on and adds complications. Where once all you had to worry about was pumping the cranks and shifting the gears, now a lot of bikes have front suspensions that need to be adjusted for different riding conditions. Great for efficiency and ride comfort, but a little tough to accomplish while you’re underway.
We’ve always known, in theory, there are ways to bend wood, but weren’t really clear on how it worked. Now that we’ve seen [Totally Handy]’s recent video, we’ve learned a number of tricks to pull it off. Could we do any of them? Probably not, any more than watching someone solder under a microscope means you could do it yourself with no practice. But it sure made us want to try!
Hearing is one of our most precious senses, and yet many take their hearing for granted, exposing themselves to loud noises that do lasting damage. [Jonathan Levi] of The Next Level does no such thing, at least not anymore. He’s even gone so far as to have custom acrylic earplugs made, which he carried around for two years, finally had them tweaked to be perfect, and promptly lost them. Rather than shell out another $150-$200 for another pair, [Jonathan] decided to see if he could make some himself.
The Quest for a Dumber Phone describes the growing movement of people who believe we benefit as individuals and a collective by unplugging from internet-enabled technology, because “it physically makes a difference in our lives when we are tethered, in our eyesight and the way we feel.”
Almost always, of course, the goal is not to give up “the internet” but only the smartphone. And it’s easier than it may seem.
Compressing the operating system drive is a way to save space on a computer’s hard drive. By reducing the size of files, more storage space becomes available. Since the OS drive often contains software packed with repeating assets, config files, and code, people have theorized that compressing the OS drive may free up significant amounts of space. And with transparent compression file systems available, users can seamlessly use their files without manually compressing and decompressing them.
[...]
As for PCs using Linux, they may use the Brfts file system for their OS compression. Brfts is supported by several popular Linux distros such as Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Red Hat.
Linux servers may use the ZFS file system, which is supported by Fedora, Debian, and Cent OS.
If you’ve been using Linux for a while, you should be able to compress your OS drive with relative ease. Although some Linux distros support NTFS, they can read and write data without the ability to change permissions.
“Today, millions of Americans are making the unacceptable choice between feeding their families or buying the medicine they need. Seniors from Vermont to Alaska are forced to split pills in half and many have died because they did not have enough money to fill their prescriptions.”
On Sunday, women across America marched to declare “We Will Never Stop Fighting” after a cabal of (mostly male) Christian extremists stripped them of bodily autonomy and equality under the law. As the post-Roe landscape veers ever further dystopian, activists are moving past Roe’s “medical patriarchy” to “write ourselves back into the Constitution.” Also reality: A network of clinicians are fighting decades of bloody propaganda with images of just what an abortion removes. Hint: not an “innocent baby.”
As thousands of people gathered at pro-choice rallies across the United States, multiple congresswomen marked the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Sunday by sharing their own experiences with abortion care and renewing calls to protect reproductive rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court reversing its landmark ruling.
A new poll released by Gallup on Monday offered the latest evidence that Democratic leaders who continue to fight the progressive push for Medicare for All are out of touch with their own party, as more than 7 in 10 Democratic voters support a government-run healthcare system in which every American could participate and receive high-quality, free care.
I am totally purging my daily life from all use of restaurants. Call it a New Year’s Resolution. I can’t even go to a restaurant without feeling ripped off at this point, so I am rejecting the modernity of restaurants and embracing the tradition of picnicking.
Working as a family doctor, Dr. Cohen has been consulted by a group of patients with new and unusual presentations. In this first video we learn that he assesses and treats them each as an individual, with good results.
Mentorship programs in open source are critical for the growth and development of the open source community, and the LFX Mentorship program is no exception. The program’s participants find it so valuable that a whopping 99% of the graduates felt the program to be beneficial, and 47% said it helped them get a job.
Today, CISA released Protecting Our Future: Partnering to Safeguard K–12 organizations from Cybersecurity Threats. The report provides recommendations and resources to help K-12 schools and school districts address systemic cybersecurity risk. It also provides insight into the current threat landscape specific to the K-12 community and offers simple steps school leaders can take to strengthen their cybersecurity efforts.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel and spip), Fedora (kernel), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, docker, firefox, jpegoptim, nautilus, net-snmp, phoronix-test-suite, php, php-smarty, samba, sdl2, sudo, tor, viewvc, vim, virtualbox, and x11-server), Red Hat (bash, curl, dbus, expat, firefox, go-toolset, golang, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, libreoffice, libtasn1, libtiff, libxml2, libXpm, nodejs, nodejs-nodemon, pcs, postgresql-jdbc, sqlite, sssd, sudo, systemd, and usbguard), Scientific Linux (firefox, java-11-openjdk, and sudo), SUSE (freeradius-server, python-mechanize, and upx), and Ubuntu (exuberant-ctags, haproxy, ruby2.5, ruby3.0, and wheel).
The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund has announced the completion of a security audit of the Git source.
Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) is thrilled to announce the results of a security audit and threat model for git. Git is the world’s most widely used version control system, and it underpins not only open source, but the vast majority of public and private software development today. To say that git is infrastructure is an understatement, it reaches nearly every corner of software development and touches nearly every product that has software in one way or another.
CISA released two Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on January 24, 2023.These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.
Apple has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected device.
Node.js is an open source development platform for running JavaScript code on the server side. Node is useful for developing applications that require a persistent browser-server connection and is often used for real-time applications such as chat, social applications, or news feeds.
Incidents like the Rockstar and Uber hacks should serve as a warning to all CISOs. Proper security must consider the role info-hungry actors and audiences can play when dealing with sensitive information and intellectual property.
Stephanie Carruthers, Chief People Hacker for the X‑Force Red team at IBM Security, broke down how the incident at Uber happened and what helps prevent these types of attacks.
The nation is no longer secure.
T-Mobile hasn’t been what you’d call competent when it comes to protecting its customers’ data. The company has now been hacked numerous times just since 2018, with hackers at one point going so far as to publicly ridicule the company’s lousy security practices.
When the first Russian forces began entering Ukrainian territory in February 2022, the instant reaction from Europe, the UK, Canada and Australia, was one of open commitment to Ukraine’s refugees. The relentless human trains heading westwards were initially embraced by Poles, whose history with Ukraine is, at best, tense and sketchy.
Across Europe, walls came down in dispensation for this new type of refugee, tolerated and tolerable by the populists and the border security types, all summed up by comments from the Bulgarian Prime minister Kiril Petkov, who declared the fleeing Ukrainians “intelligent” and “educated people”. They were certainly “Europeans” and were not like the “refugee wave we have been used to”, the sort packed with individuals with “unclear pasts [and] who could have been even terrorists.” For a time, governments could distract attention from brutal border policies directed against swarthier irregular arrivals.
If I mention the date February 24, 2022 to you, you’ll likely note it as the day on which Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Whether that date will remain carved in stone in your memory probably depends on where things go from here, nearly a year later, with the war in what looks like stalemate but all sides continually threatening escalation and promising resolution.
Humans tend to latch onto this or that “date which will live in infamy,” as FDR dubbed December 7, 1941 — the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the US fully into World War Two.
A group of 160 mostly American lawyers on Friday urged President Joe Biden to remove Cuba from the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list, a designation acknowledged as meritless and politically motivated by critics and proponents of the policy alike.
Halfway through his first term in office, President Biden generally gets high marks for his foreign policy from the national security commentariat. Of course, he enjoys a cheap grace for not being Donald Trump and for surrounding himself with certified members of the “Blob.”
A gunman killed at least seven people in the small California city of Half Moon Bay on Monday, the second mass shooting in the state in three days and one of nearly 40 that have occurred since the start of the new year—a rolling epidemic of violence that Congress has repeatedly met with inaction or inadequate compromises with gun lobby-backed Republicans.
The widow of murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Monday denounced former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his comments about her husband in Pompeo’s upcoming memoir, in which he questions Khashoggi’s journalism credentials and his allegiances.
I like to sing and what I like best is to do so at the top of my lungs when I’m all alone. Last summer, taking a walk through the corn fields in New York’s Hudson River Valley with no one around but the barn swallows, I found myself belting out a medley of tunes about peace from my long-ago, summer-camp years. That was the late 1950s, when the miseries of World War II were still relatively fresh, the UN looked like a promising development, and folk music was just oh-so-cool.
The U.S. tyranny of monopoly capital has long preferred to deal with fascist governments abroad, specifically in the Global South. American oligarchs’ foreign fascist sycophants are so much more malleable than democratic representatives; they don’t even have to be told what to do because they know. It’s in their DNA. […]
The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the press that the administration has no plans for closing the Russian borders to people who want to leave the country.
Russian authorities do not plan to rebuild the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, which was destroyed by Russian troops during the siege of Mariupol in the spring of 2022, according to Russian Construction Ministry official Yulia Maximova. Restoring the massive facility would be “impossible and unprofitable,” she told journalists.
Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov and Filipina journalist Maria Ressa, both winners of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, have called on the International Committee of the Red Cross to intervene in the case of jailed Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny.
Multiple top Ukrainian officials resigned or were dismissed on Tuesday, following Volodymyr Zelensky’s promise on Monday that “personnel changes” were imminent amid recent corruption scandals.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed an executive order prohibiting state employees from leaving the country for “non-governmental purposes” while mobilization and martial law are in effect.
New legislation proposed by Evgeny Moskvichev, the chair of the Russian State Duma’s Transport and Construction Committee, would require Russians who wish to leave the country by car to reserve specific dates and times in advance of crossing the border.
The former Wagner Group commander Andrey Medvedev, who is now seeking asylum in Norway, has been moved to a migrant detention center and fears an imminent deportation to Russia. According to the human-rights advocate Vladimir Osechkin, sending Medvedev back to Russia would almost inevitably lead to another “brutal killing” by the Wagner Group.
Somewhere between the first and second times I heard someone say “weaponize,” this term and its derivatives—“weaponizing,” “weaponization,” and so on—began to repel me. It was the crudity of it, or the way it served as an accusatory dismissal, like “conspiracy theory.” Assert that someone has weaponized a […]
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Monday that while Russia’s military call-up is complete, other provisions of Putin’s mobilization decree remain in effect because “mobilization” also includes “other measures” related to the war.
Following the news of the Estonian ambassador’s expulsion from Russia, Latvia announced a decision to downgrade its diplomatic ties with Russia in solidarity with Estonia.
Out of the 50,000 conscripts recruited by the Wagner Group among the convicts kept in Russian prisons, 40,000 are either dead or missing, and only 10,000 are still fighting in Ukraine, says Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, a charity advocating prisoners’ rights.
A Ukrainian court has issued the first verdict in a wartime collaboration case, sentencing a woman from the Kherson region to five years in prison for helping organize a “referendum on joining Russia.”
A court in the Siberian city of Chita has fined a local woman 30,000 rubles (about $437) on charges of “discrediting” the Russian army for “liking” a social media post about the war in Ukraine, according to the Radio Europe/Radio Free Liberty affiliate Sibir.Realii.
Given the secrecy typically accorded to the military and the inclination of government officials to skew data to satisfy the preferences of those in power, intelligence failures are anything but unusual in this country’s security affairs. In 2003, for instance, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq based on claims — later found to be baseless — that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was developing or already possessed weapons of mass destruction. Similarly, the instant collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021, when the U.S. completed the withdrawal of its forces from that country, came as a shock only because of wildly optimistic intelligence estimates of that government’s strength. Now, the Department of Defense has delivered another massive intelligence failure, this time on China’s future threat to American security.
