01.25.23

The ISO Delusion: When the Employer Doesn’t Understand the Company’s Value Proposition (Building Systems) and Rejects Security

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, ISO, Servers at 9:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Probably the final week of this series

Sirius Open Source watersideSummary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has failed to sell what it was actually good at; instead it hired unqualified people and outsourced almost everything

THIS is the part of this series where we focus on examples of Sirius failing on technical merits and compliance/conformance. Eventually we decided to show redacted E-mails on ISO along with my copied messages to management regarding bollocking and how it all started, me asking for an apology etc. Being accredited or recognised isn’t the same as being capable and potent. As I mentioned in the very first post in this series, when I joined the company it was different beyond recognition. The company had its own hosting (in its own premises). In 2022 we were suffering habitual outages as we don’t control our systems anymore (Slack, AWS downtimes were common; in prior years clients that relied on Clownflare also suffered outages due to Clownflare rather than their own hosting). To make matters worse, there were security breaches and the company ignored them. I kept bringing that to management’s attention, only to be ignored or rebuffed. Remember this hoax of Citation/Atlas was covered in Techrights years ago. Sirius does not teach its staff real security and does not hire people who understand or value security.

“Sirius does not teach its staff real security and does not hire people who understand or value security.”The company had a bizarre trajectory of moving from self-hosted (e.g. Asterisk), then outsourced (but still Free software, ‘managed’ Asterisk), then outsourced proprietary spyware like Google Voice. If “Open Source has won” and if Free software is becoming more widely used, then why is Sirius going in the exact opposite direction of what it was advocating? This is a management decision. It’s not the fault of technical staff — the staff which all along opposed this.

Notice the practice of password outsourcing. Here’s a direct quote sent in a request to me personally: “Put the WordPress credentials (admin user, etc) in a lastpass note and share it with xxxxx (securely, within lastpass) and we’ll be setting up a very temporary and basic portal to share info across the team, to help keep everyone better updated given how Absolutely Mentally Busy it is right now. It’s entirely for internal use when on the VPN.”

“It’s not the fault of technical staff — the staff which all along opposed this.”It’s another example of mishandling access credentials inside third parties (Slack, LastPass etc.), oftentimes not just rejecting “Open Source” but actively ripping apart Open Source things that work, replacing them with technically inferior and likely illegal (in some cases, due to data protection) proprietary stuff.

The management did even worse than this; it failed to do very basic things, such as sending payslips and sometimes paying the pension provider. Instead they made colourful excuses, so I decided to take photographs of letters from the pension provider, recalling those blunders and deciding that it’s worth discussing belatedly (and maybe add E-mails also; there were loads of E-mails about payslips, not just pensions, spanning different years from 2018 until the present day; there were phonecalls too, but those aren’t recorded).

The management was also bad at communication and correspondence. See the example below (2019):

Subject: Re: I need these tickets dealt with by support
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 11:15:56 +0100
From: Rianne Schestowitz xxxxxxx
To: xxxxxxx
CC: xxxxxxx

Hi xxxxxxx,

I responded to this email last weekend. Please check your inbox. If you
haven’t received it, I can send it again.

Many thanks,

Rianne

–
Rianne Schestowitz, NOC Extension 2834423
Sirius – stress free technology

http://www.siriusopensource.com

t: xxxxxxx

> Hi,
>
> I need these tickets dealt with by support.
>
> 1. Ticket#108642: Roy or xxxxxxx need to answer about security.
> 2. Ticket#108813: Replied with more questions. Can’t reproduce the
> error so far. Back with Support, awaiting feedback.
> 3. (Multiple) Tickets relating to masking – Code fix done, Release done
> and in live. Check with each client once data reimported. Support
> team can do this. xxxxxxx have already confirmed it works.
>
> 1. Ticket#108833: Already fixed, just needs a fresh xxxxxxx import.
> 2. Ticket#108769: The masking fix is done, we just need to schedule a
> reload.
>
>
>
> xxxxxxx xxxxxxx
> Sirius – stress free technology
> http://www.siriusopensource.com
> Tel: xxxxxxx

This was the year bullying against staff started, not too long after Gates Foundation money had landed under an NDA and something called Sirius Open Source Inc. was quietly formed in the state of Washington (where Microsoft and Gates are).

“Inaction and retaliation led to what became of it, spilling the beans out in public.”We spent nearly a month explaining what I had already written internally before resigning; we remembered to publish the entire PDF at the end (crossposted in my personal site too) as it is important to emphasise that I raised most of these concerns for years inside the company. Inaction and retaliation led to what became of it, spilling the beans out in public. I never did anything even remotely like this with any of my past employers. █

Links 25/01/2023: NuTyX 23.01.1 and GNU Guile 3.0.9 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 8:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Applications

      • It’s FOSS ☛ Flatpak vs. Snap: 10 Differences You Should Know

        Flatpak and Snap packages are more popular than ever among Linux users who no longer prefer native binary packages or AppImages.

        Primarily because of its ease of use, integration with the software center, and the ability to get the latest app updates hassle-free.

      • Neowin ☛ QOwnNotes 23.1.2

        QOwnNotes is a open source (GPL) plain-text file notepad with markdown support and todo list manager for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, that (optionally) works together with the notes application of ownCloud (or Nextcloud). So you are able to write down your thoughts with QOwnNotes and edit or search for them later from your mobile device (like with CloudNotes) or the ownCloud web-service. The notes are stored as plain text files and you can sync them with your ownCloud sync client. Of course other software, like Dropbox, Syncthing, Seafile or BitTorrent Sync can be used too.

      • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Dippi – Tells if the Laptop/External Monitor Best Choice (HiDPI or LoDPI) | UbuntuHandbook

        Going to buy a new monitor or laptop, or want to calculate whether it’s a HiDPI display? Here’s a handy app can help!

        I previously thought that 4K and 8K displays are HiDPI, but 720p that I’m being using is LoDPI. It’s 100% wrong! HiDPI, stands for High Dots Per Inch, also known by Apple’s “Retina Display”. Meaning screens with a high resolution in a relatively small format.

        A HiDPI monitor may be good for displaying photo images or playing FPS games, but not all software behaves well in high-resolution mode yet. If you’re going to buy a monitor or calculate existing display DPI, then here’s a good app for choice.

        It’s ‘Dippi’, a free and open-source GTK4 application developed by a GNOME Foundation member.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • ZDNet ☛ How to easily and quickly clean your system and free disk space with BleachBit | ZDNET

        Your computer is filled with various types of files that you don’t need or want hanging around. Given the way we work these days, much of that comes by way of the web browser cache, downloaded files, and temporary files. If you don’t take care and remove those files, the applications that use or save them can become slow to respond or even not run at all.

      • Unix Men ☛ How To Use ldd Command in Linux with Examples | Unixmen

        If you’re using a Linux machine, you will be dealing with executable files constantly – be it on the GUI or on your terminal. Executables are comprised of shared libraries, and these are used and reused across programs.

        Windows users might recognize that the DDL files on their machine are shared libraries. However, these files are stored on Linux with the .o and .so extensions.

        In this brief guide, we discuss how you can use the ldd utility on the Linux command line to view an executable’s shared objects and dependencies. But first, let’s understand what a shared object file is.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Schedule One-Time Jobs on Linux Using at

        Time management is a difficult art to master. Fortunately, with the help of technology, you can automate and delegate mundane tasks to your computer. Unlike humans, PCs are very good at running repetitive tasks at a precise set time.

        On Linux, you can run repetitive tasks using tools such as cron. In addition, you can also schedule and run one-time tasks using the at command.

      • OMG Ubuntu ☛ How to Install the Latest Version of Wine on Ubuntu – OMG! Ubuntu!

        The new Wine 8.0 release boasts better-than-ever support for running Windows apps on Linux distributions such as Ubuntu.

        You can install Wine on Ubuntu from the Ubuntu Software app (or using apt at the command line), but the version of Wine available in Ubuntu is (almost always) an older version than that currently available.

        If you want to install the latest stable version of Wine on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or 22.10 follow the steps below, which I’ve adapted from the instructions available on the WineHQ wiki.

      • Linuxiac ☛ How to Install VMware Workstation Player on Ubuntu 22.04

        This guide walks you step-by-step through installing VMware Workstation Player virtualization software on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

        Installing VMware Workstation Player on Ubuntu 22.04 is a simple process that allows you to run virtual machines on your system. It is a free, lightweight version of VMware Workstation Pro, a popular Windows and Linux virtualization software.

        With VMware Workstation Player, you can create and run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, each with its operating system. This makes it a valuable tool for developers, system administrators, and anyone who needs to run different operating systems for testing or development purposes.

        This guide will walk you through installing VMware Workstation Player on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, so let’s get started.

      • Video ☛ How to use MASTODON: the COMPLETE GUIDE (join, use, find people to follow, etiquette…) – Invidious
      • AddictiveTips ☛ How to schedule restarts and shutdowns on Linux

        Ever wanted to schedule when your Linux PC turns off? With the Time Switch app, you can. It allows you to schedule when your Linux system powers off when it reboots or even suspends. Here’s how to get it working on your system.

      • ZDNet ☛ How to add fields to a LibreOffice document | ZDNET

        How many times have you created a document and had to add specific items, such as the current date, the number of pages, the author of the document, the time, a chapter, a file name, document statistics, a company name, or more?

      • Unix Men ☛ How To Install the Apache Guacamole Remote Desktop Gateway | Unixmen

        There is no shortage of applications that enable administrators to connect to their servers. But using different applications for different purposes can get hectic, to say the least.

        Thankfully, there’s a smarter way to do things – and it’s existed since 2013.

        Enter: Apache Guacamole.

        It is a clientless remote desktop gateway that supports the RDP, VNC, and SSH protocols. The best thing about it is that you only need a web browser to work with it once it’s set up. No extensions or tools are needed to use this open-source tool!

        Here’s a quick guide to setting up Apache Guacamole.

      • Downgrading from MySQL 8.0 on Windows, Mac, and Linux

        MySQL is a popular open-source relational database management system that is widely used for web-based applications and data management. MySQL 8.0 is the latest version of the software, but sometimes you may need to downgrade to an earlier version for compatibility reasons or to fix issues that may have arisen after upgrading.

        Downgrading MySQL can be a bit tricky, but it’s not impossible. In this article, we will take a look at the steps you need to take to downgrade from MySQL 8.0 on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

      • Upgrading to MySQL 8.0 on Windows, Mac, and Linux

        MySQL is a popular open-source relational database management system that is widely used for web-based applications and data management. MySQL 8.0 is the latest version of the software, but sometimes you may need to downgrade to an earlier version for compatibility reasons or to fix issues that may have arisen after

      • Managing the MySQL Server with systemd

        MySQL is one of the most popular relational database management systems in the world, and version 8.0 brings a host of new features and improvements. In this article, we’ll take a look at how to upgrade to MySQL 8.0 on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Linux Magazine ☛ KDE Plasma 5.27 Beta is Ready for Testing – Linux Magazine

          The latest beta iteration of the KDE Plasma desktop is now available and includes some important additions and fixes.

          KDE Plasma 5.27 beta was recently announced, which is aimed at testers, developers, and bug-hunters. And one of the more exciting additions is the new Bigscreen version, which makes the KDE Desktop available for use on televisions.

          There also is a new addition to the Display Configuration widget, which now appears active in System Tray by default, when you have more than one monitor connected. The Big Multi-Monitor refactor makes working with multiple screens more reliable and gives you fine-grained controls when you have three or more monitors.

          The KWin Tiling System is also ready for testing. Using the Meta-T keyboard combination, you can launch the quick tiling features to give you complete control of where your windows are placed.