A pair of green groups on Monday released a report detailing how U.S. President Joe Biden can work toward his goal of 100% clean electricity nationwide by 2035.
Climate watchdogs warned Monday that a bill House Republicans are expected to vote on this week is a thinly veiled effort to open more public lands and waters to planet-wrecking oil and gas drilling.
The Red Sea is a rich marine haven, diverse and home to hundreds of species of fish and coral colonies. At its southern mouth, it also harbors an almost half-century old static oil tanker.
The power station operator Drax is applying intense pressure across government departments to influence energy policy in its favour, DeSmog can reveal.
In particular, the biomass giant is pressing the government to deliver key decisions that could hasten the adoption of a costly and controversial ‘carbon negative’ technology.
Lithium sulfur batteries are often touted as the next major chemistry for electric vehicle applications, if only their cycle life wasn’t so short. But that might be changing soon, as a group of researchers at Drexel University has developed a sulfur cathode capable of more than 4000 cycles.
It seems that it is software, not hardware or electric engineering, the “key link to mass charging of electric vehicles (EVs)”.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced last week that the federal government had reached the statutory debt limit and that her department had begun “extraordinary measures” to meet required spending obligations. It is estimated that by July these extraordinary measures will no longer be able to keep some spending obligations from being missed.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday took aim at the Republican Party for creating what she called a “manufactured crisis” as a potential fight over the debt ceiling looms, slamming the GOP’s threats to public spending as the party works to make it even easier for the wealthy to avoid paying taxes.
The debt limit on government spending was a jury-rigged response to the unforeseeable expenses of the United States’s entry into World War I, but it’s hard to resist the notion that it was actually designed to expose the studied inanity of journalistic discourse. For the century-plus that we’ve been saddled with the debt ceiling, it’s been formally raised more than 100 times—and most of those hikes have perversely increased long-term public debt, since they defer outstanding interest payments. What’s more, the legal rationale for maintaining the debt ceiling is iffy at best, since the public debt clause of the 14th Amendment stipulates that “the validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned,” while debt obligations of the defeated Confederacy were to be repudiated.1
The economy can have a problem of too much demand, leading to serious inflationary pressures. It can also have a problem of too little demand, leading to slow growth and unemployment. But can it have both at the same time?
Apparently, the leading lights in economic policy circles seem to think so. As I noted few days ago, back in the 1990s and 00s economists were almost universally warning of the bad effects of an aging population. The issue was that we would have too many retirees and too few workers to support them.
The global capitalist economy is at an historical juncture. The global economic restructuring that began roughly four decades ago—often associated with the term Neoliberalism—has run its course. Three crises in succession in roughly the past decade has disrupted it to its core: the Great Recession and financial crash, the Covid Crisis, and the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine and its associated global sanctions and emerging bifurcation of the global capitalist economy.
Originating in the American-Anglo economies in the late 1970s—thereafter spreading to a lesser degree to other advanced capitalist economies—the Neoliberal restructuring of the capitalist economy began in the late 1970s/early 1980s, occurring as a response to the prior global economic crisis of the 1970s. Neoliberal restructuring sought, and largely succeeded, in reordering inter-class economic relations domestically between capital and labor within the advanced capitalist economies—the US and UK in particular—as well as intra-class between capitalist classes globally. The Neoliberal economic restructuring thereby re-established the dominance of US Capital over Labor and popular movements at home, while restoring firmly the hegemony of US Capital over its capitalist competitors abroad.
In 1972, the Club of Rome released a report called The Limits to Growth that laid out the damage to the planet and to human beings of unrestrained increases in economic production and population. It was a straightforward extrapolation from then-current trends that took into account limited resources like water, fertile soil, and fossil fuels.
That same year, the United Nations held its first environment conference, which led to the creation of the UN Environment Program. Climate change was barely on the conference agenda, but it would increasingly focus the attention of scientists and policymakers over the next two decades with the introduction of the term “global warming” in 1975, the Montreal Protocol in 1987 that restricted ozone-destroying chemicals, and the creation in 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Alicea Moore is sitting at a conference table in the headquarters of the Los Angeles Housing and Community Investment Department, near Downtown LA. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and she had recently received her fourth payment from the city’s new BIG:LEAP program via the Angelenos Card, a prepaid Mastercard emblazoned with a decal of the LA skyline that she keeps in her wallet.
Reports that Justice Department investigators on Friday seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, from President Biden’s residence in Wilmington, Delaware — including documents from his time as a senator and others from his time as vice president — have shaken Washington, worrying some Democrats about Biden’s viability as a candidate in 2024.
In 2021, Elliot Malin did something heroic: He donated a kidney to save the life of his distant cousin Scott Kline, who was suffering from end-stage renal failure. Although third cousins, the two men were close and Malin was happy to make the sacrifice. Unfortunately, his spirit of altruism was matched by an opposing spirit of rapacity in the private health care system. Even though living kidney donors are not supposed to be charged for their surgery, a firm called NorthStar Anesthesia tried to stick Malin with a bill for $13,064. Despite Malin’s explaining that the bill was supposed to be taken care of by Kline’s insurance company, NorthStar Anesthesia even threatened to unleash a collection agency to get the money. This could have wrecked Malin’s credit. Only after receiving a call from ProPublica, a nonprofit journalistic outlet reporting on the case, did NorthStar acknowledge that Malin should never have been charged.
Reports Sunday that President Joe Biden has chosen Jeff Zients to replace outgoing White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain were met with alarm among progressive watchdogs, who pointed to Zients’ disastrous tenure as the administration’s coronavirus czar as well as his history in the corporate world—where he built a fortune investing in healthcare companies accused of fraud.
The surprise premiere of a documentary revealing “shocking new allegations” of sexual crimes committed decades ago by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sparked new calls on Monday for Senate and Justice Department investigations.
Denial at the top of the Democratic Party about Joe Biden’s shaky footing for a re-election run in 2024 became more untenable over the weekend. As the New York Times reported, investigators “seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, at President Biden’s residence” in Delaware. The newspaper noted that “the remarkable search of a sitting president’s home by federal agents—at the invitation of Mr. Biden’s lawyers—dramatically escalated the legal and political situation for the president.”
I honestly thought it was fake news: Just after Kevin McCarthy became House speaker, giving away his power to right-wing antagonists the first week in January, I read about Congress members smoking on the GOP side of the aisle. Just a projection from my liberal allies of Republicans’ intent to erode public health, I assumed. Funny GIF to come.
Radio’s Greatest of All Time is a new book credited to conservative radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, who began compiling it from transcripts of his program before his death from lung cancer in 2021. The final published version, which lists his widow, Kathryn, and his younger brother, David, as coauthors, serves as the definitive collectible tribute to the man described in the book’s publicity material as “a modern-day Founding Father—the George Washington of Radio.”
Once again, the federal court that had the misfortune of dealing with Donald Trump’s pile of conspiracy theory he and his lawyers generously called a “lawsuit” is handing out sanctions to Trump’s legal team.
In a move that seems unlikely to surprise anyone who has followed any bit of the life and career of former President Donald Trump, it appears that he is getting ready to come back to Twitter, in a process that will fuck over the social media site that he lent his name and brand to, and which he insisted would be a huge success and destroy Twitter.
Lots of people were expecting the Supreme Court to obviously agree to take the appeals of Florida’s and Texas’s social media content moderation laws. As you’ll probably recall, both Texas and Florida passed slightly different laws that effectively said that they could bar social media platforms from moderating certain types of content. Both laws were tossed out as easily and obviously unconstitutional limitations of social media companies’ 1st Amendment editorial and association rights.
We’ve noted a few times how the political push to ban TikTok is a dumb performance designed to do several things, none of which have to do anything with consumer privacy and security. We’ve also noted how college bans of TikTok are a dumb extension of that dumb performance, and don’t accomplish anything of meaningful significance.
Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego on Monday formally launched his 2024 campaign for the seat held by right-wing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who officially registered as an Independent in December after months of derailing the Biden administration’s policy agenda and preserving tax loopholes for her corporate allies.
The Leningrad Siege Museum commemorates the breakthrough that ended the Nazi forces’ deadly blockade in 1944. Today’s visitors can expect to find a new temporary exhibition, courtesy of Russia’s Federation Council, featuring captured Ukrainian tanks. The show’s title, “The Lessons of Fascism Yet to Be Learned,” seems apt — but not in the way intended by the curators.
We have a long tradition in America of Separation of Church and State that prohibits government’s promotion of religion on the one hand, and interference with its free exercise on the other. In their refusal to establish a state church or to favor one religion over another, the Founding Fathers didn’t think that religion was bad but that there was something amiss in human nature, a certain tendency, a will to power and a lust for domination, that always bore watching.
Rights groups are calling on Meta Platforms to seize the opportunity to improve its content moderation in Africa after its main third-party contractor in the region said it would no longer screen harmful posts for the social media giant.
Kenya-based outsourcing firm Sama said on Jan. 10 it would no longer provide content moderation services for the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram in March as it moves to concentrate on data labelling work.
Former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, famed linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky and others gave testimony Friday at the Belmarsh Tribunal in Washington, D.C., calling on President Biden to drop charges against Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States. If convicted in the United States, Julian Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for violating the U.S. Espionage Act for publishing documents that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Friday’s event was held at the National Press Club and co-chaired by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. We spend the hour featuring compelling excerpts from the proceedings.
Daniel Ellsberg says using the Espionage Act against journalist Julian Assange in blatant violation of the First Amendment means the First Amendment is essentially gone.
A recent talk with a friend gave me valuable insight into an important human phenomenon: how is a moral conscience created? A few years ago, I met Pierre, an abstract painter, and we developed a close friendship. As I learned about his complex upbringing, I wondered how he was able to overcome harrowing events in his life.
Pierre had been borne in a French containment camp (which in practice functioned as a prison,) where his parents were held after fleeing Spain’s civil war fought between 1936 and 1939 between Republicans and Nationalists. Both of them fought on the Republican side against the regime headed by general Francisco Franco. When the Republicans were defeated, to escape Franco’s reprisals, they crossed on foot the Pyrenees, a mountain range that separates the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of the continent. A strenuous trip under any circumstance, crossing the tallest mountain range in Europe was excruciating during the bitter winter cold.
Decolonization is a term I don’t use. It’s too passive and, like other supposedly left politics that avoid/ignore discussion of class, it opens the space where capitalists can creep in and stifle genuine revolutionary change. In other words, one oppressive structure is replaced by several–all of them assuming the permanence of capitalism and its current hierarchies. This results in the decolonized colonies remaining colonized, only then they are part of a unipolar system ruled directly and indirectly by US imperialism. The illusion of liberation or, to be more accurate since liberation is not the intention, the illusion of independence..
Ukraine does not have the means to get what it wants militarily without the financial and military support of Washington, which is using this conflict as a means to push Europe back to where it was in the 1950s-1970s. In other words, one goal of this war drive in Europe is to make Europe once again dependent on Washington for most of its military and economic backing. Washington rejected a peace dividend in the 1990s and built up its military while rejecting Europe’s thoughts of its own defense forces that included cooperation with Moscow for European security. Meanwhile, Europe’s economy grew. The US wants both military and economic dominance. The response of the Russian government to being once again cast in an adversarial role was not an accident. It was the intention of post-Soviet US foreign policy to create military conflict with Moscow. Moscow acted as almost any state would, especially one with Moscow’s legacy. While this obviously does not excuse the invasion of Ukraine, it does explain it in terms by which such states operate.
A top Human Rights Watch official warned Monday that restrictions recently placed by Israel’s apartheid government on “foreigners”—including Palestinians—seeking entry into the West Bank could turn the illegally occupied territory into “another Gaza,” which is often described as the “world’s largest open-air prison.”
Not too long ago, my friend and I snuck onto a beach reserved for the residents of a moshav 10 minutes south of Haifa. The idea that we were infiltrating (at least in someone’s view) a Jewish settlement to sunbathe didn’t burden me. I don’t believe a beach can be “private property.” Besides, after a year in pandemic-stricken New York, there was nothing on my mind but the Mediterranean.1
I was in Barbados, visiting relatives, when Princess Diana died. That afternoon I met an Englishwoman on a walk. “I feel so awful just being out enjoying myself,” she told me.
In 1948, a young historian named Richard Hofstadter published The American Political Tradition, a critical look at the country’s politics that marked a sharp break from the accepted wisdom among historians of the time. Many scholars, following in the footsteps of the Progressive era’s Charles Beard, held that American history was defined by conflict: by the policy disagreements that separated agrarian from industrial regions, by disputes among different factions of the economic elite over the right path forward for the country. But Hofstadter suggested the opposite. Profiling an array of political leaders—from Thomas Jefferson and John Calhoun to Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt—he argued that American politics existed within a shockingly narrow spectrum. Almost all of the politicians he chronicled, who helped define the American “tradition,” had accepted capitalism and individualism as the reigning norms of political life. Despite their apparent differences, they all shared this bedrock faith—one that left them unable to grapple with the underlying realities of American life, with its myriad inequalities of class and power. American democracy was unable to live up to its promise, Hofstadter insisted, because it was in the grip of a liberal ideology defined by a rapacious individualism.
As Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy walked off the field following a bitter and frustrating 19-12 playoff loss to the San Francisco 49ers, he roughly pushed a cameraperson away. But this wasn’t even the most embarrassing moment for McCarthy in the closing moments of the season. That happened in the game’s last play, where, down one touchdown, he inexplicably had running back Ezekiel Elliott play center and hike the ball to quarterback Dak Prescott. Elliott was predictably “trucked”—knocked down with extreme force—by a 49ers player. Before he could be sacked, Prescott threw a five-yard pass, and his receiver was immediately tackled. It was an awful end to a season that held so much promise. For Coach McCarthy and Prescott, it also echoed last year’s playoff exit, where they were also narrowly beaten by the 49ers in a close game that ended with a similarly risible play when Prescott ran with the ball ostensibly to set up one last desperate play and instead ran out the clock.
Cops in Nevada had better start behaving. The state’s Supreme Court has handed down a ruling that not only guarantees residents the right to sue under state law, but won’t allow officers to easily escape lawsuits by asking for qualified immunity.
Ars Technica (10/26/22) called Gigi Sohn “the tiebreaking vote needed to reverse Trump-era deregulation of the broadband industry [and] restore net neutrality rules.”Media democracy advocate Gigi Sohn, nominated to the Federal Communications Commission in October 2021 (FAIR.org, 4/19/22, 6/15/22, 10/28/22), still awaits a confirmation vote in the Senate—which means the public still awaits a functioning FCC that can protect its interests.
We’ve long covered the trend of communities building their own broadband networks. It’s a movement directly created by decades of anger at telecom market failure, poor service, and monopolization. But since 2015, Vermont officials have taken things to an entirely different level.
Today, the U.S. Department of Justice and states including California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. The suit claims that Google “unlawfully monopolized” the online advertising market by buying up would-be competitors, freezing out rivals, and leveraging its market power in some markets to dominate others. The suit follows our letter urging the Justice Department to review Google’s conduct for anticompetitive behavior in the advertising technology market.
Perhaps no modern artist better exemplified the charge issued by Baudelaire in his 1862 essay “Painters and etchers” — “etching is a profound and dangerous art, filled with treachery, which reveals the faults of an artist’s mind as clearly as his virtues” — than James Ensor (1860–1949). Aside from an incomplete course of study at Brussels’ Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, the institution he called an “establishment for the near-blind”, the artist spent the near entirety of his life in the coastal Belgian city of Ostend. Here he lived in his parents’ home into his late fifties, largely financed by his mother and aunt Mimi’s souvenir shop, which sold papier-mâché carnival masks, skeleton costumes, and Asian curios. His early realist and romantic paintings impressed critics, with Russian Musicg (originally titled Chez Miss) earning him a coveted showing in the 1882 Paris Salon. By the mid 1880s, however, much of his new work was unrecognizable, and his future, once full of promised renown, seemed abruptly foreclosed. A lifelong atheist, Ensor pivoted toward grotesque Christian imagery, not for its theistic content, but because it offered the best symbolic vocabulary for visualizing his growing disgust with the world. Once claiming that he had “anticipated all modern tendencies . . . in every direction”, he now saw, through the mockery of Christ, his own plight to be misunderstood.
If you are writing about a new idea, mechanic, or technology, start with it. Talk about what it is before you start contrasting it with what it isn’t. Start by explaining the new thing and why the new thing is so good.
If the reason the new thing is good is because it’s different from an old bad thing, and you really, really wanna contrast and compare in order to make it super clear how much better the new thing is, I guess you can, but please move that to the end of your article.
It’s difficult to write positively, to write “new first”—we are so trained to tell stories chronologically—but we have the life-changing magic of editing. I need to edit my texts a ton, but that’s how I write: make a mess, then clean it up. This essay you’re reading right now started out just as backwards, just as “bad first”; my first draft of it started with a rant about how the typical Lobsters article is a rough read.
Over the last few years I’ve veered almost completely away from buying brand new tech. What I mean by new in this case is brand new, in-package electronics at the latest model or a model or two prior. I became focused on reducing my own electronic waste and it forced me to examine how much computing “power” I actually needed in my day-to-day life.
It turns out I don’t need much power at all. The newest tech I own and use daily is my Pixel 4a with CalyxOS. I plan on using it until the very last moment. I’m not a programmer or gamer, so my work computer doesn’t actually need that much horsepower. Since I’m already a Linux user, I can easily use an older computer stress-free. I’ve been using a Dell Latitude E6410 from 2011 for almost two years now and it’s been awesome. I’ve even got it hooked up to two Lenovo monitors from 2013 with built-in webcams.
Recently, solderpunk challenged his readers —perhaps in jest— to come out and post about “Orphans of Commodore”. What a load of perkele! Those early Commodore users and their affection towards their grey brick. Ah, but the Amstrad, the lovely Amstrad CPC 464, that is a beautifulmachine. And it became perfectly usable as soon as you upgraded it to use those rock solid diskettes; when I transitioned into a IBM Compatible PC and their, very, floppy drives, I did miss those Amstrads well thought, dependable diskettes that might have been designed in Lahti.Oh, and there were a few things I missed too.
The Fantastic Manual. The Amstrad CPC 464, not only came with a nice keyboard and monitor; but also a great, honest to Ilmarinen, user manual, and, a Basic handbook, all lovely translated to Spanish. The fancy PC?, well you had to acquire it somewhere, which is not exactly easy when you are living on an island. Luckily, I had then access to the university library, which had a few books, most of them written in English, which I could manage at age 18, but would have been a huge chore back when I got my lovely Amstrad.
so i made a chrome extension for mastodon
Maybe they no longer use telnet like they did in the old days, but I’m nevertheless fascinated.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
As noted elsewhere:
Summary: Even supposed ‘growth’ areas at Microsoft are being culled (this growth is faked, it is a lie)
For anyone working with Linux, having a solid understanding of essential commands is crucial for efficiently navigating and managing the system. Knowing how to navigate the file system, view system logs, and interact with system processes can be the key to troubleshooting the problems that you might face.
In this article, we’ll cover 35 essential Linux commands that can help you troubleshoot many problems, including the common issue when a laptop isn’t turning on. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced Linux user, understanding these commands is crucial for maintaining the health and stability of your system.
Our coverage of Linux desktop environments will include everything from “explainer” articles for those new to Linux, as well as articles for more experienced users. We’ll also be conducting a two-part poll to determine which desktop environment our users prefer.
Among the many impressive tools and applications of big data, predictive analytics stands apart as one of the most effective. By utilizing statistical models and machine learning algorithms to analyze data in order to make forecasts about upcoming events, businesses are able to gain valuable insights and make decisions that can give them a competitive edge.
For Linux users, there are many incredible open-source tools available to take full advantage of such advanced analytics. From accessing data straight from databases to creating models and algorithms for forecasting – many of these tools can be accessed using familiar Linux commands and programming languages.
In this article, we’ll explore how you can begin using predictive analytics on Linux, including which tools you should use and what steps you need to take to get the best out of your data. Let’s get into it.
The Framework laptop comes from the new company from the same name, which is trying to disrupt the established laptop market by focusing on customization and reparaibility. Both are noble principles I highly value (which is why I typically go for Thinkpads, at least the older versions of Thinkpads as Lenovo is progressively losing its ethos).
While they do not ship their laptops directly with Linux, Framework has a pro-Linux stance by providing direct documentation on how to install the most prominent distributions on the device. I decided to take their device for a spin with Ubuntu since it was mentioned as having almost perfect compatibility. But first, let’s have a tour at the hardware.
Note that I got the DIY version of the laptop, which comes with parts to assemble it yourself. Namely the RAM memory sticks, the M2 SSD, and the extension modules (you get USB-A, USB-c, ethernet, HDMI and DP ports as plug-and-play extensions).
Huang believes that to truly unleash innovation that betters everyone, we must replace our current patent and copyright culture with one that truly values making products better, cheaper, and more reliably by encouraging competition around production, quality, and cost optimization. He wants to remind people of the fun, inspiring era when makers didn’t have to live in fear of patent trolls, and to encourage them to demand a return of the “permissionless ecosystem” that nurtured so many great ideas.
Huang speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about how we can have it all – from better phones to cooler drones, from handy medical devices to fun Star Wars fan gadgets – if we’re willing to share ideas and trade short-term profit for long-term advancement.
I'm announcing the release of the 6.1.8 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
A new version of the vmware driver is now available. This is mostly a
"flush the master branch" release - necessary because the previous
release tarball no longer builds against current X servers. Please see
the git shortlog below for details on the commits.
Alan Coopersmith (3):
Remove obsolete B16 & B32 tags in struct definitions
gitlab CI: add a basic build test
Build xz tarballs instead of bzip2
Martin Krastev (2):
vmwgfx: Change header inclusion order to avoid xorg headers catching stdbool.h
Garbled XvPutImage output for FOURCC_YV12 when using 3D-accel-texture adaptor
Peter Hutterer (1):
Bump the version number to 13.4.0
Rudi Heitbaum (1):
vmwgfx: fix missing array notation
Thomas Hellstrom (10):
vmwgfx: Fix XVideo memory leaks
vmwgfx: Fix a memory leak
vmwgfx: Use libdrm to obtain the drm device node name v2
saa: Make sure damage destruction happens at the correct location
vmwgfx: Fix invalid memory accesses in CloseScreen
vmwgfx: Don't exceed the device command size limit v3
vmwgfx: Limit the number of cliprects in a drm dirtyfb command v3
vmwgfx: Limit the number of cliprects in a drm present command v3
vmwgfx: Limit the number of cliprects in a drm present_readback command v3
vmwgfx: Unify style in scanout_update and present functions
Ville Skyttä (2):
Spelling fixes.