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • 9to5Linux ☛ GUADEC 2023 Conference Takes Place July 26-31 in Riga, Latvia, for GNOME 44

          Just like last year’s GUADEC 2022 conference, the GUADEC 2023 event will offer a hybrid model where attendees can join in person or online. If you’re joining in person, you should know that the conference will take place in Latvia’s capital, Riga, for the first time in Europe since 2019.

          GUADEC is the place where GNOME users and developers from all over the world gather together to share knowledge and discuss the new features and changes of the next major release of the GNOME desktop environment, in this case for the GNOME 44 series, which launches in late March 2023.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • H2S Media ☛ Windows 10 vs Linux Mint: A Comprehensive Comparison

      For users who don’t want to switch to Windows 11 from Windows 10 and want to adopt Linux Mint; here is a quick comparison between the two operating systems. I hope this helps in making the decision.

    • H2S Media ☛ 5 Best free to use Linux Server distributions for 2023 – Linux Shout

      Linux is an open-source software platform developed initially for home computers but later become a dominant Server operating system. Linux Server OS are popular because of their small size and ability to quickly convert to perform some specific operations such as Web server, File server, monitoring tool, etc. That’s why you will see almost all computing cloud platforms prefer Linux servers to distribute their computing services.

      Apart from powring thousands of racks at hosting companies, in server farms, and at cloud providers, you can also see Linux command line servers nested in container instances or virtual machines, in short Linux keeps the Internet alive. As a server, Linux today supports more architectures and processors than any other kernel – from very large to very small.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Chromium

        • Google ☛ Chrome Releases: Beta Channel Update for Desktop

          The Chrome team is excited to announce the promotion of Chrome 110 to the Beta channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. Chrome 110.0.5481.52 contains our usual under-the-hood performance and stability tweaks, but there are also some cool new features to explore – please head to the Chromium blog to learn more!

        • Google ☛ Chrome Releases: Chrome Beta for Android Update

          Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Beta 110 (110.0.5481.50) for Android. It’s now available on Google Play.

    • FSF

      • LWN ☛ A pair of Free Software Foundation governance changes [LWN.net]

        The Free Software Foundation has announced a bylaw change requiring a 66% vote by the FSF board for any new or revised copyright licenses. The FSF has also announced an expansion of its board of directors and a call for nominations from among its associate members.

    • GNU Projects

    • Programming/Development

      • Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Nibble Stew: Typesetting an entire book part V: Getting it published

        Writing a book is not that difficult. Sure, it is laborious, but if you merely keep typing away day after day, eventually you end up with a manuscript. Writing a book that is “good” or one that other people would want to read is a lot harder. Still, even that is easy compared to trying to get a book published. According to various unreferenced sources on the Internet, out of all manuscripts submitted only 1 in 1000 to 1 in 10 000 gets accepted for publication. Probabilitywise this is roughly as unlikely casting five dice and getting six with all of them.

        Having written a manuscript I went about tying to get it published. The common approach in most countries is that first you have to pitch your manuscript to a literary agent, and if you succeed, they will then try to pitch it to publishers. In Finland the the procedure is simpler, anyone can submit their manuscripts directly to book publishing houses without a middle man. While this makes things easier, it does not help with deciding how much the manuscript should be polished before submission. The more you polish the bigger your chances of getting published, but the longer it takes and the more work you have to do if the publisher wants to make changes to the content.

      • Barry Kauler ☛ Escaping characters in translation strings in initrd
      • Socorro Engineering: 2022 retrospective | Will’s Blog

        2022 took forever. At the same time, it kind of flew by. 2023 is already moving along, so this post is a month late. Here’s the retrospective of Socorro engineering in 2022.

      • FOSSLife ☛ Google Summer of Code 2023 Now Accepting Applications for Mentor Organizations

        Applications are now being accepted for mentor organizations to participate in Google Summer of Code 2023 (GSoC).

        According to the announcement, Google has set a goal of welcoming 30+ new organizations into the GSoC program. If you’re interested in participating, check out the mentor guide to learn what is involved. New organizations are also encouraged “to get a referral from experienced organizations that think they would be a good fit to participate in GSoC,” the announcement says.

      • Perl / Raku

        • Perl ☛ My Favorite Modules: PerlIO::via | Tom Wyant [blogs.perl.org]

          OK, I confess: PerlIO::via is not a module that I use every day. It allows you, easily, and with minimal code, to modify an I/O stream before it gets to the reader of the stream. or after the writer has written it. All you do is write (say) My::Module conforming to the parts of the PerlIO::via interface you need, and provide it to the second argument of open() or binmode() as ‘:via(My::Module)’. How cool is that? And how cool is a language that lets you do that with a minimum of fuss, bother, and code?

          I encountered this when trying to modify (OK, hack) the behavior of a large and complex hunk of Perl not under my control. Rummaging around in this turned up the fact that all file input went through a single module/object, which had an open() method. I realized if I could insert my own PerlIO layer into the input stream, I would have control over what the victim host code saw.

          In the true spirit of the Conan the Barbarian school of programming (“Bash it until it submits!”) I wrote a PerlIO::via module whose import() method monkey-patched the open() to insert my layer into the stack. All I had to do was launch the host code with -MMy::Module and the dirty deed was done.

      • Python

      • Rust

        • A small Rust program – Sam Thursfield

          I wrote a small program in Rust called cba_blooper. Its purpose is to download files from this funky looper pedal called the Blooper.

          It’s the first time I finished a program in Rust. I find Rust programming a nice experience, after a couple of years of intermittent struggle to adapt my existing mental programming models to Rust’s conventions.

          When I finished the tool I was surprised by the output size – initially a 5.6MB binary for a tool that basically just calls into libasound to read and write MIDI. I followed the excellent min-sized-rust guide and got that down to 1.4MB by fixing some obvious mistakes such as actually stripping the binary and building in release mode. But 1.4MB still seems quite big.

  • Leftovers

    • What Can We Learn from Barnes – Noble’s Surprising Turnaround?

      I’ve written too many negative stories about digital media platforms in recent months. I’ve started to worry. Am I turning into Dr. Doom and Mr. Gloom?

      In all fairness, my predictions have proven sadly accurate. After I served up these dismal forecasts for Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, and others, their share prices took a steep dive.

      I’m not sure that’s a good thing—I’d like to see digital media improve and flourish. When they falter, we all pay a price. But each of these companies is now suffering for a good reason. Their dominance led to arrogance, and they decided to impose all sorts of heavy-handed policies on users.

    • Tedium ☛ Mis-swiping the Point

      Public infrastructure is a reflection of a community’s values. Americans, however, are disconnected to what public infrastructure says about our values. We’ll claim the U.S. is the greatest country on earth, yet accept potholes and failing schools as a fact of life. In a larger sense, public infrastructure is a clear sign of a government’s priorities and even what a government thinks about a specific community. Clean streets and robust public spending shows where and who governments value. This is generally pretty obvious like with police responsiveness to community needs or well-maintained community spaces. The issues facing forgotten neighborhoods and communities can manifest in truly nefarious ways that undercut the ability of individuals to improve their lives. Today’s Tedium is going underground to look at the New York City subway system and why paying per ride might cost you your job.

    • Hardware

    • Linux Foundation

    • Security

      • eSecurity Planet ☛ Top 10 Open Source Vulnerability Assessment Tools | ESP

        Vulnerability assessment tools scan assets for known vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other flaws. These scanners then output reports for IT security and application development operations (DevOps) teams that feed prioritized tasks into ticketing and workflow systems for remediation.

        Open source vulnerability testing tools provide cost-effective vulnerability detection solutions. Many IT teams even deploy one or more open source tools in addition to commercial vulnerability scanning tools as backup, or as a check to verify vulnerabilities. In our analysis, here are the best open source vulnerability tools for 2023.

      • eSecurity Planet ☛ Cybercriminals Use VSCode Extensions as New Attack Vector [Ed: This proprietary spyware of Microsoft should be avoided for many other reasons too]

        And Aqua Nautilus researchers have discovered a big one.

      • LWN ☛ Security updates for Wednesday

        Security updates have been issued by Debian (libde265, nodejs, and swift), Fedora (nautilus), Oracle (bash, bind, curl, dbus, expat, firefox, go-toolset, golang, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, libreoffice, libtiff, libxml2, libXpm, nodejs, nodejs-nodemon, postgresql-jdbc, qemu, ruby:2.5, sqlite, sssd, sudo, and usbguard), Red Hat (bind, go-toolset-1.18, go-toolset:rhel8, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, pcs, sssd, and virt:rhel, virt-devel:rhel), Scientific Linux (bind, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, and sssd), SUSE (mozilla-nss, rubygem-websocket-extensions, rust1.65, rust1.66, and samba), and Ubuntu (mysql-5.7, mysql-5.7, mysql-8.0, pam, and samba).

      • CISA ☛ CISA, NSA, and MS-ISAC Release Advisory on the Malicious Use of RMM Software | CISA

        Today, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) released joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) Protecting Against Malicious Use of Remote Monitoring and Management Software. The advisory describes a phishing scam in which cyber threat actors maliciously use legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) software to steal money from victim bank accounts.

      • CISA ☛ VMware Releases Security Updates for VMware vRealize Log Insight | CISA

        VMware released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities in VMware vRealize Log Insight. A remote attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Internet Freedom Foundation ☛ Delhi High Court issues notice in the blocking case of satirical website

        Mr Tanul Thakur’s satirical website, dowrycalculator.com was banned by an order of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (‘MeitY’) without providing him a hearing or even a copy of the ban order. Mr Thakur challenged this censorship action before the Delhi High Court December 5, 2019. On May 11 2022, the Court directed MeitY to provide Mr Thakur a copy of the ban order and a post-decisional hearing under the Information Technology (Procedure and safeguards for blocking of Access of Information by public) Rules, 2009 (“Blocking Rules, 2009”). Subsequent to the post-decisional hearing, Mr. Thakur was informed that MeitY decided to continue its ban on his website. The Delhi High Court requested that Mr. Thakur should file a fresh writ petition including a challenge to MeitY’s 2022 decision to continue blocking of the website. Mr. Thakur with the legal assistance of IFF, has filed a writ petition before the Delhi High Court challenging the same. The matter was heard on January 23, 2023 and the court was pleased to issue notice in the matter.

    • Monopolies

      • Copyrights

        • Public Domain Review ☛ Illusory Wealth: Victor Dubreuil’s Cryptic Currencies – The Public Domain Review

          After supposedly stealing 500,000 francs from his bank, the mysterious Victor Dubreuil (b. 1842) turned up penniless in the United States and began to paint dazzling trompe l’oeil images of dollar bills. Once associated with counterfeiting and subject to seizures by the Treasury Department, these artworks are evaluated anew by Dorinda Evans, who considers Dubreuil’s unique anti-capitalist visions among the most daring and socially critical of his time.

        • Public Domain Review ☛ Introducing PDR Revisited – The Public Domain Review

          We are revisiting older posts in our collection to give them some much needed love.

          [...]

          If you venture into the Collections section of The Public Domain Review, you will experience considered meditations on a broad range of subjects: from medieval pattern poems to the emotional lives of pigeons, from Albrecht Dürer’s pillows to various attempts to visualise and chart history. But if you venture far enough down the rabbit holes of our site, you will also encounter posts limited to just a few sentences, which do not always do full justice to the curious objects they describe.

          These posts were, with little exception, written in the early days of PDR — the best efforts of an overworked sole editor trying to wear too many hats and overheating in the process. While these early posts serve as reminders for how much the site has evolved since those first forays, they can make for a jarring experience, pulling us away from a state of mind where ideas and images, from across our project’s history, are allowed to converse freely.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • The Stonecutter, Part 1

        I heard this story many years ago and was told that it’s an old Chinese tale. Recently I came to think about it again for no particular reason and when I told it to my kids they were captivated. Seems appropriate that I share it, although it’s no doubt been re-told better in hundreds of other places.