Man page syntax fix.
git tag: xf86-video-vmware-13.4.0
The main highlight of this update is the AV1 video codec, a free alternative to H.26/HEVC that now supports hardware encoding and decoding through VAAPI/VA, AMF, D3D11, NVCODEC, QSV, and Intel MediaSDK.
Rust programming language is constantly getting more famous for its performance-oriented and memory-safe approach.
You can find plenty of software rewritten in Rust just to make things faster and more robust. As an example relevant to Linux users, System76 chose to build its desktop environment from scratch powered by Rust. So, it is undoubtedly loved by many.
Let me highlight some of the best Rust-powered Linux terminal tools to save you some trouble.
An electronic mailing list offers the ability to efficiently distribute information to many internet users. It is similar in some ways to a traditional mailing list.
Electronic mailing lists are normally automated using dedicated mailing software and a reflector address. Mailing lists are often used as a two-way method of discussion between interested parties, or a one-way dissemination of information where only selected individuals can make posts.
Mailing lists provide a popular method of information exchange for both Linux developers and users. For example, the Linux kernel mailing list gets a high volume of traffic, acting as a focal point for sharing patches, discussing implementation details, reporting bugs, and new features. Many prominent companies participate in these discussions including Intel, IBM, Oracle, and VMware.
– Invidious#Shorts Here’s a quick tip which will help you be more productive in the Linux Terminal!
The mount command in Linux is used to mount a file system or removable storage devices like USB flash drives to a specific point in the directory tree, known as the “mount point”.
This allows files and directories on the file system or storage device to be accessed and managed like any other files on the system. Once you’re done, you can use the “umount” command to detach the mounted filesystem.
In this article, you will learn how to mount and unmount various file systems using the “mount” and “umount” commands in Linux (with practical examples).
MyPaint is a free and open-source digital painting software for Linux, specifically, and can be easily installed on the Fedora desktop. It offers a wide range of features and benefits compared to its competitors, making it an excellent choice for digital artists and illustrators. Some of the key benefits of MyPaint include its lightweight design, which allows for fast and responsive performance, and its powerful brush engine, which allows for a high degree of artistic control and precision. Additionally, MyPaint offers a wide range of customization options, including support for multiple layers and various file formats, making it a versatile and flexible tool for digital artists.
Python 3.11 is the latest stable version at the time of writing of tutorial. Which comes with multiple new features and security upgrades. This version comes with improved error messages for common mistakes in type hints. A new syntax for variable annotations, to make it more clear when a variable is intended to be used for type hints versus other purposes. Improved the support for type checking and type inference in the standard library and third-party libraries.
In this tutorial, we will help you to install Python 3.11 on Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint operating systems using PPA as well as compiling it from the source code. This tutorial will also work on other Debian-based Linux systems.
Are you tired of struggling to make your scripts and files executable on Linux? Look no further! In this post, we will dive deep into the “chmod +x” command and uncover its true power. From understanding the basic syntax to advanced usage examples, you’ll learn everything you need to know to easily make your files executable. Say goodbye to the frustration of file permissions and hello to streamlined and efficient scripting. Don’t miss out on this essential guide for any Linux user!
Learn how to containerize an application, create a deployment, and expose the service using HTTP.
Stardeus was one of the most promising Early Access releases on 2022, giving you pretty much RimWorld in space and the first major update is out now. Clearly, the developer has been rather busy.
Accessory brand JSAUX recently did a poll to see what colours people might like for a Steam Deck backplate and the winners are in.
A fresh Steam Beta is out now for Steam Deck and Desktop Steam, with a bigger focus on Steam Input improvements and some Big Picture Mode fixes too.
Want to play the new Steam release of Ghost Recon Breakpoint on Steam Deck? Or a Linux desktop? It doesn’t run out of the box but here’s how to fix it.
dbrand have today revealed their latest way of poking fun at other companies, with their special edition SwitchDeck skin for the Steam Deck. This isn’t the first time they’ve prodded the beast, like with theKillswitch case for Steam Deck that they had to remake part of due to problems with magnets.
It’s been close to a year since the Steam Deck launched, so here’s where things currently stand and my thoughts on it.
EA recently sent Origin to the graveyard and replaced it with the EA App, which caused numerous problems on Linux desktop and Steam Deck but it looks like the biggest problems are over on that.
Another good chance for you to build up your Steam collection, with Humble Bundle offering two new bundles full of games. Here’s what to expect from them. To help you out and stop you needing to click around, I’ll note the expected compatibility across Linux desktop and Steam Deck, along with Native Linux support or a ProtonDB rating (which goes Platinum – Gold – Silver – Bronze – Broken).
In a move that could cause issues for Linux desktop and Steam Deck gamers, Rocket League is going to introduce new anti-cheat measures. Something people argued with me on Twitter some time ago that wouldn’t happen — I was right again.
Farlanders is a turn-based city-builder from Andriy Bychkovskyi and publisher Crytivo that has you colonize and attempt to terraform the red planet. It’s available now with Native Linux support, but no Steam Deck rating as of yet.
It’s not going to win any awards on style but some of you may want to know that the classic free and open source RPG FreedroidRPG is now on Steam. A name some older readers might not have seen for a while…
Fedora Kinoite is an official Fedora KDE Plasma Spin for containerised applications and container-based software development. It is an immutable Linux distribution where the base packages never change and are identical for all installations. Due to this, it’s easier to use it as a development box for complex projects and testing because your codebase runs on identical packages.
With the success of Kinoite, the KDE team takes the concept further to provide an unofficial Fedora Kinoite Nightly version. This distribution offers Fedora stable packages with nightly versions of KDE Plasma, KDE framework and KDE applications!
When we switched our shell from Bash to Zsh we were not able to login and came back to the sddm login screen.
It was never the fault of the packages nor the config of Zsh but the way these desktops are started.
Gentoo and Arch Linux are two of the most popular open-source operating systems available today. Both distributions offer a wide range of features, flexibility, and customization options that make them ideal for a variety of users. Gentoo is known for its performance-oriented approach, offering advanced package management tools and an extensive software repository. Arch Linux is more user-friendly, with easy installation and configuration procedures as well as reliable updates. Both distributions have their own unique advantages, but which one reigns supreme in the great debate between Gentoo vs arch linux remains to be seen!
We are sorry that Tails 5.8 affected many of you so badly.
Thanks to your patience and feedback, we were able to solve most of these new issues.
The devs managed to solve most of the issues reported by users from the Tails 5.8 release, including support for some graphics cards, such as Intel UHD 750, by upgrading the kernel to Linux 6.0.12. These graphics issues occurred due to Tails 5.8 switching to Wayland by default.
Also fixed in Tails 5.9 is launching of AppImage binaries that use the Qt toolkit, such as Bitcoin-Qt and Feather, clipboard encryption and decryption in the Kleopatra OpenPGP client, as well as the display of the applications menu with some GTK3 apps installed using the Additional Software feature.
As you know, Debian projects and sponsor provides so-called “porterbox”, but it does not cover all architectures.
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
The automotive industry is facing one of its biggest revolutions since the advent of automation. In this post, we will go through the Industry 4.0 aspects and how OEMs can turn these challenges into opportunities.
To put it simply, the first Industrial Revolution relied on steam power, the second one on electricity and the third one on computers. What about the fourth Industrial Revolution everyone is talking about? I would describe it as a data-driven revolution.
[...]
In order to build a vehicle today, more than 3,000 parts need to be integrated per vehicle! These parts come from hundreds of suppliers around the world that need to work hand in hand with the OEM.
From designing the part, to sourcing it, producing it and delivering it, the entire supply chain needs to behave like clockwork. On top of that, there are environmental and social commitments that have to be considered, mainly related to worker well-being, for example.
PicoScopes are display-less PC scopes from UK-based Pico Technology.
They have real scope performance (and real scope prices to go with that, although you can still get a 10MHz 2204A for ~£100), and are not be confused with the low-performance PC-based scopes that some companies offer.
The PC in question has Linux Mint 20, upgraded to 20.1.
Pico Tech has been working on a Linux version of its pre-release PicoScope 7 software (PicoScope 6 is the current full release version).
ThingPulse launched today the ePulse Feather which implements the ESP32-WROVER-E-N8R8 module enabled with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2. The compact board includes 8MB Flash, 8MB PSRAM, up to 20x GPIOs, 1x LiPo charger and it consumes about 12-27uA in deep sleep mode.
The Arduino Cloud is Arduino’s integrated platform to develop, deploy, monitor and control IoT devices with minimal effort. It enables makers, IoT enthusiasts and professionals to build easily connected projects based on a wide range of hardware including not only Arduino boards, but also ESP32 and ESP8266 boards. Arduino is committed to making all the Arduino Cloud features available to all the supported hardware and as a result of this effort, ESP32 family of chipsets now support over-the-air (OTA) updates.
[...]
One of the facts that have contributed to this popularity is the ability to use the Arduino IDE to code and program the devices. You can find tons of resources describing how to get started. There are thousands of projects that will inspire you and help you create and develop your own ideas. You can reuse the code and sketches even if they have been originally developed for other ESP32 or Arduino boards. It is so easy to get started!
BharOS, the homegrown operating system that was successfully tested by Union ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw and Dharmendra Pradhan on January 24, is based on a Linux kernel, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras director V Kamakoti told Moneycontrol.
The Linux kernel is the main component of the open-source Linux operating system developed by Finnish software engineer Linus Tovalds. Android, too, is a derivative of the Linux kernel, Kamakoti said.
This is important because BharOS is being promoted by the Indian government as an indigenous mobile operating system. On January 24, a Press Information Bureau release described BharOS as a “Made in India operating system”, which was an important step towards fulfilling the PM’s vision of “strong, indigenous and self-reliant digital infrastructure in India”.
Before the millennium, Netscape was THE web browser to use. We’d laugh at Internet Explorer.
At 8am on January 22, 1998, Netscape put out a press release announcing that the source code to the web browser would be released to the public at the end of March.
Jamie Zawinski, one of the founders of Netscape (and of a whole bunch of neat stuff, often still used today) discusses how Mozilla came to be.
I kept my feelings to myself. Obviously, the guy who asked me to join the team (one of the senior directors in that cluster) had other plans. Maybe it was a test to see how I would react? I was new to the team and had to build credibility before I could steer any change. Plus, as I often say: “Understand before trying to change.” For all I knew, the code and people are inseparable. You cannot fix cultural issues with technical solutions.
[...]
Initially it was hard to defend spending 10% of the team bandwidth on tech debt, but over time the payback was huge: [...]
I love legends. The life of Pythagoras is riddled with them: from the discoverie of consonant intervals in music while walking past a forge to how give death to his disciple Hippasus throwing him overboard a ship after this one proved the existence of irrational numbers. My favorite is the one that heads this post: it is said that Pythagoras could hear the sound of the spheres, the harmony of the universe. No more no less.
Traditionally, data scientists have built models based on data. This article details how to do the exact opposite i.e. generate data based on a model. This article is second in the series of articles on building data from model.
We just bought the premium domain OnlineTools.com and launched Online Tools. Online Tools offers thousands of utilities for getting things done quickly and is used by millions of people every month.
In case you’re wondering, the above simply prints out the vector.
Further, you might have looked at what C++20 (and especially C++23) offers in this area, but you are unfortunately stuck on C++17 or even C++14 and expect to be for quite a while.
Finally, you might have tried some of the existing libraries but found that they didn’t work very well with the Qt containers.
This was exactly my situation when I decided to write a few algorithm wrappers. Actually, I was using some other code already but it was GPL, and I wanted to offer something for Qt Widgets and More in an episode on algorithms.
In the rest of this blog post, I’ll switch between Qt and non-code Qt. KDAlgorithms works just as well with both container libraries. If you’re not familiar with Qt, just mentally replace QVector with std::vector, qDebug() with cout, and you will be just fine.
In our last dispatch we looked at a serial algorithm to trace ephemerons. However, production garbage collectors are parallel: during collection, they trace the object graph using multiple worker threads. Our problem is to extend the ephemeron-tracing algorithm with support for multiple tracing threads, without introducing stalls or serial bottlenecks.
C++ is TIOBE’s programming language of the year 2022. It has won this title because C++ gained most popularity (+4.62%) in 2022. Runners up are C (+3.82%) and Python (+2.78%). Interestingly, C++ surpassed Java to become the number 3 of the TIOBE index in November 2022. The reason for C++’s popularity is its excellent performance while being a high level object-oriented language. Because of this, it is possible to develop fast and vast software systems (over millions of lines of code) in C++ without necessarily ending up in a maintenance nightmare.
One of the game-changing features of ggplot2 was the ease with which one can explore the dimensions of the data using small multiples. There is a small trick that I was to share today – put all the data in background of every panel. This can considerably improve comparability of the data across the dimension which splits the dataset into the subsets for the small multiples. Better to show right away what I mean and then explain in details.
This is… unfortunately true. I find I need to write HTML email when sending messages to suppliers, landlords, etc. More and more people don’t understand direct URLs or image attachments, or are confused when their HTML email gets converted to plaintext when I reply. I could make a stand, or I could get our shower fixed.
Natalie Batalha was itching for data from the James Webb Space Telescope. It was a few months after the telescope had reached its final orbit, and her group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, had been granted time to observe a handful of exoplanets—planets that orbit around stars other than our sun.
Among the targets was WASP-39b, a scorching world that orbits a star some 700 light-years from Earth. The planet was discovered years ago. But in mid-July, when Batalha and her team got their hands on the first JWST observations of the distant world, they saw a clear signature of a gas that is common on Earth but had never been spotted before in the atmosphere of an exoplanet: carbon dioxide. On Earth, carbon dioxide is a key indicator of plant and animal life. WASP-39b, which takes just four Earth days to orbit its star, is too hot to be considered habitable. But the discovery could well herald more exciting detections—from more temperate worlds—in the future. And it came just a few days into the lifetime of JWST. “That was a very exciting moment,” says Batalha, whose group had gathered to glimpse the data for the first time. “The minute we looked, the carbon dioxide feature was just beautifully drawn out.”
Had the student suddenly improved his writing this much over a short time? Or, was the paper she was looking at written by a computer program?
Just months ago, the question wouldn’t have occurred to the veteran English instructor. But new artificial intelligence apps have grown in sophistication to the point that they can generate everything from essays and analyses to poems and songs at the click of a button.
Today after 23 years, I have a relatively high level leadership position but it wasn’t always like this. As an introvert in a world that’s optimized for extroverts I had a long and painful learning curve.
Like most people I’ve failed more interviews than I made. Sometimes I walked out, most of the time, I was rejected. In this post, I will go through my top 3 favorite interview lessons hoping to shorten the learning curve for some of you who may be in the job market.
I absolutely love the computers of the old Soviet Union.
Sure, I never had one: I never lived in the Soviet Union… and I don’t speak a single drop of Russian.
Just the same, there’s something fascinating and wild about the computer industry of that particular place and time.
The Soviet-styled, Sci-Fi inspired cases. The (often) knock-off copies of hardware and (also often) stolen ROMs and software. The history, technology, and aesthetics are downright whimsical.
Hey Karl here. The timing couldn’t have been more opportune when I was asked to review the TerraMaster F4-423 4-bay NAS. Let me explain why.
I run Unraid as my OS of choice for my home lab. I have found it easy to maintain and hard to break. My old rig had a 3900X with 3 cores, 6 threads dedicated to docker containers, and the remaining cores running VM’s. It has been a fun and learning experience.
I have run it with several different VM configurations over the past few years. The majority of the time I ran 2 VM’s. One personal and one work and I would RDP over to the work VM. If I wanted to game I had a third gaming VM and allocated all resources to it. It’s not super convenient and as convoluted as it sounds. But recently I moved back to my company-provided laptop and was liking the idea of running bare metal again.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—and likely again and again and again. In the age of the pandemic, everything old is new again when it comes to antivaccine misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Indeed, the new COVID-19 conspiracy theories only differ from old antivaccine conspiracy theories in certain details specific to the coronavirus causing the pandemic and the vaccines used to prevent COVID-19; for example, antivaxxers might have built up elaborate “mechanisms” and conspiracy theories based on the rare occurrence of myocarditis after the vaccination, but the message is still that vaccines are killing young people and causing “depopulation,” just as the antivax message about Gardasil was that it was killing girls and young women back in the day. So I’m rather embarrassed to say that it came as a bit of a surprise to me that the latest viral trend seems to be videos of people claiming that COVID-19 vaccines caused them to develop chronic spasms and seizures.
A number of tests used by patients to make major health care decisions have once again escaped regulation by the Food and Drug Administration, following intensive lobbying on behalf of test-makers, professional associations and academic medical centers.
For years, experts have warned about the dangers of so-called laboratory-developed tests — including certain cancer screenings and diagnostic tests for everything from Lyme disease to autism — reaching patients without FDA oversight.
Scientists in Cuba believe that the breakthroughs they have made in the health care and technology sectors should be used to save and improve lives beyond the country’s borders. This is why the island nation has developed important scientific and medical partnerships with organizations and governments across the globe, including with those in Mexico, Palestine, Angola, Colombia, Iran, and Brazil. However, such collaborations are difficult due to the blockade imposed on Cuba by the United States, which has now been in place for the last six decades.
In a conference, “Building Our Future,” held in Havana in November 2022, which brought together youth from Cuba and the United States, scientists at the Cuban Center of Molecular Immunology (CIM) stated during a presentation that the blockade hurts the people of the United States, too. By lifting the sanctions against Cuba, the scientists argued, the people of the United States could have access to life-saving treatments being developed in Cuba, especially against diseases such as diabetes, which ravage working-class communities each year.
We’re all, with few exceptions, addicted to our phones and the apps on them as well, which is its own kind of emergency. If you can imagine not having the option of unlocking it for a peek at what’s going on in the online world every time you’re bored or want a distraction from something dull, painful, and/or seemingly unbearable, then you might realize how painful withdrawal is.
My point is, let’s take a moment of silence and empathy for those still addicted to nicotine before briefly pivoting over to some of our collective addictions.
As many people have pointed out over the past week, third-party clients helped make Twitter the platform it is today, innovating parts of Twitter we take for granted and, in the early days, helping form the company’s very identity. They’ve also acted as a safe haven from unwanted changes, helping to keep people tweeting when they were ready to give up on the platform.
Modern software development is incredibly complex. Software nowadays is always comprised of a combination of components. These components are typically modules and libraries called by other code or even standalone programs that are used in conjunction with other programs.
Until a few years ago, the 80/20 rule was valid: in any significant piece of software, 80% of the content should not be yours. It makes no economic sense to try to develop more than 20% of any software because it’s likely someone has already built components with the necessary functionality. Instead, focus on developing what gives you a competitive advantage. In recent years, this balance might have even shifted to 90/10.
That’s where the software bill of materials (SBOM) comes in. It’s a formal record containing details and supply chain relationships of all the components used in building software. These components can be open source or proprietary, freely available or paid-for, widely available or access-restricted. The information present in an SBOM can be used in a multitude of ways, helping answer various contractual, legal, or technical queries about the software.
Early efforts for providing SBOMs were mostly spearheaded by the desire for legal compliance. Every software component is under a specific license, which might impose some obligations on its use. In order to be legally compliant, one must satisfy all the obligations of all the licenses. This is straightforward, but not easily accomplished. An obvious first step is to have a record of all components and all licenses, which is exactly what an SBOM is.
SOF 2.4.1 is the first release using Zephyr RTOS with native Zephyr device drivers (on some Intel platforms) and Windows IPC. This should be the last “opt-in” intermediary release as code is transitioned to support Zephyr RTOS, topology2, Module API, and IPC abstraction (IPC3/4) support.
Readers will have noticed that two maintenance releases of pkgconf were cut over the weekend, 1.9.4 and 1.8.1 respectively, to address CVE-2023-24056, a pkg-config specific variation of the now-classic “billion laughs attack”. While fixing software defects is important, a lot went wrong with how this CVE was reported and the motivations behind its disclosure, and for my own catharsis, I want to talk about this.
There is much talk about supply chain security and reviewing your suppliers for cyber security. But how much information do they intentionally and unintentionally leak about your organisation online?
We see this particularly in the industrial controls sector as its cyber security maturity is perhaps a few years behind the wider cyber market.
Fortunately, this is something that you can audit yourselves, without needing to involve the supplier. It can make for useful negotiation points during procurement exercises, particularly if you engage your purchasing teams in the process.
Why make the hackers life easy?
This is a curious book. It starts out as a look at the security of everyday objects, but quickly becomes a series of after-dinner anecdotes about various security related issues. That’s not a bad thing, as such, but a little different from what I was expecting.
The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is an interesting and important proposal for a European law that aims to drive the safety and integrity of software of all kinds by extending the “CE” self-attestation mark to software. And it may harm Open Source. The proposal includes a requirement for self-certification by suppliers of software to attest conformity with the requirements of the CRA including security, privacy and the absence of Critical Vulnerability Events (CVEs).
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The Open Source Initiative assumes the Act is not intended to negatively impact the communities that make Open Source software or burden the non-profit foundations that support them.
I nearly fell for a run of the mill phish recently. Just goes to show that they can get anyone.
Just to give you some context before we get into this, I’m a senior leader at Bank of America, where I work in the information security team.
The team I run is in the identity space and one of the things we’re interested in is phishing attacks. So although I’m no expert, I do like to think of myself as a person who knows a thing or two about phishing attacks.
Your international money transfers might not be as discreet as you think. Senator Ron Wyden and The Wall Street Journal have learned that US law enforcement can access details of money transfers without a warrant through an obscure surveillance program the Arizona attorney general’s office created in 2014. A database stored at a nonprofit, the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC), provides full names and amounts for larger transfers (above $500) sent between the US, Mexico and 22 other regions through services like Western Union, MoneyGram and Viamericas. The program covers data for numerous Caribbean and Latin American countries in addition to Canada, China, France, Malaysia, Spain, Thailand, Ukraine and the US Virgin Islands. Some domestic transfers also enter the data set.
The program exists to help agencies collect evidence of fraud and money laundering, as transfer services aren’t required to know customers like banks. This has led to busts for drug cartels and other criminals, TRAC director Rich Leber explained to The Journal. The $500 threshold exists to prevent the system from collecting most data for immigrants remitting money to family in their home countries. Money transfer apps like Apple Cash, Cash App, PayPal, Venmo and Zelle haven’t provided data to TRAC, Wyden says.
Instead, they make pearls like ”$200 travel mugs with location-sharing capabilities and irreplaceable batteries”. And that’s just one example from the iFixit list of CES 2023 worst products.
Gregg Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht are best known as the election deniers behind True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit responsible for amplifying conspiracies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
But soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, they shifted some of their focus to the war effort, jumping into the fray with an inspiring idea — to bring a mobile hospital to the region to care for victims of the conflict.