        It’s quite a bit to write so I’ll be splitting it in several parts until it’s done, however many that might be. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

    • Technical

      • Can robot brains break laws human brains can’t?

        I think it is safe to say that most everyone has heard about ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the handful of other new AI driven services that generate content via human prompts. For those who haven’t heard, one of th leaders in image generation, Stability.ai is being sued by multiple groups for copyright infringement due to it’s use of millions of online images in the process of teaching its AI to draw.

      • First time messing with Sway

        It’s Chinese New Year (or Lunar New Year), whatever and I have a long vocation with my family, being lazy and whatnot. I decided to today I’m too bored to do anything scrious. I ended up trying to use a tiling window manager for once. Why? Because they feels very cool the first time I saw somone using one (I think it was i3). And because the claimed productivity imrovments over a floating model.

        I am a long time Gnome user. I feel I’m very efficent on Gnome. Can Sway improve upon that? We’ll see.

      • Programming

        • Floating Point Fun

          FLoating point math did not get the memo that the magnitude of the velocity of a circular orbit should be constant. The direction of that constant velocity is always changing (like a rolling stone) which under floating point math gives ample opportunity for small errors to accumulate and thus consigns the aliens of the week to (probably) the oblivion that is deep space.

        • Everyone, learn how to code

          For once, Internet was good today instead of just a constant bruising source of pain and misery.

        • Using libsodium

          Libsodium is a wrapper around the Nacl cryptography library which simplifies the handling of buffers.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

Links 25/01/2023: Stratis 3.5.0 and Many Political Links

Posted in News Roundup at 12:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Systemd 76 ☛ Desktop Environment (Change)

        Pop!_OS and Ubuntu both include the GNOME desktop environment by default. A desktop environment is responsible for the look and feel of the graphical desktop, and includes many of the key programs that get used every day.

        You can install an alternative desktop environment using the instructions below.

    • Applications

      • Stratis 3.5.0 Release Notes

        Stratis 3.5.0 includes one significant enhancement as well as several smaller improvements.

        Most significantly, Stratis 3.5.0 extends its functionality to allow a user to add a cache to an encrypted pool. The cache devices are each encrypted with the same mechanism as the data devices; consequently the cache itself is encrypted.

      • Linux Links ☛ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Apple Console

        Console is proprietary software and it’s not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

        For many years system and kernel logs were handled by a utility called syslogd. Most Linux-based operating systems have since moved to systemd, which has a journal. That’s a giant log file for the whole system.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 87: mask properties

        There are a bunch of properties you can use to adjust the styling of the mask.

      • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 86: the initial-letter property

        The property takes two arguments. The first one defines the size of the initial letter in terms of how many lines it occupies. The optional second argument defines the number of lines the initial letter should sink. If it’s omitted, it equals the initial letter size.

      • Jim Nielsen ☛ The Best Time to Own a Domain Was 20 Years Ago; The Second Best Time Is Today

        That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

      • Austin Gil ☛ CSS Named Colors: Groups, Palettes, Facts, & Fun

        This page contains everything I’ve ever wanted when working with CSS named colors: groups, palettes, favorites, factoids and more.

      • Sean Conner ☛ A few small differences

        The main RFCs for mDNS appear to be RFC-6762 and RFC-6763 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.”

      • Daniel Lemire ☛ International domain names: where does https://meßagefactory.ca lead you?

        Today, in theory, you can use any Unicode character you like as part of a domain name, including emojis. Whether that is wise is something else.

        What does the standard says? Given a domain name, we should identify its labels. They are normally separated by dots (.) into labels: www.microsoft.com has three labels. But you may also use other Unicode characters as separators ( ., ．, 。, ｡). Each label is further processed. If it is all ASCII, then it is left as is. Otherwise, we must convert it to an ASCII code called “punycode” after doing the following according to RFC 3454: [...]

      • University of Toronto ☛ I should always make a checklist for anything complicated

        Today I did some work on the disk setup of my home desktop and I got shot in the foot, because when you remove disks from Linux software RAID arrays and then reboot, the boot process may reassemble those RAID arrays using the disks you removed (or even just one disk), instead of the actual live disks in the RAID array. There are a number of reasons that this happened to me, but one of them is that I didn’t make a checklist for what I was doing and instead did it on the fly.

      • OpenSource.com ☛ Count magical bunnies with LibreOffice Calc

        I love working with spreadsheets, and my favorite spreadsheet application is LibreOffice Calc. A spreadsheet is a grid of cells where each column is represented by letters and rows are numbered. You can perform all kinds of calculations using a spreadsheet. If you can perform a calculation based on other values, you can do that in a spreadsheet.

        Here I illustrate how to use the LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet to perform a particular calculation called the Fibonacci Sequence. Fibonacci Sequence numbers pop up everywhere in mathematics and the sciences and are often used to model a simple population growth.

      • Clean Up Unwanted APT Packages in Linux

        New Linux users often install a lot of unnecessary APT packages that they might rarely use in the future. Also, a few bulky distributions come with many pre-installed APT packages.

        When the Linux system is running low on disk space, it becomes necessary to clean the APT packages to free up some space, as they can cause performance issues and even prevent the system from booting properly.

        There are several ways to find the APT packages that are taking up the most space on your Debian or Ubuntu system; however, we will only cover two of them in this article.

      • TecAdmin ☛ How to Install PHP 8.x on Pop!_OS – TecAdmin

        If you want to develop web applications using PHP on Pop!_OS, you may need to install multiple versions of PHP for testing or compatibility purposes. One way to install multiple versions of PHP on Pop!_OS is to use a Personal Package Archive (PPA). At the day of writing this tutorial PHP 8.2 is the latest version available.

      • TecAdmin ☛ How To Install Python 3.11 on CentOS 9/8 – Fedora – TecAdmin

        Python 3.11 is recently launched with multiple improvement and security upgrades. This version provides developers to easily debug their code with fine-grained error locations in tracebacks. The new “Self” annotation provides a simple way to annotate methods that return an instance of their class.

        Mostly the latest operating systems comes with the latest Python versions. But the OS versions released before the release of Python 3.11 may not have the latest version . This tutorial will help you to install Python 3.11 on your CentOS, Red Hat & Fedora operating systems by compiling it from source code.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install OnlyOffice on AlmaLinux 9

        OnlyOffice (formerly TeamLab), stylized as ONLYOFFICE, is a free software office suite developed by Ascensio System SIA, a subsidiary of “New Communication Technologies”, a company from Russia, but headquartered in Riga, Latvia. In Russian market branded as P7-Office. It features online document editors, platform for document management, corporate communication, mail and project management tools.

      • Installing MySQL on Linux using Generic Binaries

        MySQL is one of the most popular open-source relational database management systems. It is used by many websites and applications to store and retrieve data. In this article, we will be discussing how to install MySQL on a Linux machine using the generic binaries.

        Before we begin, it’s important to note that there are different distributions of Linux, such as Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. The instructions in this article are for Ubuntu and Debian, but the process is similar for other distributions.

      • Starting or Stopping MySQL 8

        MySQL is a widely used open-source relational database management system. It is commonly used for web applications and can be used to manage and store data for various types of applications. MySQL 8 is the latest version of the software, and it comes with many new features and improvements. In this article, we will discuss how to start and stop MySQL 8 on different operating systems.

      • Uninstalling MySQL 8 from windows, mac and Linux

        MySQL is a popular open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) that is widely used for web applications and data management. However, sometimes, you may need to uninstall MySQL 8 from your system for various reasons, such as upgrading to a newer version or removing it to free up space. In this article, we will discuss how to uninstall MySQL 8 from Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

      • Red Hat Official ☛ Understanding rootless Podman’s user namespace modes | Enable Sysadmin

        Customize how you run containers in Podman by changing the user namespace while in rootless mode.

    • WINE or Emulation

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Wine 8.0 is out now with major compatibility improvements

        Wine 8.0 is out now, a big improvement over the last stable release with many upgrades for Windows to Linux compatibility across thousands of games and apps. This is part of what makes up Steam Play Proton, the compatibility used on Steam Deck to run Windows games.

      • It’s FOSS ☛ Wine 8.0 Stable Release is Here!

        Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications that has been the primary choice of many Linux users who rely on running such programs.

        Over the years, it has received numerous updates that allow it to run Windows apps with ease on a variety of hardware.

        The last major release was Wine 7.0, that offered several important improvements. It was also receiving regular bi-weekly development releases ever since.

        With the recent announcement, Wine 8.0 has officially landed that unified all the changes from the 7.x release and makes it better.

      • DebugPoint ☛ Wine 8.0 Released with 8000+ Changes and Enhancements

        After a couple of months of development, testing and RC phase, the Wine team announced the release of Wine 8.0 stable version. This major release brings several improvements over its predecessor to this Windows compatibility layer for UNix-based systems. Changes spread across exe, DLL support, 32-bit execution of apps, gaming performance improvements via Wine, input hardware controller support and many more.

        Here’s a quick summary of this release.

      • GamingOnLinux ☛ Direct3D to Vulkan translation layer DXVK 2.1 adds HDR support, improves shader stutter

        DXVK, one of the secret sauces included with the Proton compatibility layer, has a big new release out now. DXVK 2.1 adds in some big new features like HDR!

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • digiKam Recipes 2023-01-27

          New year, new digiKam Recipes book release. The new version features the completely rewritten Tag faces with the Face Recognition feature chapter and an all-new example workflow section in the Batch process photos and RAW files chapter. Several chapters have been revised and improved, including Edit tags with Tag Manager, Color management in digiKam, and Move digiKam library and databases. All screenshots have been refreshed, too. As always, the new revision includes plenty of tweaks and fixes.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • OSI Blog ☛ The 2023 State of Open Source Report confirms security as top issue [Ed: OSI, heavily bribed by Microsoft, is now citing and amplifying Microsofters in typical anti-Linux, anti-FOSS FUD]
    • OpenSource.com ☛ Celebrating the 2023 Opensource.com Community Choice authors

      Often our first interaction with open source is through community knowledge bases.

      This past year, I have had the fantastic opportunity to work with the many authors here at Opensource.com (and bring in some new ones!). I am fortunate enough to meet with our Correspondents program authors weekly and see some authors at in-person and virtual conferences. We are diverse in our knowledge, locations, backgrounds, and uniquely lived experiences.

      Each January, we celebrate the community of authors at Opensource.com. So, (drumroll please), I’m pleased to present the People’s Choice Award winners for 2022!

    • Unicorn Media ☛ With First Keynote Announcements, SCALE 2023 Looks Like a ‘Must Attend’ Event

      The Southern California Linux Expo, better known as Scale (commonly printed as SCaLE), one of the big tent events on the Linux and open source conference circuit, is bouncing back from the lean Covid years very well.

      Last year, back in the saddle after shutting down due to Covid lockdown in 2021, the event snagged as a keynote speaker none other than Vint Cerf, creator of TCP/IP and widely regarded as one of the, if not the, father of the internet. Who wouldn’t want to see that?

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • CNX Software ☛ U-boot now supports booting Linux from an HTTP server

        Up until now, U-boot would only support the User datagram protocol (UDP) allowing for TFTP and NFS boot, but Linaro has now added support for TCP and HTTP in U-boot in order to boot Linux from common web servers.

        TFTP boot from U-boot has been supported for years, as around the year 2006 I remember implementing TFTP Linux boot for a Karaoke system in order to lower the BoM cost by selecting a smaller flash device, and I also explained how to boot Linux on a TV box with TFTP back in 2014. This requires installing a TFTP server on your server, which is quite a trivial task, but HTTP servers are omnipresent, so it’s a welcome addition to U-boot.

      • Cendyne Naga ☛ Fixing html video playback on chrome

        I do not often include videos on my blog, but when I do, I test to make sure they work. And to my dismay, these HTML5 videos could start, they could pause, but any time I attempted to seek the video playback position, it would fail.

    • Education

      • Data Science Tutorials ☛ Top 7 Skills Required to Become a Data Scientist

        As a result, the pay scale for data scientists is fairly decent, which is one of the primary reasons why people are gravitating toward this field.

        However, as simple as it may sound, becoming a successful data scientist necessitates a set of skills that employers seek.

      • James G ☛ Giving my first talk

        I am taking away many learnings from this talk. First, preparation upfront, and adequate rehersal time, is crucial. I prepared my demos and tested them in advance of the talk, leaving enough time to ensure I could make any changes as needed. This made me feel a lot more comfortable as I was talking. In addition, rehersal time helped me ponder what auxillery resources I should prepare that would make the talk more seamless. For example, I prepared some short code snippets that freed up time in my talk to walk through more of the how to of Webmention.

      • Buttondown ☛ New Workshop, Some Data-ish Pipeline Tricks

        Anyway, on to the main thing. A couple of years ago I started work on a Logic for Programmers pamphlet, then ADDed into some other project. I started work on it again last week with the hope (the hope) of having an early version available by the end of winter. I’m writing the book in Sphinx but compiling it to LaTeX and then a pdf. I like using Sphinx because it’s (relatively) easy to create “directives”, or new types of content with special processing rules.

    • Programming/Development

      • Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Speeding up queries 1000x by sorting my bitmaps

        I’m working on a database system that stores and queries chess games and positions. Right now, it contains 240 million unique positions1 from 3.8 million games. One of the things it needs to do is quickly find all the games where a particular position occurs. I’d also like it to do things like find games where this position occurs and it ends in a draw.

        Bitmaps are really useful here, and with some care they can achieve unbelievable efficiency. They can also be really slow if you’re not careful. It’s a journey.

        We’ll start by looking at how my bitmaps are implemented, and then we’ll see how an assumption punished me severely and how I fixed it to make things a lot faster.

      • Hillel Wayne ☛ Sources Of Complexity: Constraints

        Complexity is bad. Simple software is better than complex software.

        But software is complex for a reason. While people like coming up with grand theories of complexity (Simple Made Easy, No Silver Bullet) there’s very little info out there on the nitty-gritty specific sources of complexity. Without that, all the theories feel to me like the four elements theory. We just don’t have the data needed to come up with something more predictive. 1

        I think a lot about the different sources of complexity. This article is about one particular source.

  • Leftovers

    • Terence Eden ☛ How I became the #1 mapper in New Zealand

      I hate leaderboards. I think competition tends to corrupt the incentives people have to contribute to a goal.

      Yet, at the same time, I was delighted to see that I was the top mapper in the whole of Aotearoa New Zealand.

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ A Short, Totally Unofficial, History of Port Numbers in Web Development

      One such bouncing question deals with port numbers. It seems like every time I run npm start on a web project, it’s a roll of the dice as to which port of localhost I’ll get a local dev server on.

    • Hackaday ☛ Sequencing The Vintage Way

      For most of us, an 8-bit microcomputer means one of the home computers which set so many of us on our way back in the 1980s. But this ignores an entire generation of 1970s 8-bit machines which filled the market for affordable office and industrial desktop computing before we were seduced by Pac-Man or Frogger. It’s one of these, an SWTPC 6809, that’s found its way into the hands of [Look Mum No Computer], and in direct contradiction to his branding, he’s used it to control a synthesizer.

    • Site36 ☛ Matthias Monroy
    • Scheerpost ☛ Hide ‘n Sneak
    • The Nation ☛ Collective Disaster

      After seeing White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s acclaimed 1985 novel, at the New York Film Festival, I discussed the movie with a couple of friends as we walked back to the subway. They had mixed to negative reactions, for a bevy of reasons, but they shared one thing: They felt that the film’s thematic concerns—consumerism as an American religion, the media’s power to shape human behavior, the collapse of high and low culture—were fundamentally dated and quaint. The story of college professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their brood of children and stepchildren confronting an “airborne toxic event”—a noxious cloud from a chemical spill that threatens the fictional town of Blacksmith—comports broadly with the tropes of a disaster film, but the fixation on contemporary pop culture can feel tired when depicted on-screen. We live in the age of watered-down postmodernism; contemporary audiences are trained to closely analyze cultural flotsam, inured to metatextuality and pastiche in forms as varied as Quentin Tarantino films and single-camera sitcoms.

    • Education

      • Phil Eaton ☛ An effective product manager

        There are three specific activities I have loved in some product managers I’ve worked with (and missed in others).

      • The Nation ☛ After an Art Controversy, Hamline Faculty Urge Their President to Resign

        On October 6 of last year, Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor of art history, showed a well-known medieval image of the Prophet Muhammad to her students. What happened in the classroom is a matter of some dispute and an ongoing lawsuit, but afterward, a Muslim student lodged an official complaint with the university, and eventually the chair of her department informed López Prater that she would not be returning in the spring to teach another course as previously planned. By December, the story had become the latest anecdote in the narrative about political correctness on college campuses, evidence that the “woke mob” was running amok.

      • CoryDoctorow ☛ David Graeber’s “Pirate Enlightenment”

        It’s a reworking of Graeber’s anthropology doctoral research, studying the Zana-Malata people of Madagascar, the living descendants of the feminist, anarchist pirates who ruled the island in the early 18th century.

      • Idiomdrottning ☛ Paragraph

        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.

      • TruthOut ☛ Media Literacy for Young People Is Crucial — But Rarely Taught in Schools
      • Scheerpost ☛ Missing Links: The Legacy of Textbook History

        It took almost 10 years of teaching before I finally grasped the extent to which secondary American history textbooks fostered misunderstanding and confusion.  The depth of the problem became apparent following class discussions of a 12-page reading assignment on the “Origins of the Cold War.” When I made […]

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Free the Books,’ Say Opponents of New Florida Law as Teachers Remove or Cover Libraries

        Teachers in at least one Florida county this week began removing or covering books in their classrooms to avoid running afoul of a new law requiring every volume to be vetted by a state-trained “media specialist”—violation of which could result in felony charges.

    • Hardware

      • Hackaday ☛ Lanna Factory Makes You Work For Your Lampshade

        While you could 3D print a lampshade, there’s something to be said for having a more active role in the process of creating an object. [THINKK Studio] has made custom lampshades as easy as riding a bike.

      • Hackaday ☛ You Can Help Build A Resin Printer Review Database

        Picking the best resin (SLA) printer is not an easy task. Every large and small 3D printer manufacturer offers a range of models covering many features that are backed by an equally extensive range of customer support. Although review sites and user feedback on forums can help with making a decision, especially for beginners it can feel like just a wild guess. Even for advanced users, it is a chore to stay on top of all the goings-on within the world of resin printers. This is where [VOG] (VOGMan, formerly VegOilGuy) as a popular resin printer review site is asking for feedback (video also linked below) from his viewers on their printer experiences.

      • Hackaday ☛ New Commodore VIC-20 Build

        In a recent episode of [The Retro Shack], a new Commodore VIC-20 is built, using a ‘Vicky Twenty’ replacement PCB by [Bob’s Bits] as the base and as many new components as could be found. The occasion for this was that a viewer had sent in a VIC-20 that turned out to be broken, so in order to diagnose it, building a new one with known working parts seemed incredibly useful.

      • Hackaday ☛ Translating And Broadcasting Spoken Morse Code

        When the first radios and telegraph lines were put into service, essentially the only way to communicate was to use Morse code. The first transmitters had extremely inefficient designs by today’s standards, so this was more a practical limitation than a choice. As the technology evolved there became less and less reason to use Morse to communicate, but plenty of amateur radio operators still use this mode including [Kevin] aka [KB9RLW] who has built a circuit which can translate spoken Morse code into a broadcasted Morse radio signal.

      • Hackaday ☛ Secure LoRa Mesh Communication Network

        The Internet has allowed us to communicate more easily than ever before, and thanks to modern cell-phone networks, we don’t even have to be tied down to a hard line anymore. But what if you want something a little more direct? Maybe you’re in an area with no cell-phone coverage, or you don’t want to use public networks for whatever reason. For those cases, you might be interested in this Secure Communication Network project by [Thomas].

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • The Nation ☛ Biden’s Former Covid Czar Steps Up to Run the Show

        Jeff Zients seems to be coming into the role of White House chief of staff out of central casting. At a moment of economic uncertainty, the former private equity executive radiates can-do confidence. As the Covid pandemic drags on through the winter, Zients can cite his last résumé entry—Covid czar for the first year and half of the Biden administration—as another high-profile exercise in building public confidence and managing public expectations. Perhaps most crucially, Zients can draw on his private-sector bona fides to ensure the major legislative victories of the Biden White House are secured and translated into palpable gains for ordinary Americans in the run-up to a prospective Biden bid for reelection in 2024. At the same time, Zients’s critics say that his record of equivocal deal-cutting has been a serious liability throughout his career in both the private and public sector.

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Shameful’: UK Approves ‘Emergency’ Use of Banned Bee-Killing Pesticide

        Biodiversity defenders have sounded the alarm about the United Kingdom government’s Monday decision to provide another so-called “emergency” exception for the use of an outlawed neonicotinoid pesticide lethal to bees.

      • TruthOut ☛ The US Finally Removes a Major Barrier to Opioid Addiction Treatment
      • Project Censored ☛ “Forever Chemicals” in Rainwater a Global Threat to Human Health – Validated Independent News

        To reach this conclusion, the researchers compared levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (or PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) in rainwater from around the world with the drinking water guidelines established by environmental agencies in the United States and Denmark, “which are the most stringent advisories known globally.” Based on the latest US guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, “rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink,” the lead author of the study, Ian Cousins, stated in a press release.

      • Pro Publica ☛ NV Gov. Lombardo Turns to Lobbyist Tied to COVID Lab Scandal for Help With Budget

        During his contentious campaign to become Nevada governor, Joe Lombardo accused the Democratic incumbent of catering to the family of a donor and their lobbyist who helped an error-prone COVID-19 testing lab get licensed in the state.

        Shortly after he won the race, Lombardo, a Republican, quietly turned to that same lobbyist for help building the state budget, giving him access to confidential documents and putting him in a position that allowed him to advocate for state funding sought by his clients.

    • Proprietary

      • Reuters ☛ Microsoft cloud outage hits users around the world | Reuters

        Microsoft Corp on Wednesday was hit with a networking outage that took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook, potentially affecting millions of users globally.

      • BBC ☛ Microsoft Outlook and Teams down for tens of thousands around world – BBC News

        Data from outage tracking website Downdetector showed more than 5,000 reports in the UK alone.

      • Jay Little ☛ MacOS is the Worst Part of Apple Silicon

        Fast forward to today and the situation is far more murkier and less clear. For starters, MacOS lacks a wide variety of quality of life features that you can basically expect out of the box in Windows along with most high end Linux desktop environments. For example the ability to easily move application windows between multiple monitors using keyboard shortcuts, or snap windows into place so they partially occupy portions of a particular screen are completely missing out of the box. Yes there are third party applications like Rectangle that will add these features to MacOS at no cost, but I can’t help but to wonder why a modern OS in 2023 requires third party addons for something that basically became standard functionality when they first debutted with Windows 7 in 2009.

      • Stacey on IoT ☛ Ransomware may be waning, but wiper malware is growing

        Ransomware payments are dropping even as there’s been a shift in hackers’ tactics toward using wiper malware to delete data rather than ransom it, according to data released in two reports issued this week. First up, Chainalysis, which tracks cryptocurrency payments to and from known hackers’ accounts, says ransomware groups extorted $311 million less in 2022 compared to the $768 million they scored from victims in 2021.