Washington believes Kiev is expending significant resources in the battle for Bakhmut.
The Pentagon’s Massive Intelligence Failure on China.
Three more countries have announced reviews of honorary consuls after an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and ProPublica revealed widespread wrongdoing by members of the little-known system of volunteer diplomats.
Jordan, Latvia and Israel have either terminated the status of honorary consuls operating within their borders or ordered reviews of those currently serving.
“Attacking the Capitol was a means to an end,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Louis Manzo told jurors during closing arguments Wednesday. He said the group took advantage of the riot and seized the opportunity to fulfill their goal of preventing Congress from counting the electoral votes and confirming Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election.
“January 6 was just a battle. The full conspiracy was to stop the transfer of power,” Manzo said.
After telling Rex Patrick his PM’s Diary FOI request would be processed for $1,344, and after Rex paid the deposit, the Prime Minister’s Office has backflipped and is now refusing to process the request for 29 pages on the grounds that doing so “would substantially and unreasonable interfere with the performance of the [Prime] Minister’s functions”. What’s the scam?
A fee of $1,344 to process a Freedom of Information request for PM Anthony Albanese’s diary is “outrageous” says Rex Patrick.
[...]
Ministerial diaries should be released, albeit it is expected that on rare occasions some redactions might be necessary. Not only is the making of ministerial diaries public ‘of interest to the public’, more importantly it’s ‘in the public interest’.
Ministers work for you. Everything they do, they do for public purpose. It’s appropriate that members of the public can look at ministers’ diary to see what they are (or aren’t) doing, who they are (or aren’t) meeting with, how much time they are spending on the job and how much time they spend at their office versus out in the field versus overseas.
The environmental activist groups filed the petition under Administrative Procedure Act 5 U.S.C. § 702 and Deepwater Port Act 33 U.S.C. § 1516. Both statutes provide that an aggrieved party may seek judicial review in the US Court of Appeals of an agency’s decision within 60 days of the decision. Specifically, the environmental activist groups sought judicial review of the MARAD’s decision to license the Sea Port Oil Terminal for transportation of domestically produced crude oil to the global market. The environmental activist groups alleged that MARAD “failed to adequately assess the devastating oil-spill risk and species harms from [the terminal’s] construction and operation.”
In last year’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Congress included about $20 billion earmarked for natural climate solutions. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is responsible for deciding how those funds should be allocated to meet the climate goals outlined in the text of the IRA, which include projects that will “reduce, capture, avoid, or sequester carbon dioxide” in American forests and farms.
Eagle-eyed CCL volunteer Matthew Mayers noticed that USDA was requesting public input regarding how to achieve those goals in practice, and CCL staff jumped on the opportunity to provide comments on this issue related to our healthy forests policy agenda.
It’s hard to argue. In a decade of covering crypto, I’ve seen no end of scams and disasters—most notably the catastrophic Mt. Gox hack of 2014 and the casino-rama frenzy of the 2017 ICO era—but nothing this bad. The FTX collapse not only blew up tens of billions of dollars in value but deeply damaged trust in an industry that only two weeks ago seemed poised to enter the mainstream of American finance.
The use of museum specimens allowed us to directly investigate genetic patterns in the endangered Saimaa ringed seal population through more than a 100 years. Although erosion of the initial genetic diversity has continued throughout the isolation, we observed 20th-century loss of haplotypes and relatively drastic fluctuations in haplotype frequencies, demonstrating a genetic effect of the human-induced population collapse. Combining newly generated and already published data from multiple ringed seal populations additionally allowed us to investigate broad phylogeographic patterns in ringed seals. In apparent contrast with the traditionally held view of the Baltic origin of the population, the Saimaa ringed seal mtDNA variation shows enigmatic affinities to North American ringed seals. These results add to the growing body of evidence which calls for a re-evaluation of the deep history of the Saimaa ringed seal population. Future data on still-unsampled populations, for example, in the Arctic Ocean, as well as genomic data and ancient DNA could provide keys to understanding the origin and demographic history of the Saimaa ringed seal. Lake Saimaa may harbor a ringed seal population that is even more unique than previously thought, which calls to strengthen the conservation efforts of this population further.
In other words, the point of natural selection is to act as a preservative around important functions of the organism…
The recent Twitter API access issues are an illustrative case study in how people discuss issues online. One camp is horrified that longstanding third-party applications are being denied access. The other group says they’re entirely in their right to do so.
It is now official, you can now find me on Mastodon. Now that the future of Twitter continues to be uncertain, I figured that I would give Mastodon a go and so far the experience has been mostly positive. My only real issue is finding people to follow but that should get easier as my server federates with others.
Music streaming service Spotify announced Monday that it is slashing hundreds of jobs in the latest round of layoffs in the tech sector.
Spotify said it would cut 6 percent of its staff, or about 600 workers, based on its last earnings report.
Nothing in the 49-page report will surprise readers of this newsletter, but I want to highlight a big area where I wish we’d stop talking about the problem and actually do something about it. The report notes the two biggest governance gaps in the IoT: privacy practices and the ethical use of the technology, followed by cybersecurity. I’m optimistic we’re well on our way to closing the governance gap when it comes to cybersecurity, but we’re completely failing users when it comes to privacy, and that will hobble the IoT.
Eighty-two percent of respondents indicated they lacked confidence in the protection of privacy and the responsible use of data generated from connected devices. That means more than four out of every five people aren’t ready to trust connected devices or the ethics of those producing or deploying them.
A new Forbes investigation has revealed that TikTok’s algorithm isn’t nearly as democratic as the app and its parent company, ByteDance, have been happy to let users believe.
Per the report, TikTok employees have access to a secret “heating” feature, which is essentially a big red button for virality. Hit that button, and content gets boosted — unbeknownst to the TikTok users who might be consuming the “heated” videos.
Cambridge, Mass.—Over the past several weeks, Harvard University has been at the center of a national debate on bias, censorship, and academic freedom. As first reported in these pages, Dean Douglas Elmendorf of the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) blocked longtime director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) Kenneth Roth from a fellowship at the Carr Center for Human Rights. Why? Alleged “anti-Israel bias.” The Kennedy School’s rejection was a part of broader backlash against HRW’s work documenting Israel’s abuses of Palestinian rights, invoking the all-too-familiar rhetoric used against any who dare criticize the Israeli government. For an institution supposedly committed to veritas—a motto displayed prominently across the Harvard campus—it seems the truth of Israeli apartheid is not welcome. While HKS claims to value difficult conversations and openly opines about topical issues such as the war in Ukraine, the unwillingness to engage the reality of Israeli apartheid reveals intellectual strong-arming against Palestinian narratives.1
Maurizi begins her masterful book Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies by recounting these episodes, capturing the immense excitement and potential that accompanied WikiLeaks as it published what no one else dared to. At a time when many were skeptical of corporate media’s ability to challenge entrenched power, Wikileaks’ defiance of powerful corporate and state actors was inspiring — especially coming as it did at a time when the democratizing and liberatory potential of the internet dominated the conversation, rather than its deleterious impact on democracy and the human psyche as it does today.
Maurizi has very likely produced the definitive version of the WikiLeaks story, and it’s a page-turner to boot. But the book is not merely a history of WikiLeaks’ war on secret power and secret power’s subsequent war on WikiLeaks. Maurizi was the media partner for nearly every WikiLeaks disclosure. (She was also the Italian partner for the Snowden disclosures). Through intertwining her own experiences as a journalist with the larger history of WikiLeaks, Maurizi debunks misinformation about WikiLeaks.
Under the new disciplinary procedures, students will be notified of an infraction in three progressive steps. The first violation results in sending the violating student a text message reminding them to follow the appropriate dress code. A second violation results in the university contacting the student’s family about the offending behavior. The consequence of a third violation is a meeting with the disciplinary committee. A student is granted clemency when they admit wrongdoing. Alternatively, when the student does not admit fault, they are punished according to the law.
Armed with those principles, here are some ideas of where you can shop next. This is not a comprehensive list but rather resources for customers seeking Amazon alternatives.
Since seizing power in 2021, the ultra-conservative rulers have restricted women’s lives, closing most secondary schools to girls
Women have been banned from going to university, stopped from entering parks and gyms and must observe strict dress codes
About half the population face acute hunger and 97% are in poverty but in December the Taliban also banned female aid workers from doing their jobs
Malibu Media, the adult entertainment company that previously demanded hefty settlements from thousands of pirates, now finds itself in rough waters. A federal court in Texas has just dismissed one of its last remaining piracy lawsuits after Malibu failed to resolve a corporate suspension due to tax issues. The end of an era?
Last month, the U.S. seized dozens of domains for illegally streaming World Cup 2022 matches. The tournament began in November, but according to a Special Agent’s affidavit, Homeland Security received information on sites illegally streaming World Cup matches in September. HSI affidavits filed in support of the December 2022 domain seizures reveal how that process played out.
Popular live TV streaming portal USTVGO appears to have shut down its service. A brief message on the site says “Sorry, we are closed,” leaving millions of users with plenty of unanswered questions. While the reason for the sudden decision is unknown, rightsholders and anti-piracy outfits already had USTVGO on their radar.
Back in October last year, a Walled Culture post noted that generative AI programs were likely to have a massive impact on both copyright and creation. When programs can produce free texts, images and sounds that are “good enough” for most everyday purposes, copyright becomes largely irrelevant. Creativity is impacted too, but not just in the obvious, possibly negative way. The free availability of an endless supply of AI generated works will make truly original, human creations more valuable. But of course, many artists don’t see those positives. Obsessed as they are with ownership and its infringements, they have responded to generative AI in the only way they know: by bringing a lawsuit.
[...]
This admits that generative AI images may not even look like the input data, but still tries to claim that they represent some kind of infringement because they are “derived” from the training images, even though they do not copy them, as Guadamuz notes, they analyse them. By the logic of this lawsuit, artists who look at other works, and dare to think about how they are put together, are also infringing by virtue of the “input” those creations provide for other, non-copying works.
What’s sad about this lawsuit is that it represents a further instance of copyright-obsessed creators reflexively fighting against exciting new developments in technology. It comes from a misplaced sense of ownership of intangible creative elements that belong to the artistic commons, and thus to everyone. It’s yet another result of copyright’s malign influence on creativity and creators.
In which I discuss miniseries as an art form in comparison with feature films and television shows; and then digress into contrasting films and television in general.
Written on a MacBook Pro in Neovim while listening to the Bugsnax Original Soundtrack (2021) by Seth Parker.
I remember being kinda frustrated in school, in the first few grades of school, over how they couldn’t give a rule for when to break paragraphs. For sentences, the capital letter at the start, period at the end was easy enough (although what a sentence is isn’t entirely clear even to linguists xbar mp s np vp foo bar frotz), but for paragraphs they couldn’t say anything. It was more a “know it when I see it”; great, what does that help us?
Now that I know a li’l bit more, I think one reason for why they couldn’t is because sentence division is on the syntax layer while paragraph division is on the semantic layer. My guideline is that a paragraph should start and end “being about the same thing”, unlike a DJ segueing from talking about one song to another. Introduce a new concept? New paragraph.
Links are selected randomly from a list of known host from the lupa crawler[1]. The links are not manually curated and I’m not responsible of the content of these capsules. If some offensive capsules are listed here automatically, please alert me so I can manually remove them.