      • Ciprian Dorin Craciun ☛ Containerized deployments, the Death Star of complexity

        The article starts with the rise and fall of Java EE, then it goes through the rise and fall of (SOAP/XML based) web-services, and finally it lands on the current hot topic of containerized deployments.

        It’s perhaps a bit of dry writing, however it boiled down the situation quite nicely. (Although I might be extremely biased…)

    • Linux Foundation

      • SJVN ☛ Can open source save the metaverse?

        Who knows? It’s a mess of old ideas–I’d declared AR was old hat back in 2009–dressed up with new language. But, combined, there may be something novel and worthwhile here. But, neither Meta nor any other company will pull that off. You know who might, though? The newly minted Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF), that’s who.

        Why do I think an open-source approach might succeed when Meta Reality Labs alone has spent billions on the metaverse? Indeed, Meta’s already lost over $10 billion in 2022 alone. Looking ahead, Meta CFO, Dave Wehner, said, he expected, “that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year.”

        Ouch!

        I believe the open-source way can win out for the same reason it has in so many other fields. By enabling people to work together via the Linux Foundation-sponsored Open Metaverse Foundation, they can create an open metaverse that will enable everyone to play and profit from it. By enabling everyone to work with open hardware, open code, and open standards, the market pie will be larger for everyone.

    • Security

      • SJVN ☛ New Linux kernel SMB security flaw revealed

        Before Christmas 2022, there was a truly nasty security hole in the Linux 5.15 in-kernel Server Message Block (SMB) server, ksmbd. It could be used to execute code in the kernel context. In short: Bad. But, the newest ksmbd security problem, discovered by the Sysdig Threat Team, is relatively minor.

        Ksmbd, introduced to the kernel in 2021, was developed by Samsung. Its goal was to deliver speedy SMB3 file-serving performance. SMB is used in Windows and Linux–via Samba–as an important file server protocol. Most distributions do not have Ksmbd compiled into the kernel or enabled by default.

      • Wladimir Palant ☛ IPinside: Korea’s mandatory spyware | Almost Secure

        On our tour of South Korea’s so-called security applications we’ve already took a look at TouchEn nxKey, an application meant to combat keyloggers by … checks notes … making keylogging easier. Today I want to shed some light on another application that many people in South Korea had to install on their computers: IPinside LWS Agent by Interezen.

        The stated goal of the application is retrieving your “real” IP address to prevent online fraud. I found however that it collects way more data. And while it exposes this trove of data to any website asking politely, it doesn’t look like it is all too helpful for combating actual fraud.

      • Krebs On Security ☛ Administrator of RSOCKS Proxy Botnet Pleads Guilty

        Denis Emelyantsev, a 36-year-old Russian man accused of running a massive botnet called RSOCKS that stitched malware into millions of devices worldwide, pleaded guilty to two counts of computer crime violations in a California courtroom this week. The plea comes just months after Emelyantsev was extradited from Bulgaria, where he told investigators, “America is looking for me because I have enormous information and they need it.”

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Tor ☛ Announcing new board members

          We are excited to announce the result of our open call for board members – three new members are joining the Tor Project’s Board of Directors: Esra’a Al Shafei, Sarah Gran and Christian Kaufman! Each new member comes to Tor with a different set of expertise that will help the organization and our community. At the end of this post, you can read each of their bios.

          Please join us in welcoming Esra’a, Sarah, and Christian to the board!

        • Techdirt ☛ Federal Court Says Scraping Court Records Is Most Likely Protected By The First Amendment

          Automated web scraping can be problematic. Just look at Clearview, which has leveraged open access to public websites to create a facial recognition program it now sells to government agencies. But web scraping can also be quite useful for people who don’t have the power or funding government agencies and their private contractors have access to.

        • Site36 ☛ Use of Spanish spyware in Germany illegal, Bundestag report says

          `Such digital surveillance would be illegal in Germany. This is the conclusion of a study by the Scientific Services in the Bundestag, commissioned by Andrej Hunko, a member of the Left Party. „Intelligence activities of foreign intelligence services in Germany are fundamentally inadmissible as an exercise of foreign state power, unless the Federal Republic permits them,“ the experts write. However, there is no legal basis for such permission. This also applies to the surveillance of telecommunications.

          This is also the view of intelligence services expert Thorsten Wetzling, who heads the „Surveillance, Fundamental Rights and Democracy“ department at the Berlin-based Stiftung Neue Verantwortung. He further refers to the case law of the Federal Constitutional Court on foreign telecommunications surveillance by the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), according to which independent surveillance measures by foreign services in Germany should not depend on simple tolerance on the part of the federal government in Berlin.

        • Site36 ☛ Europol is not investigating „Europe’s Watergate“

          The EU Parliament is probing one of Europe’s biggest espionage scandals, but has little power to do so. Europol should investigate the misuse of „state trojan „Pegasus“ in the EU, MEPs demand. However, this would only be possible with the permission of governments, which would be violating fundamental rights.

          Governmental surveillance software such as „Pegasus“ is used to monitor mobile phones remotely. The programmes, known in Germany as „state trojans“, can be installed on devices of targeted persons via manipulated links. This turns the mobile phone into a bug: attackers can switch on the microphone and camera, read out location data and listen in on all communications.

          The Canadian civil rights organisation Citizen Lab was able to prove in 2016 that some EU states were using „Pegasus“ to spy on political opponents, their lawyers and even critical journalists. This violates the fundamental rights of many of those affected, but also the confidential lawyer-client relationship or the protection of sources, which is important for media professionals.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Scheerpost ☛ ‘This Is a National Emergency’: Dems Push for Assault Weapons Ban Amid String of Massacres

        It is far past time to reenact an assault weapons ban and get these weapons of war out of our communities.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Ukraine’s Corruption Comes Home To Roost

        Around 15 advisers, deputy ministers and regional governors either resigned or were fired as a massive corruption drive shakes up the Ukrainian government.

      • Meduza ☛ Zelensky signs law increasing penalties for desertion and other military offenses — Meduza

        Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has approved amendments to the country’s Criminal Code that impose harsher penalties for soldiers who commit certain offenses during wartime.

      • Meduza ☛ A casting call for opportunists The Kremlin is gearing up for local and parliamentary ‘elections’ in the annexed Ukrainian regions — Meduza

        Across the regions it annexed last year in Ukraine, the Putin administration and its domestic politics team are busy laying the groundwork to “elect” parliamentary and local officials. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev spoke with several Kremlin insiders about the preparations and who is in charge of forming collaborationist governments in occupied Ukraine.

      • The Nation ☛ The Department of Defense Has Delivered Another Massive Intelligence Failure

        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 United States 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.

      • The Nation ☛ Too Violent?
      • Counter Punch ☛ Swiss Miss: FBI as “Good Guys”?

        You can judge an audience by how much bullshit they tolerate from the podium. By that standard, the World Economic Forum attendees in Davos, Switzerland last week were either depraved or craven. Why else would FBI chief Christopher Wray not get hooted down for portraying his agency as “good guys?”

        Why was the FBI boss even making an appearance at a conference chockful of political weasels, billionaires, and depraved activists like former Vice President Al Gore? Actually, Wray was part of a panel on national security that included luminaries such as Ukrainian Vice-Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, who could have offered insights from her government’s perpetual failed war against pervasive corruption. Wray boasted that “the level of collaboration between the private sector and the government, especially the FBI has, I think, made significant strides.”

      • Scheerpost ☛ Scott Ritter: The Nightmare of NATO Equipment Being Sent to Ukraine

        The West’s recent approval of more military assistance for Kiev risks nuclear nightmare, fails Ukrainian expectations and rebukes the World War II history enshrined in a prominent Soviet war memorial in Berlin.

      • Scheerpost ☛ US Funds “Independent Journalism” in Cuba to Spread Propaganda, Ex Spy Admits

        Former CIA analyst Fulton Armstrong told The Guardian that, in Cuba, “a lot of the so-called independent journalists are indirectly funded by the US”. They spread anti-government disinformation with the support of the NED.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Strong Militaries, Weak Society: The Missing Story in the Global Firepower Ranking

        The Global Firepower ranking was published on January 6. The annual report classifies the world’s strongest militaries based on over 60 factors, including size, spending and technological advancements.

        The report, which placed the United States military on top, followed by Russia, China, India and the UK, raised more questions than answers, with some accusing GFP, the organization that compiled the report, of being biased, sloppy and highly politicized.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Right & Left to Join in D.C. Protest: “Not one more penny for war in Ukraine.

        February 19, New Anti-Interventionist Coalition To March To White House from Lincoln Memorial.

        On February 19, Washington, DC, will witness a protest against the war in Ukraine that marks a sharp departure from past demonstrations.  The lead demand is simple and direct, “Not One More Penny for war in Ukraine.”  It is a demand that emphasizes what we in the US can do to end the war, not what others can do.  After all, the only government we have the power to influence is our own.

      • Democracy Now ☛ As Asian Americans Reel After Mass Shootings in California, Will Congress Take Any Action on Guns?

        As California is reeling after three mass shootings over the past three days, we go to Oakland to speak with Connie Wun, co-founder of the AAPI Women Lead organization and a researcher on race and gender violence, and look at the state of gun control with Nick Suplina, managing director for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety.

      • Counter Punch ☛ The Pentagon’s Massive Intelligence Failure on China: Climate Change

        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.

        The Pentagon is required by law to provide Congress and the public with an annual report on “military and security developments involving the People’s Republic of China,” or PRC, over the next 20 years. The 2022 version, 196 pages of detailed information published last November 29th, focused on its current and future military threat to the United States. In two decades, so we’re assured, China’s military — the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA — will be superbly equipped to counter Washington should a conflict arise over Taiwan or navigation rights in the South China Sea. But here’s the shocking thing: in those nearly 200 pages of analysis, there wasn’t a single word — not one — devoted to China’s role in what will pose the most pressing threat to our security in the years to come: runaway climate change.

      • Meduza ☛ Ukrainian media: Brovary helicopter crash was due to fog and disrupted navigation — Meduza

        The January 18 helicopter crash that killed 14 in Brovary was probably due to bad weather and a convergence of wartime factors, reports the Ukrainian news outlet Strana.ua, citing sources in the Ministry of the Interior. Flying in the fog, with poor visibility, the pilot was late to notice a high-rise building, sources claim.

      • Meduza ☛ Moscow art museum removes painting containing sign that says artist ‘doesn’t want to defeat anybody,’ citing ‘political subtext’ — Meduza

        Moscow’s All-Russian Decorative Art Museum has removed a painting by contemporary Russian artist Dmitry Shagin, the founder of the art group Mitki, from its display. The painting shows six people in the blue and white striped shirts traditionally worn by many Russian military servicemen holding up a sign that reads, “Mitki don’t want to defeat anybody!”

      • Meduza ☛ Belgorod governor: 25 residents killed by shelling, 96 more injured since Russia invaded Ukraine — Meduza

        In a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov told him that 25 residents had been killed, and 96 more injured, as a result of Ukrainian shelling since the start of the war (which he called a “special military operation”).

      • Meduza ☛ ‘Thе fog of war spreads over daily life’ Human rights lawyer Pavel Chikov explains how arbitrary and cruel law enforcement is reducing Russian society to paranoia and paralysis — Meduza

        Last month, attorney Pavel Chikov joined Meduza’s Russian-language podcast “What Happened” to discuss Russia’s main legal trend in 2022: the strengthening of the police state inside the country against a backdrop of the war in Ukraine. The show’s host, Vladislav Gorin, premised the interview on the thought that Russia’s increasingly repressive regulation of society is both the domestic equivalent of the Kremlin’s fear-based foreign policy and an instrument of achieving Putin’s military goals by forcing the population to power the invasion. Pavel Chikov described Russia’s changing legal landscape from his perspective as a practicing attorney and the head of the Agora human rights organization. The interview addressed major changes in Russia’s repressive machinery since the start of the invasion and assessed this system’s capabilities now, a year into the war. Anna Razumnaya distills the show’s key highlights.