Kev’s story is a good reminder that even the careful can get phished. It also reminded me of a pretty good phishing attempt that came my way several months ago and I think the biggest reason I didn’t fall for it was dumb luck.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
At the core of every Linux system is the kernel. The kernel is what sets apart Linux from other operating systems. It is the central component of the operating system and acts as a bridge between the user-level applications and the underlying hardware components.
In conclusion, Linux can be a viable option for businesses that want to take advantage of its cost savings, customization options, security features, and reliability. However, it is important to carefully consider the compatibility and support issues that may arise, as well as the limited user base, when deciding whether Linux is the right choice for your organization. It may be necessary to weigh the benefits and disadvantages of Linux against those of proprietary operating systems in order to determine the best fit for your business. Ultimately, the decision to use Linux in your business will depend on your specific needs and goals.
Recovering data from a broken SSD, configuring the lights on a new keyboard, trying stock Android on a Pixel 7, easily blocking ads with DNS, playing with 3D models of ancient museum pieces, and more.
It appears that many Big Tech companies are over 90% Democrat. With Netflix being 99.6% Democrat. How is that possible? Let’s spend a few moments thinking about what it would take to make that happen… and how actively those companies would need to discriminate against people based on perceived politics.
GStreamer 1.22 open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework is out today as a major release that brings numerous improvements, new features, and many other changes to provide you with a top-notch multimedia experience.
GStreamer 1.22 includes AV1 video codec support improvements by adding hardware encoding and decoding via VA-API/VA, AMF, D3D11, NVCODEC, QSV, and Intel MediaSDK, new AV1 RTP payloader and depayloader elements, new encoder settings in the AOM reference encoder-based av1enc element, as well as AV1 parser improvements.
The GStreamer team is excited to announce a new major feature release of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!
As always, this release is again packed with new features, bug fixes and many other improvements.
The 1.22 release series adds new features on top of the previous 1.20 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series of the GStreamer multimedia framework.
There are far ranges of Linux bioinformatics tools available and widely used in this field for a long while. Bioinformatics has been characterized in many ways; however, it is frequently defined as a combination of mathematics, computation, and statistics to analyze biological information. The main goal of the bioinformatics tool is to develop an efficient algorithm so that sequence similarities can be measured accordingly.
This article provides a step-by-step guide on upgrading, potential risks and considerations before converting a Debian stable installation to a testing version.
Learn how to effectively write tests for Kubernetes applications in Java using Fabric8 Kubernetes Mock Server and Fabric8 Kubernetes JUnit Jupiter extensions.
Got a .gz file? It is a gzip-compressed archive file. Gzip reduces the file size better than the simple zip archive.
Now, to unzip a file, you have the unzip command in Linux. But you cannot use it on the gzip files.
MongoDB offers high-performance data storage when deployed over multiple servers. So, we need to identify the version of MongoDB running in the system when analyzing the reported problems. The version numbers which follow a semantic numbering scheme enable us in recognizing significant and minor changes. We can run the latest bug-free version by just updating the mongodb version which should be known. We have discussed some methods below which can be used to determine what version of MongoDB we are currently utilizing. Some of these techniques check the server version of the MongoDB, whereas others check the version of the Mongo shell.
APT is a command line tool on Ubuntu. It is one of the most used and supremely powerful command-line tools on Ubuntu. APT can be used to install new software packages, upgrade packages that are already installed on your system, or even upgrade. This command line tool is by far one of the first that all novices learn in Linux. APT can be subdivided into APT-GET, APT-CACHE, and APT-CONFIG. In this tutorial, we will be exploring the various ways we can use APT-GET.
We already know how to create texts and we know how to place them on a blank canvas. But there are times when we really need to make the texts look unique. Perhaps it is a brand name or something you would like to add to your website. Either way, you will be looking at how to fancy things up. In this tutorial, we will be learning how to fancy up texts.
In Linux, the exit command is used to terminate the shell (the current login session) in which it is run. Also, similar to a C program, the exit command is used in shell scripts to terminate the script. Moreover, it returns a value to the script’s parent process.
Logging is a normal operation that the Linux operating system performs constantly to maintain different types of messages in various log files.
If you’re maintaining a Linux server, it’s most likely that you might have come across an issue of running out of disk space. In such a situation, emptying huge log files mainly resolve the problem.
Using the rm command to directly delete log files is what you should avoid as it can leave you in a messed up situation. In this article, we’ll see various methods to clean up log files in Linux without deleting the actual file entirely.
PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is a popular open-source programming language perfect for web development. Integrating it into your Fedora Linux system is a breeze and offers many perks.
Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is a powerful and popular code editor developed by Microsoft. It is designed to be a lightweight yet versatile tool that can be used for various programming languages and tasks. One of the benefits of using VSCode is that it can be easily incorporated into Linux Mint.
There are several ways to open Apple’s Heic image file on Linux Mint, either by installing the additional packages or converting them to JPG. Here we discuss both of them.
Apple devices store images in HEIF (HEIC), a file format for High-Efficiency Image Format. Such file format images use HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding ) encoding. It is designed to be more efficient, consumes less space, and supports a wide range of color information than traditional image formats like JPEG. Further, it can also save images with transparent backgrounds. HEIF is also supported on IOS 12 and macOS.
Follow the steps to install Opera Browser on Linux Mint 21 using the command terminal and APT repository to have regular updates easily.
Opera is a popular browser known for its speed and security features. It was first released in 1996 by Opera Software. We can install Opera on various platforms, such as Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. The most notable feature of Opera is its built-VPN an ad blocker. Apart from the regular Desktop version, the company also offers a gaming edition of their Opera browser.
To reduce the web page’s size and speed up browsing on a slow connection, it comes with a feature called “Opera Turbo.” Apart from all this, the browser also offers a currency converter, integrated messengers, a Twitter sidebar, a Battery saver, a Crypto wallet, and more…
The Logical Volume Manager commands in Linux are one of the handiest tools I’ve used for adding new disk or expanding existing volumes. It’s easy to do this on the fly without requiring downtime or rebooting, though I always recommend taking a full backup of all data on any existing volumes first, as well as taking a snapshot of the virtual machines involved.
Apache’s mod_proxy module allows you to forward requests to another server using the ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse directives. However, in some cases, you may want to exclude certain URLs from being proxied. In this tutorial, I will show you how to exclude an URL from ProxyPass in Apache.
The first step is to identify the URL that you want to exclude from being proxied. For this tutorial, let’s assume that we want to exclude the URL “/static” from being proxied.
This step-by-step guide shows how to install the Caddy web server with PHP 8 support on Rocky Linux 9 / AlmaLinux 9 and obtain a free SSL certificate.
Caddy is a free, security-focused, HTTP/2-enabled web server written in Go, designed to be simple, efficient, and portable. It offers modern capabilities such as virtual host support, reverses proxy functionality, and so on. Furthermore, Caddy is the first web server to automatically obtain and renew SSL/TLS certificates using Let’s Encrypt.
Caddy’s popularity has skyrocketed in the last few years due to its ease of use, speed, and native SSL support. So, it is quickly becoming the web server of choice for many developers and system administrators.
In this guide, we will show you how to download, install and use Adoptium Temurin on your AlmaLinux systems.
Java™ is the world’s leading programming language and platform. The Adoptium Working Group promotes and supports high-quality, TCK certified runtimes and associated technology for use across the Java ecosystem. Eclipse Temurin is the name of the OpenJDK distribution from Adoptium.
With Adoptium Temurin , You can prebuilt OpenJDK binaries for Free!
In this article, we will show you how to install Caddy on your AlmaLinux Systems.
Caddy is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go. It is an ultimate server. It simplifies your infrastructure. Also, it takes care of TLS certificate renewals, OCSP stapling, static file serving, reverse proxying, Kubernetes ingress, and more.
Its modular architecture means you can do more with a single, static binary that compiles for any platform.
Caddy runs great in containers because it has no dependencies—not even libc. Run Caddy practically anywhere.
In this guide, we will show you how to install and use Nessus Scanner on AlmaLinux systems.
Nessus is a proprietary vulnerability scanner available free of charge for personal use. There are over 40,000 plugins covering a large range of both local and remote flaws.
It is a proprietary vulnerability scanner developed by Tenable, Inc.
MariaDB is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) that is a fork of the popular MySQL database. It is designed to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL and offers many of the same features and benefits, with additional enhancements and improvements.
GlassFish is an open-source Jakarta EE platform application server project started by Sun Microsystems, then sponsored by Oracle Corporation, and now living at the Eclipse Foundation and supported by Payara, Oracle and Red Hat. The supported version under Oracle was called Oracle GlassFish Server. GlassFish is free software and was initially dual-licensed under two free software licences: the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and the GNU General Public License (GPL) with the Classpath exception. After having been transferred to Eclipse, GlassFish remained dual-licensed, but the CDDL license was replaced by the Eclipse Public License (EPL).
LEMP is a software stack that consists of Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, and PHP. It is a popular stack used for web development and hosting. Nginx is a powerful and efficient web server, MariaDB is a robust and reliable SQL database, and PHP is a server-side scripting language used for web development. Together, these technologies provide a powerful and reliable platform for building and hosting web applications.
Changing the hostname of a Linux system is a relatively simple process that can be done through the terminal. This guide will cover how to change the hostname on Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) using the command line. The hostname is the name assigned to a computer or device on a network and is used to identify the device on the network. Changing the hostname can help identify or personalize a specific network device.
VSCodium is a free and open-source version of Visual Studio Code, a popular code editor developed by Microsoft. VSCodium is built from the same source code as Visual Studio Code but with all Microsoft-proprietary telemetry and tracking removed. It can be used on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
lighttpd (pronounced “lighty”) is an open-source web server optimized for speed-critical environments while remaining standards-compliant, secure and flexible. It was originally written by Jan Kneschke as a proof-of-concept of the c10k problem – how to handle 10,000 connections in parallel on one server, but has gained worldwide popularity. Its name is a portmanteau of “light” and “httpd”.
The 6.1 version of the Linux Kernel can be implemented on either Linux Mint 21 or Linux Mint 20 systems, and offers a variety of new enhancements and upgrades, such as the inclusion of preliminary support for the Rust programming language, increased performance of the Btrfs file system, advancements in Intel Arc graphics, further development for AMD RDNA3 graphics processing units, Thunderbolt compatibility for Intel Meteor Lake, expanded support for audio systems, compatibility with Xbox One Elite Controller paddles, enhanced support for Nintendo replica controllers, and initial support for DualSense Edge controllers. Moreover, numerous other updates are included in this release, making it an important update for Linux users.
This guide will provide instructions for installing Linux Kernel 6.1 on your Linux Mint desktop using the TuxInvader Launchpad PPA. The PPA contains the most recent generic kernels, and the guide will demonstrate how to use the command line terminal to import the PPA and install the latest Linux Kernel.
Learn how to easily install Linux Kernel 6.1 on Linux Mint 21 or 20 with the TuxInvader Launchpad PPA. A step-by-step guide to upgrading your system’s performance and features.
VirtualBox is an excellent hypervisor and virtualization tool for Debian and other Linux OSes. However, it doesn’t come in the official software sources for users to install. In this guide, we’ll show you how to quickly set up VirtualBox 7.0 on Debian.
Today we are looking at how to install the OpenShot Video Editor 3.0.0 or newer 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.
At this time, ChatGPT is the talk of the town.
I was doing some preparation for my weekly tutoring activity and when I realized I misspelled “science” on a particular file that I end up sharing with parents. Somehow, I spelled “scoence” and almost published the file spelled as such. I realized that somewhere along the line, Dolphin, the most amazing file manager wasn’t doing the spell check that it once did for me. A crutch I much appreciate leaning on to keep me from looking like a fool.