      • Meduza ☛ ‘Wagner opened the door for me’ How a convicted murderer became a decorated ‘war hero’ in Russia — Meduza

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • The Nation ☛ The Original Sin Is We Classify Too Much

        With a sitting president, a former president, and a former vice president now implicated in the mishandling of classified information, the classification system itself is coming under scrutiny. This attention is long overdue. But there’s a danger that some observers will conclude we need stronger protections for our nation’s secrets, such as tighter handling restrictions or enhanced penalties for violations.

      • TruthOut ☛ Whistleblowers Face a Double Standard When It Comes to Classified Docs
      • Counter Punch ☛ Doltish Ways: Biden’s Documents Problem

        Through the course of his political life, the current US president has often been injudicious. He has stumbled, bungled and miscalculated.  His electoral victory was fortuitous, aided by a number of factors, not least the conduct of his opponent and the murderous gift of a global pandemic.  Along with his fellow Democrats, he has made the issue of Donald Trump a matter of pathology rather than politics.

        It is precisely that pathological approach that has come back to haunt his administration.  While Trump continues to be characterised as the proto-authoritarian in waiting, squirreling off classified documents that should have been deposited in the national archives, Biden claimed to be above such behaviour.

    • Environment

      • Project Censored ☛ Deadly Decade for Environmental Activists – Validated Independent News

        Killing of environmental activists have been concentrated in the Global South, with 68 percent occurring in Latin America. Three-hundred-forty-two killings occurred in Brazil, 322 occurred in Columbia, 154 occurred in Mexico, 177 occurred in Honduras, and 80 occurred in Guatemala. Outside Latin America, the Philippines accounted for 270 killings and India accounted for 79.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Exxon Got Rich, We Got Played

        When I was a teenager, I knew global warming was caused by fossil fuels. So did Exxon.

        For decades, Exxon has been hiding the truth about the climate crisis, burying their own scientific reports. From 1970 to 2003, the oil company ran studies that accurately predicted the disastrous consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Climate Crisis Making Millions Too Poor to Escape… the Climate Crisis

        As the worsening climate emergency creates an increasing number of migrants around the world, the economic effects of the planetary crisis are paradoxically making millions of people throughout the Global South too poor to escape its ravages.

      • Energy/Transportation

        • DeSmog ☛ Louisiana Democratic Party ‘Funneled’ Utility Donations to Climate Candidate Challenger

          Louisiana Democratic Party leaders are accused of funneling thousands of dollars from utility companies to the campaign of a fossil fuel–friendly candidate who ran for reelection on the state’s utility regulatory committee.

          Campaign finance records filed this week show that the Party received more than $90,000 in donations from utility companies, energy producers, and their executives during the elections for two Louisiana Public Service Commissioners. The same utility companies — Entergy, Cleco, and CenterPoint Energy — also donated directly to incumbent Lambert Boissiere III, whose campaign was largely sponsored by industry groups. Entergy, Cleco, and CenterPoint Energy did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

        • Common Dreams ☛ Shareholder Resolutions Push Big Banks to Phase Out Fossil Fuel Financing

          Taking aim at Wall Street banks financing the oil, gas, and coal extraction fueling the climate crisis, a coalition of institutional investors on Tuesday announced the filing of climate-related shareholder resolutions in an effort to force “more climate-friendly policies that better align with” the firms’ public commitments to combating the planetary emergency.

      • Wildlife/Nature

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Patrick Breyer ☛ Political advertising: EU lawmakers want to stop surveillance-based political advertising

        Today, the European Parliament’s Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) adopted amendments [1] [2] to draft legislation which seek to restrict the use of personal data to target online political advertisements. Only personal data explicitly provided for this purpose by citizens with their consent would be allowed to use for targeting, excluding the use of behavioral and inferred intelligence on citizens private life. IMCO thus follows the position of the LIBE Committee, which has the lead regarding the proposed regulation of targeting.

      • BBC ☛ Twitter sued by Crown Estate over alleged unpaid rent at UK HQ

        The Estate – which oversees a property portfolio belonging to the King – filed a claim against Twitter in the High Court in London last week, according to Reuters news agency.

        The alleged arrears relate to office space near Piccadilly Circus in central London, the BBC has been told.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ A surprising plan: the state may take over the best Hungarian spas
      • The Nation ☛ The Growing Political Power of TikTok

        Gen Z voters are an increasingly powerful political demographic, especially for Democrats and progressives. That much was proven in the 2022 midterm elections, where high turnout among young voters helped fend off the anticipated “red wave,” keeping a Democrat-controlled Senate and near-equal split in the Republican-controlled House in the new Congress, which started its term this month. Indeed, the 2022 midterms saw the second-highest turnout among young voters in three decades (just behind 2018): An estimated 27 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 voted in the midterms.

      • The Nation ☛ Victor Navasky Recognized the Power of Cartooning

        Although Adolf Hitler was a master of propaganda, he was continually flummoxed by one particular form of communication: the editorial cartoon. Perhaps because the Nazi leader had a high opinion of himself, he couldn’t stand to be caricatured. The very sight of an inky mockery of his goose-stepping gait and toothbrush moustache drove Hitler into a spittling, almost frothy, spasm of rage.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Jeremy Clarkson Must Parade Naked through Every Town in Britain, while Crowds Throw Lumps of Shit at Him

        That is obviously the only recourse left for Clarkson to make amends for the remarks that have caused so much outrage, now that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (aka Harry and Meghan) have (again) rejected his grovelling apology. My female mentor thinks he should be cut up into meat and sold in his farm, but that is, I think, a tad excessive, and would lead a bad taste in the mouth, something not entirely inappropriate.

        I am of course referring to Jeremy Clarkson’s comments about Meghan Markle in his Sun newspaper column. They have been judged in the court of public opinion as second only to Mein Kampf in their heinousness. The words causing the most offense are: “At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.” I will return to his comments later, but must first address the reaction to them.

      • Counter Punch ☛ Debunking the GOP’s “Frivolous” Lawsuits Lie

        For years Montanans have been subjected to the claim that “environmental extremists” have been flooding the court system with “frivolous lawsuits.”

        These absolutely false accusations have come from some of our top elected Republican officials including Sen. Daines, Gov. Gianforte, and Reps. Zinke and Rosendale to name a few. Strangely enough not one of these politicians has ever been able to actually cite a Montana judge tossing an environmental lawsuit as frivolous.

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Corrupt Bargain’: Omar, Schiff, and Swalwell Blast McCarthy for Blocking Them From Committees

        Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday formally blocked Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from serving on the House Intelligence Committee and is expected to hold a floor vote to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from the chamber’s foreign affairs panel, moves that the Democratic lawmakers slammed as “political vengeance.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ Sinema Challenger Gallego Sets Arizona Fundraising Record With $1 Million 24-Hour Haul

        Just over 24 hours after announcing his 2024 U.S. Senate candidacy for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s seat in Arizona, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego set multiple fundraising records and made clear the vast difference between his approach to public service and that of his opponent.

      • Democracy Now ☛ Jeremy Scahill: Biden & Trump Scandals Point to Deeper Problems with Overclassification of Gov’t Docs

        We speak with The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill about the brewing scandals over the handling of classified documents by President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, and how they “point to deeper systemic problems with Washington’s obsession with secrecy.” While the details differ, Scahill says both cases show powerful players in Washington who routinely mishandle classified documents face different rules than whistleblowers who have endured the full brunt of the law for exposing government secrets in the public interest.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Crisis in Peru Is What Happens When Popular Aspirations Ripped Away

        With all eyes on the fight for democratic government in Brazil, with its obvious parallels to events in the United States, it’s easy to miss another equally alarming struggle in the region. Peru has been shaken by protests and violence since the Peruvian Congress removed President Pedro Castillo from office on December 7 following his own attempt to shutter Congress. As of this writing, 55 people have died so far in the unrest, with 18 killed in the town of Juliaca on January 9 alone.

      • Common Dreams ☛ South Dakota AG, Gov. Threaten Felony Charges for Pharmacists Prescribing Abortion Pills

        South Dakota’s Republican governor and attorney general on Tuesday issued a threatening letter directed at the state’s pharmacists in response to a recent move by the Biden administration to ease restrictions on dispensing abortion pills amid the GOP’s nationwide assault on reproductive freedom.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Blue Dogs Devour Themselves Over ‘Common Sense’ Disagreement

        The Democratic Party’s conservative Blue Dog Coalition has been slashed in half due partially to a disagreement within its ranks over efforts to attract more members, Politico reported on Tuesday, with a number of corporate lawmakers insisting on preserving the Blue Dogs’ “longstanding legacy” and name despite its reputation as a “Southern ‘boys’ club’.”

      • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Unprecedented Danger’: Doomsday Clock Set at 90 Seconds to Midnight

        “We are living in a time of unprecedented danger, and the Doomsday Clock time reflects that reality.”

      • TruthOut ☛ Trump Plans to Ditch His Own Social Media Site Upon Returning to Twitter — Report
      • TruthOut ☛ The RNC Is Already Warning Its Nominee Will Boycott 2024 Presidential Debate
      • Common Dreams ☛ To Save Our Democracy, We Must Transcend Bill Clinton’s Legacy

        Thirty years ago this month, Bill Clinton launched a presidency he claimed, in his inaugural address, would “reinvent America.” Clinton was right: he did reinvent America, definitively shifting the Democratic Party away from a politics that saw economic security for American working people as the fundamental task of government, a path that had brought the party decades of political success. The disastrous consequences of that shift, limiting working Americans’ expectations about how our political system can improve their lives, are with us to this day. To save our imperiled democracy, we must definitively transcend the political circumstances Clinton brought us.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ They were given two days to pack up the child’s life
      • Counter Punch ☛ Biden 2024 Decision Pits the Party’s Elites Against Most Democrats

        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.”

        Donald Trump’s obstructive refusal to cooperate with the federal investigation into the far more numerous classified documents in his possession stands in sharp contrast with Biden’s apparently full cooperation with the Justice Department. Yet Biden now faces a documents scandal that’s sure to fester for quite a while — the average length of special counsel investigations has been upwards of 900 days — and the impacts on his plans to seek re-election are unclear.

      • Meduza ☛ Russian State Duma passes law lifting requirement that legislators declare income publicly — Meduza

        The Russian State Duma has passed the third and final reading of a law that lifts the requirement that lawmakers publicly declare their income.

      • Meduza ☛ Russian authorities move to establish 24 new penitentiaries in annexed Ukrainian regions — Meduza

        The Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (“FSIN”) has received a government order to set up 24 new penal colonies in the Russian-annexed regions of Ukraine. The order was signed by the Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • Salon ☛ The power of a conspiracy theory — and a 3-step plan to deprogram American idiocracy

          More than half of all Americans cannot read at a sixth-grade level. High quality primary and secondary public education, as well as the college and university system — which should create citizens who are capable of critical thinking and acting as responsible members of a democratic community — have been systematically targeted for destruction by the Republican Party and “conservative” movement….

          To some significant degree, the [Internet], social media and its algorithms, our ubiquitous smart phones and digital technology, and a larger media culture designed to drive what is euphemistically described as “engagement,” damages people’s ability to think deeply and critically about complex matters.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • uni Yale ☛ Silencing Science: How Indonesia Is Censoring Wildlife Research

        Under President Joko Widodo, Indonesia has gained international praise for its conservation policies. But now the government is clamping down on scientists who are questioning official claims that the country’s endangered orangutan and rhino populations are increasing.