I did a quick search about spellcheck in dolphin but nothing came up in the top few search results. The full documentation came about but that wasn’t helpful. What I wanted to answer was, how can Dolphin, once again spell check my file names.
Here is the answer: Go into the Plasma System Settings and search for “Spell Check.” That will filter out the module from the rest quickly. The option of “Automatic spell checking enabled by default” is what you need to have Dolphin automatically check your spelling.
We are excited to announce the launch of our new website, now built with the popular static site generator, Hugo. This change marks a significant shift away from our previous CMS, Drupal, and brings a fresh new look that aligns with the style of KDE, our parent organization.
We understand that change can be difficult, but we believe that this move will greatly benefit our users. The switch to Hugo allows for faster loading times, improved security, and a more streamlined user experience. Additionally, the new design is fully responsive, ensuring that the site looks great on any device.
Netrunner is one of my absolute favorite Linux distributions, but I haven’t been recommending it to people lately. Why? Well, to be honest, I thought the operating system was dead. You see, the last time the developers released a new version of Netrunner was early 2021. I assumed development had ended. The year 2022 came and went without any substantial Netrunner news.
But no, Netrunner lives! Out of the blue, a new version of the KDE-focused operating system is made available for download. Code-named “Vaporwave” (no, not vaporware), Netrunner 23 is based on Debian 11 “Bullseye” stable for the first time. Yes, fans of Netrunner can finally have modern Debian.
After nearly two years of silence regarding the operating system’s development, you would expect a rather detailed announcement, but nothing could be further from the truth. Shockingly, we are treated to only two substantive sentences, which we share below.
Infra & Releng Team is a sub-team in Red Hat’s Community Platform Engineering (CPE) Team that takes care of Fedora Infrastructure, Fedora Release Engineering, and CentOS Infrastructure. This blog post is a summary of what the team did in 2022. It contains infographics as a quick review. Below that will be more detailed information about what you can see in the infographics.
From implementing zero trust to managing a multi-cloud environment, these five IT strategies will help ensure that your organization stays competitive in the coming year
What makes a digital transformation successful? These success stories show how five organizations embraced the right technology to help solve their most pressing challenges
Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on the Debian operating system. Xubuntu is an operating system that is based on Ubuntu, but using the Xfce desktop environment instead of GNOME. Freespire is an OS that is based on Xubuntu. What does this mean? Well, besides too many Linux distributions existing, it means Freespire is, very loosely speaking, sort of like the great-grandson of Debian.
Anyway, today, Freespire 9.0 becomes available for download. A 64-bit ISO of the Linux-based operating system, can be had immediately. It is notable for using Xfce 4.18.
“Today the PC/OS Open Source development team is pleased to announce Freespire 9.0, our newest release based on Canonical;s Xubuntu 22.04 LTS. With stability and functionality in mind, our team has been working to make this optimal for both open source enthusiasts and desktop users,” explains The Freespire Team
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 771 for the week of January 15 – 21, 2023.
The companies state the “highest performance RISC-V development board” is a “premium software development system ideal for developer desktop machines and rack-based build/test/deploy servers for RISC-V software development. RISC-V has no limits.”. But last October, the demo platform was clocked at 2.2 GHz, and if what we have here is indeed a quad-core Cortex-A75 processor @ 2.2 GHz, it will be the fastest RISC-V platform and offer a performance boost compared to the VisionFive 2 SBC (which I received yesterday), but still be ways behind mid-range Arm and entry-level x86 processors such as Rockchip RK3588 or Intel Jasper Lake processors.
We don’t have pricing information yet, but it’s clearly designed as a (Linux) development board that’s NOT optimized for cost, so the microATX motherboard won’t be cheap and should cost several hundred dollars, and possibly closer to $1,000. For reference, the previous generation HiFive Unmatched mini-ITX motherboard initially sold for $665. You may find a few more details and/or register your interest on the product page.
SB Components’ HackyPi is a Raspberry Pi RP2040-based USB dongle whose main purpose is to teach ethical hacking and coding programs, in other words, some sort of portable educational hacking tool.
The small USB stick features a 1.14-inch color LCD, a MicroSD card to store data such as scripts and photos, and a button to enable programming like on other Raspberry Pi RP2040 boards.
If you frequent driving ranges, you’ve probably seen a machine (often attached to the front of an armored golf cart) designed to pick up golf balls. Because a driving range can easily fill up with thousands of golf balls an hour, such machines are necessary. After noticing that nobody wanted to pick up the ping pong balls after matches, Maxime Monsieur and his team (Oumaima Achkif, Reda El Marsse, and Amir Farbod) built this robot that collects ping pong balls using a mechanism similar to those used for golf balls.
Like a golf ball collecting machine, this robot picks up golf balls using a spinning mechanism that resembles something you’d see on an agricultural harvester. Any ping pong balls in front of the robot get pushed towards that mechanism by a pair of spring-loaded arms. The rotating mechanism then pushes the ping pong balls up a ramp and into a bin. The robot navigates through the room like an old robot vacuum: by driving forward until it meets a wall, then turning in a random direction.
Medicine reminder apps are designed to help patients, caregivers set timely repeated medication reminders, track their medication and make sure not to miss any medication.
Many patients require these type of apps especially, ones with diabetes, epilepsy, hypertension, heart problems and many others.
In this post, we offer you a collection of the best open source and free medicine reminder apps for Android devices.
Meta is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, that is one of the biggest techno-feudal oligarchs of our time. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), of the European Union is the “the toughest privacy and security law in the world”.
Says the Guardian that Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has just given Meta “three months to bring its data processing operations into compliance with [the decision to impose] a fine of €210m for the Facebook GDPR breach and €180m for Instagram.”
The problem is that all this software-enabled revolution still needs:
more batteries than may be ever produced
more grid than it may be feasible
space, need, money by the same numbers of car owners of today
Last weekend I had the pleasure of being on a Scout camp. I am part of
a team taking a group of 14-18 year olds on an Explorer Belt
expedition to Malta, an island nation in the Mediterranean. The aim of
the Explorer Belt is to spend 10 days completing 10 minor and 1 major
project. This group of Explorer Scouts is made up of members of
various units across South West Birmingham and so many do not know one
another. I certainly didn’t know many. So why not have a camp to get
to know one another and do some planning?
This is the third Frank Sinatra album I’ve had so far. This felt unreasonable, so I checked Wikipedia – and it’ll be the last Frank Sinatra album I get, because he ‘only’ has 3 albums on the list. 3 is very respectable, but I haven’t enjoyed the previous two much, so that also isn’t much consolation.
Sleater Kinney passed me by totally. No good reason, I just never had the cause to pick them up. I’m grateful this project made me sit down and listen to Dig Me Out.
Oof-da I’m tired. Two misfortunes happened to me last night, the first was the 4½ hr delay, the second was the invalid connection. Even though I had a ticket for a train that I missed because the railroad was late, there was some issue with the reservation so they couldn’t compensate me or give me a reduced fare. In fact, I had to pay another $15 for the next day’s train. Annoying, but I kinda expected this from America’s least reliable (and only!) passenger rail.
This is a revised post of my older one talking about systemd. A lot is the same, but I’ve added some configuration options, and swapped to inetd because it was easier to setup, and was what efingerd expected.
If you want create a TUI or GUI application, I am not really interested in these details, even though this project is well suited to work on a TUI environment…
I found myself, always more, taking notes and ideas in GemText; I would write emails too if only we had a Gemini Email Client. Even though I’d had loved having more “lines” I think we got a good compromise. The composition for lines helps you to create a peculiar style giving a nice rhythm to the paragraphs, I really love it!
I think if I would have a software that allows me to taking notes and ideas in a Gemini fashion, and if I could link together these notes as the good old time of the hyper-texts, and moreover if I could eventually export such ideas in Gemini pages; plain text documents; or even plain text email; this will surely become my preferred software for writing anything.
The main RFC (Request For Comment)s for mDNS appear to be RFC-6762 [3] and RFC-6763 [4] and to support them in full requires breaking changes to my library. The first are a bunch of flags, defined in RFC-6762 and it affects pretty much the entire codebase. The first deals with “Questions Requesting Unicast Responses.” Most flags are defined in the header section, but for this, it’s “the top bit in the class field of a DNS question as the unicast-response bit.” And because mDNS specifically allows multiple questions, it’s seems like it could be set per-question, and not per the request as a whole, as the RFC states: “[w]hen this bit is set in a question, it indicates that the querier is willing to accept unicast replies in response to this specific query, as well as the usual multicast responses.” To me, that says, “each resource record needs a flag for a unicast reponse.” The other bit the “outdated cache entry” bit. which again applies to individual resource records and not to the request as a whole. And again, to me, that says, “each resoure record needs a flag to invalidate previously cached values.”
Another year, another version of Epicyon [1]. The details of changes can be found here [2]. Over the last year there have been many bug fixes and small improvements, and I have added more documentation.
Things seem to be going quite well for the fediverse in general, and there also appears to be declining mindshare in the legacy silo systems and in the scammy “web3″. Open standards are making something of a comeback. The fall of Twitter may mean that activists start running their own infrastructure [3] again, and there’s the potential for something like another Indymedia to emerge from the smoldering ruins.
* 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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QmXjS7DjGrfMS4H9c59VH5eHwnLnypFEsWY1rBi6CPB8Ne |
IRC log for #boycottnovell(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmVDX3ji1icugYnfAUtgi8JceaiWjhk93Bkg5S5FL2BGKj |
IRC log for #boycottnovell(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmdBRPgZBcCU5UAN7U5F1abfhTzHtXaDyckrLhNh1tx5K8 |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmQJ1xZidiM7bZXd9yneXLgZPDDhCrXDaGzfggWEcTbJqJ |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmT6x3snHuzTpHDJ7ftiUrLxn89deURtVqdxEudSUtMpXF |
IRC log for #techbytes(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmT7TCWesrBdQPmZP4XFV4dP3JbtmBwpiYPU7SSTT6Uz6P |
IRC log for #techbytes(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmcYJu2g5cCu2fUvcFtFZwVQpoNM2mbCjAgDPhFt8HdqQn |
IRC log for #techrights(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmYZdFpZj9X5UkVTk45zQn61Zi7hFsRt7o6uMcHCUcomPc |
IRC log for #techrights(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmRheVwyBoWpNZy7SeG2521qpyibe47XJkYUj8i1DqEaBf
Video download link | md5sum cc29a588d814b375a666bda5d567b58f
What Sirius Teaches Us About ISO
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Based on my experiences inside Sirius ‘Open Source’ — as I was there for nearly 12 years — I finally tell what I’ve witnessed about ISO certification processes (see ISO wiki for prior experiences)
Sirius ‘Open Source’ taught me a whole bunch of things; some were valuable technical skills, but many were negative experiences that I can finally explain out in the open, expressing in words various ideas that I formed (or formulated) years ago.
“If more people understood the business model of ISO, maybe there would be no ISO anymore.”The above video concerns ISO and it is relatively long because it covers two parts instead of just one, starting with background and proceeding to real-life examples in the form of redacted E-mails.
The conclusion I reached years ago is that ISO is somewhat of a scam. It creates a barrier that mostly protects monopoly and it makes a lot of money by giving worthless papers, essentially turning managerial ‘religion’ into a fat cash cow. If more people understood the business model of ISO, maybe there would be no ISO anymore. █
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Guest Editorial Team
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