      • duvaR ☛ Turkish inmate’s letter gets censored after writing about dream

        A prison administration has censored an inmate’s letter to his wife that told about his dream. The jail authorities argued that dreams “are used for organizational communication purposes within the crime group of the applicant.” The issue was taken to the Constitutional Court which ruled that the inmate’s right to communication was violated and ordered the state to pay compensation.

      • Copenhagen Post ☛ Fallout from another Koran burning: How Rasmus Paludan’s actions could impact affairs of immense importance

        Rasmussen referred to Paludan as a “Danish-Swedish” national, but he is Danish-raised, and it was in Denmark that he trained and worked as a lawyer before becoming a full-time agitator in the build-up to the 2019 Danish General Election, where his party Stram Kurs failed to win any seats.

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • TruthOut ☛ Florida Teachers Cover Books in Classrooms Over Fear of Anti-“WOKE” Laws
      • TruthOut ☛ House Coalition of Conservative Democrats Falls to Half Its Size
      • Common Dreams ☛ Probe Demanded After ‘Cold-Blooded Killing’ of Eswatini Human Rights Lawyer

        Human rights advocates on Monday implored Eswatini authorities to launch a swift, rigorous, and independent investigation into the recent killing of renowned pro-democracy lawyer Thulani Maseko.

      • FAIR ☛ ‘The Cry Is “Lumumba Lives”—His Ideas, His Principles’

        Janine Jackson interviewed Friends of the Congo’s Maurice Carney about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba for the January 20, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

      • EFF ☛ The Next Stage in Security Expert’s Trial Set for January 31

        After years of pretrial procedures, Bini’s actual trial began in January of last year and resumed in May. This was not the end of trial proceedings because the defense still had evidence to present, and the court still had to hear Bini’s testimony and parties’ closing arguments. The trial was set to continue in August, but it was rescheduled given the absence of an expert Swedish-Spanish translator, a right guaranteed by Ecuadorian Law for foreign defendants. The court called a new hearing for November, with no information on whether or not an expert translator would be present. Again, resumption of the trial was delayed when the prosecutor did not show up for the hearing, presenting a medical certificate two days later.

        The next trial date is now set for January 31, though it is unlikely that this single day will be enough to complete the proceedings.  We hope the court carefully assesses testimonies and alleged evidence, ensuring Ola Bini’s rights; misunderstandings of technology and political implications must not guide the final outcome. 

        The core accusation against Bini relies mainly on a printed image of a telnet session (telnet is an insecure communication protocol that has largely been abandoned for public-facing technologies). This image, which was supposedly taken by Bini himself and sent to a colleague, shows the telnet login screen of a router. Although the image’s authenticity is under debate, it is not even demonstrative of anything beyond the normal procedures that computer security professionals conduct as part of their work. Centro de Autonomía Digital, co-founded by Ola Bini, reported that expert witnesses on both sides of the case agreed the photo fails to sustain the prosecution’s accusations. In fact, the prosecution’s technical expert reportedly told the court that the report issued by Ecuador’s national communications provider about the alleged attack didn’t include sufficient evidence that any access has ever happened. Expert witnesses on behalf of the defense, including Tor co-founder Roger Dingledine, reiterated the lack of evidence of non-authorized access to a computer system.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Monopolies

      • Common Dreams ☛ DOJ Suit Against Google Heralded as Among ‘Most Important Antitrust Cases’ in US History

        Anti-monopoly advocates on Tuesday praised the Biden administration and eight states for launching a federal antitrust lawsuit that could break up Google, which is accused of illegally dominating the digital advertising market.

      • NPR ☛ Taylor Swift fans will protest outside the Senate’s Ticketmaster hearing

        Critics have long accused Ticketmaster of being a monopoly, especially after its controversial merger with Live Nation (now its parent company) in 2010. But outrage reached a new pitch after its botched presale process for Swift’s The Eras Tour in November, when long wait times, exorbitant fees and website outages left thousands of fans frustrated and empty-handed.

        After years of complaints about high fees, murky resale practices and other issues, the incident seemed to galvanize fans and lawmakers alike. Attorneys general of several states launched consumer protection investigations, many Democratic lawmakers called for Ticketmaster to be broken up and dozens of Swift fans sued the company for fraud and antitrust violations.

      • Techdirt ☛ Amazon’s Dying Smile Donation Program… Was Really All About Amazon Keeping Referral Fees To Google Down

        You may have heard last week that Amazon has announced the end of its “AmazonSmile” program, in which you could shop at Amazon, and a portion of all of the money you paid would actually go to the charity of your choice. Amazon claimed that the program “has not grown to create the impact we had originally hoped” and (perhaps reasonably!) implied that the overhead of delivering small amounts to many different charities was not very efficient. The company noted that the “average” donation to charities was less than $230 per charity.

      • Copyrights

        • Techdirt ☛ Rockstar Releases Same Buggy, Broken ‘GTA Trilogy’ Game To Steam… But On Sale!

          Over a year ago, we discussed an annoying and strange set of actions taken by Rockstar and Take2, the companies behind the popular Grand Theft Auto series of games. Two actions were taken in sequence by those companies that were clearly related. First was that they worked to get a fan-made GTA 4 mod taken down, after learning that the mod essentially brought the cities and some of the gameplay from previous GTA games into GTA 4. Shortly after that was done, Rockstar released GTA Trilogy, which was a re-release bundle of those same older games the mod was incorporating. The problem is that GTA Trilogy was such a broken mess that the company had to pull the games out of online stores almost immediately. The launcher for the game was broken, the games were buggy as hell, and so on.

        • Techdirt ☛ The World’s First Robot Lawyer Isn’t A Lawyer, And I’m Not Sure It’s Even A Robot

          Note: This post is an adaptation of what started initially as a Twitter thread.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Bungie Expert: Destiny 2 Cheats Logged “Active Military” Patient Data

          In June 2022, Bungie obtained a $13.5m copyright infringement judgment against defendants who supplied Destiny 2 cheating software ‘Wallhax’. New filings by Bungie claim that Wallhax logged users’ machines, including medical data of Department of Defense or “active military” personnel. Meanwhile, two defendants are now testifying on behalf of Bungie.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Big Brother: TV Channel Staff Told to Report Password Sharers For Piracy

          Season 23 of Big Brother has just got underway in Brazil, and broadcaster Globo is taking no chances. In a leaked email, Globo staff are informed that when people share too much BBB23 content on social media, it hurts the show and the company, and it needs to be stopped. And if staff suspect people of sharing their passwords, they should be reported too.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

New Record Low: Only One ‘Linux’ Article in ZDNet in More Than Two Weeks

Posted in Deception, FUD at 5:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Previously we saw 13 days or so

ZDNet went dry

Summary: Only a few years ago ZDNet published about 3 “Linux” stories per day (mostly FUD pieces); now it’s a ghost town, painted in ‘alien green’; considering ZDNet’s agenda (and sponsors) maybe it’s better this way

Links 25/01/2023: Pale Moon 32.0 and DXVK 2.1

Posted in News Roundup at 4:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • mintCast Podcast ☛ mintCast 404 – The Tenacity of Tenacity

        First up in the news, RPi adds an autofocus camera, Fairphone2 hits EOL, more Tenacity than ever, new Unity, Xubuntu Minimal arrives soon, Brave adds Bridges, Kodi 20 is released, Libvirt 9.0 is out, Google gets shot down, and new features arrive in Firefox 109;

    • Graphics Stack

      • Free Desktop ☛ [Mesa-announce] [ANNOUNCE] mesa 23.0.0-rc3
        Hi list!

Here is a slightly early release for once! I'm giong to be not working
tomorrow, so I thought I'd give you a little treat (and save me having
to remember to do the release on Thursday). We've got a nice array of
fixes here, touching a little bit of evertying, but not too much of
anything.

Right now we're trending towards a release next week, and not an rc4
(there are no issues on the blocking milestone), so if you have any
critical issues make sure you get them on the milestone before next
Wednesday!

Cheers,
Dylan

    • Applications

      • DebugPoint ☛ 5 Best Free Code Editors for Ubuntu and Other Linux [Ed: Why does this list begin with proprietary spyware controlled by Microsoft? This makes no sense.]

        Here are five free code editors for Ubuntu and other Linux systems which you can try out for your workflow.

        There is absolutely no shortage of code or text editors in the Linux ecosystem. Hence finding the best one for your taste requires a little exploration.

        Whether a beginner or a seasoned developer, finding the perfect code editor can make a big difference in your day-to-day routine.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • sRGB↔L*a*b*↔LChab conversions
      • Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Install VMware Workstation Pro on Debian

        Do you want to operate multiple operating systems on your computer without dual boot? If yes, then VMware Workstation, a popular virtualization tool is what you need that lets you add multiple guest OS on your single PC.

        VMware Workstation is available in two different versions: VMware Workstation Player and VMware Workstation Pro. Workstation Player is a non-commercial that offers basic VMware functionality while VMware Workstation Pro offers advanced and professional features for which you need to buy a license key.

        In this article, I’ll walk you through installing VMware Workstation Pro on Debian 11/10 operating system.

      • Linux Shell Tips ☛ How To Install and Use Docker on Rocky Linux 9/8

        So, do you want to run application processes in complete isolation from your underlying Linux operating system, just like a virtual machine? Docker is an open-source application that fulfills the same purpose along with enabling developers to build and deploy applications consistently.

        Docker is available in two main editions: open source and free Docker Community Edition (Docker CE) and premium Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE).

        In this article, we’ll go through step-by-step installing Docker CE in a minimal version of Red Hat-based Rocky Linux 9/8 distribution.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Microsoft Teams on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 – LinuxCapable [Ed: Epic spyware from Linux-hostile company; use Free software instead]

        Microsoft Teams is a collaboration and communication platform developed by Microsoft. It provides various tools and features to help users stay connected and collaborate effectively, regardless of location. Installing Microsoft Teams on Ubuntu can offer many benefits to users, especially those who work in a remote or distributed environment.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Microsoft Edge on Rocky Linux EL8 or EL9 [Ed: No actual reason for any GNU/Linux users to install this password stealer; even Microsoft fires the developers of this failing Chrome clone]
      • Trend Oceans ☛ Simple way to Copy and Move a Large Number of Files using Terminal – TREND OCEANS
      • Learn Ubuntu ☛ Fix “UFW Status Inactive” in Ubuntu

        By default, the UFW firewall is not active on Ubuntu. When you try to check its status, it will show that your firewall is inactive.

      • What is /dev/zero in Linux and its Uses

        In Linux, a “special file” is a type of file that represents a device or a kernel object rather than a regular file or directory.

        Special files are typically found in the “/dev” directory and represent devices that are attached to your system. However, these files are not intended to be read like normal files.

        They are used to communicate with the device drivers and hardware, and their content represents the data stored on the device.

      • What is Bash?

        Bash, also known as the “Bourne Again Shell,” is a command-line interface (CLI) for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. It is the default shell for most Linux distributions and macOS, and it can also be installed on Windows.

        Bash allows users to interact with their operating system by providing a command prompt, where users can enter commands and execute them. These commands can range from simple tasks such as listing the files in a directory, to more complex ones such as creating and manipulating files and directories, managing processes, and even programming simple scripts.

      • Installing MySQL 8.0 using RPM or DEB package files

        Installing MySQL 8.0 using RPM or DEB files is a simple process that can be done in a few steps. MySQL is a popular open-source relational database management system that is widely used for web development, data warehousing, and other applications. In this article, we will show you how to install MySQL 8.0 using RPM or DEB files on different operating systems, including Linux, Ubuntu, and Debian.
        Before we begin, it’s important to note that you will need to have root or superuser access to your system to perform the installation. If you don’t have root access, you can use the “sudo” command to run the installation commands with superuser permissions.

      • Installing MySQL using YUM or APT Package Manager

        MySQL is one of the most popular open-source relational databases. It is used for storing and managing data for various types of applications, including web applications, content management systems, and more. In this article, we will cover how to install MySQL on a Linux server using YUM (Yellowdog Updater Modified) and APT (Advanced Package Tool) package managers.

        Before we begin, it’s important to note that the commands and examples in this article are specific to the Red Hat and Debian/Ubuntu distributions of Linux. If you’re using a different distribution, the commands and package names may be slightly different.

      • MySQL: A Brief Introduction

        MySQL is a powerful and popular open-source relational database management system. It is widely used in web development, app development, and data warehousing. MySQL is known for its reliability, performance, and ease of use. It is also compatible with a wide range of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.

        In this article, we will take a closer look at MySQL, including its features, benefits, and examples of how it can be used. We will also explore some of the common issues that users may encounter when working with MySQL and how to troubleshoot them.

      • The Linux Filesystem and Structure Explained

        If you’re new to Linux, the filesystem can seem a bit overwhelming at first. There are a lot of different directories and files, and it can be hard to know what they’re all for. In this article, we’ll take a look at the Linux filesystem and explain what all the different directories and files are for.

      • Setting Up Your Local Environment for Bash Scripting

        Bash scripting is a powerful tool for automating tasks and streamlining your workflow. However, before you can start writing and running scripts, you need to set up your local environment to support Bash. This process can seem daunting at first, but with a little bit of knowledge and the right tools, you’ll be up and running in no time. In this article, we’ll go over the basics of setting up your local environment for Bash scripting, including installing the necessary software, configuring your terminal, and creating and running your first script.

      • Learn Ubuntu ☛ Using UFW Firewall Commands in Ubuntu

        The UFW (uncomplicated firewall) is the easiest firewall you can use on Linux as it is simple and powerful simultaneously.

        So in this guide, I will share some common commands you should know if you are using or willing to use UFW in the near future.

      • The New Stack ☛ What Is the Docker .env File and How Do You Use It? – The New Stack

        When you deploy Docker containers, you will oftentimes have to add customized variables. Those variables could include all sorts of information, including usernames, passwords, database names, etc. Of course, you can always hard code those variables into the container manifest but that is widely considered a security issue. On top of that, if you’re deploying similar containers over and over again, it’s not exactly efficient having to re-type all of that information.

        To solve these types of problems, most developers opt to go with the .env file. Essentially, an .env file is a list of key pair values that set specific variables for a container deployment. So, instead of having to code those variables into the manifest itself, you add them to an .env file and when you run docker-compose up -d, the variables will be applied from within the .env file (“env” being short for environment variables).

      • Make Tech Easier ☛ LibreOffice Impress Keyboard Shortcuts – Make Tech Easier

        LibreOffice Impress is a free open-source presentation editor for Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX. Like Microsoft Powerpoint, Impress allows you to create, modify and publish high-quality presentation slides straight from your desktop computer.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Microsoft Fonts on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 – LinuxCapable

        Ubuntu is a popular Linux operating system known for its ease of use and stability. One of the features that many users appreciate about Ubuntu is its ability to run a wide range of software, including Microsoft fonts. This article will show you how to install the “ttf-mscorefonts-installer” package, which contains a collection of Microsoft fonts, on your Ubuntu desktop.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Telnet on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 – LinuxCapable

        Telnet is a protocol that allows users to connect to remote servers and devices over a network. It is a simple and widely-used method for managing servers and network devices, such as routers and switches. When incorporated into your Ubuntu desktop or server, telnet can benefit you by allowing you to access and manage network devices remotely, troubleshoot connectivity issues, and test network services. It is handy when you need to access a remote device or server but do not have physical access to it or if you have a headless server without a GUI.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Unity DE on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 – LinuxCapable

        The Unity desktop environment is a popular user interface for the Ubuntu operating system. It is built on top of the GNOME desktop environment and offers a sleek, modern look and feel. One of the main benefits of using Unity is its ability to provide a consistent and intuitive user experience across different devices, including laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Additionally, Unity is highly customizable, allowing users to tailor their desktops to their specific needs and preferences.

      • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Skype on Rocky Linux EL9 or EL8 – LinuxCapable

        Skype is a popular communication tool that allows users to make voice and video calls and send instant messages, files, and images. It can be installed on various operating systems, including Rocky Linux. By installing Skype on Rocky Linux, users can stay connected with friends, family, and colleagues from anywhere in the world.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to enable remote access on MySQL 8?

        This short post will help you to enable remote access to MySQL. Although this is not always recommended, it can be helpful.

        By default, and for security reasons, MySQL remote access is disabled, and you will only be able to access using Localhost. In most cases, this will suffice, but it is not always the case.

        A practical case is that some developers use virtual machines to do their testing and require a remote connection to it. Furthermore, if you need to manage the database remotely, it is also useful.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Configure mod_rewrite?

        One of the most recommended settings if you have a personal blog on your server is to make the web addresses understandable to novice users. This will make it well weighted by search engines. Therefore, today, you will learn how to configure mod_rewrite on Linux. Let’s see.

      • TecAdmin ☛ How To Install Python 3.11 on Debian 11/10 – TecAdmin

        The Python team has announced the new release of Python 3.11. At the same time, Python 3.12 development has been started. So as of today, Python 3.11 is the latest version available for installation. This version is loaded with various new features and security upgrades. The Python developer will feel better with this version in terms of error display and debugging etc.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Install Vue.js on Raspberry Pi

        Vue.js is an open-source, progressive, approachable, and effective JavaScript framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications. It provides several tools and libraries that help users develop web applications with the knowledge of Node.js, JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Install SuperTuxKart on Raspberry Pi

        SuperTuxKart is a kart racing game in which Tux and friends race together. There are several tracks that one can explore in SuperTuxKart. It can be played with AI (single-player mode) or in a split-screen mode with friends. It has various modes including 3 Strikes Battle, Time Trial, and Grand Prix. The player can explore tracks while racing. The best thing about this game is that it is lightweight due to which it can be installed and played on Raspberry Pi very easily. The complete process to install SuperTuxKart on Raspberry Pi is discussed in this article.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Install Ninja Build System on Raspberry Pi

        Ninja is a small and simple build system that allows users to build binaries from source code. It was developed by a Google Employee, Evan Martins and has been quite effective in building binaries faster than the most used “make” command. It is extremely effective in those scenarios where you have to build a large number of input files on the system.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Install Docker Compose on Raspberry Pi

        Docker Compose is a docker utility based on compose file format and is used to run multi-container applications. Basically, the compose file of docker defines the configuration of multiple containers for an application. The multiple containers of docker-compose have the ability to share networks and data volumes in a customized environment. This tutorial presents the way to install docker-compose on Raspberry Pi.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Fix Sound on Raspberry Pi

        Raspberry Pi is a valuable device that can be utilized for various purposes, including the home automation system, creating web servers, controlling different machines and much more. The device can run several Linux distributions and has all the power to replace your desktop PC. However, it doesn’t have a built-in speaker for listening to audio. Thus, Raspberry Pi users are forced to connect an external audio device like speakers or headphones with the Raspberry Pi. But most users still won’t be able to listen to the sound from Raspberry Pi even after connecting the external audio device.

        If you are experiencing the same issue, follow this article’s guidelines to fix it and listen to the audio from a sound device connected to your Raspberry Pi.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Enable Login Screen on Raspberry Pi

        Most Linux systems have a login screen enabled by default that protects your data to be easily accessed by any external user. However, unlike other Linux-based operating systems, the Raspberry Pi login screen is disabled by default, making the system insecure and allowing every user to enter and access the system files.

        To protect the system files and personal data, enabling the login screen is better so that only trusted users can access the Raspberry Pi system. This article is a detailed guide to enable the login screen on the Raspberry Pi system easily.

      • Linux Hint ☛ Web Application Information Gathering with Kali Linux

        Information gathering is the technique of collecting numerous information about the target. Information-gathering is the most crucial first step in conducting penetration testing. Information gathering gives the penetration tester a gateway to decide on what are common vulnerabilities found in specific web applications.

        There are a lot of information-gathering tools in Kali Linux. In this tutorial, we will learn specifically about web application information gathering such as Whois, Whatweb, NSLookup, and CMSeek. Those tools are open-source and already pre-installed in Kali Linux. If you do not have Kali Linux, you could download or check those tools projects at GitHub. Links will be provided in each tool section below.

      • Linux Hint ☛ Web Application Gathering Information with Kali Linux

        A website page that you are visiting on the internet is not just an HTML and CSS page. There are many technologies that work together in running a website such as a web server, content management system, database management system, and soon.

      • Linux Hint ☛ Evil Twin Attack with Airgeddon in Kali Linux

        Wi-Fi connections are everywhere, at home, school, office, café, airport, hotel, restaurants, and many other places. Some of the Wi-Fi is protected and other is publicly open. As a hacker, you might sometimes wonder what is the password of that protected Wi-Fi, don’t you?

        There are two methods to achieve your goal. Either by cracking the captured WPA handshake which relies on a wordlist file, or set up an Evil Twin attack which only requires some time until a client gives the password to us. What is the most reliable and efficient attack between both of them? Of course, the Evil Twin attack, right? As a matter of fact, it is so easy to set up an Evil Twin attack with Kali Linux this day.

      • Linux Hint ☛ How to Install MPlayer on Linux Mint 21

        Looking for a free and open-source media player for your Linux Mint 21 then try the MPlayer. It can be used for playing audios and videos either using GUI or through command line and not only that it supports a large variety format for videos and subtitles. This guide is all about installing MPlayer on Linux Mint so if you want to try this application on Linux Mint then read this guide.

    • WINE or Emulation

      • Wine Reviews : DXVK version 2.1 has been released with HDR support

        On systems supporting HDR10 color spaces, HDR can now be enabled by setting the environment variable DXVK_HDR=1, or by setting the option dxgi.enableHDR = True in the configuration file. When using vkd3d-proton 2.8 or newer, this will allow D3D12 games to detect and use the HDR10 color space if they support it.

    • Games

      • CubicleNate ☛ JSAUX Screen Protector for the SteamDeck – CubicleNate’s Techpad

        Originally I was going to make a video of applying a screen protector to the SteamDeck but… why? It’s not like it would be all that interesting and would probably be another turd of a video so just a blathering is just as well. The production time for writing something out is far, far less than filming, editing, rendering and publishing a video.

        I bought the screen protector from JSAUX at the same time as I purchased the dock station and protective shell. I hesitated putting the screen protector on the device because I did spend the extra bit to get that etched glass to take advantage of the anti-glare feature it provides. Anti-glare might be a bit of an oversell… more like dramatic glare reduction. Regardless, it is a very, very comfortable experience due to the reduced glare.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • OpenSource.com ☛ Why sysadmins should license their code for open source

      As a Linux system administrator, I write a fair amount of code.

      Does that surprise you? Well, I strive to be the “lazy” sysadmin, and I do this, in part, by reducing the number of repetitive tasks I need to do by automating them. Most of my automation started as little command-line programs. I store those in executable scripts for re-use at any time on any Linux host for which I have responsibility.

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Chromium

      • Mozilla

        • Neowin ☛ Pale Moon 32.0

          Pale Moon is an Open Source, Goanna-based web browser available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Android, focusing on efficiency and ease of use. Make sure to get the most out of your browser!

          Pale Moon offers you a browsing experience in a browser completely built from its own, independently developed source that has been forked off from Firefox/Mozilla code, with carefully selected features and optimizations to improve the browsers speed, resource use, stability and user experience, while offering full customization and a growing collection of extensions and themes to make the browser truly your own.

        • Firefox Nightly: New year, new updates to Firefox – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 130
        • Mozilla ☛ Latest Pocket Android app makes it easier to discover your saved and new stories

          Google recently named Pocket as one of the best apps of 2022, and it’s only getting better. We spent a lot of time with our users last year to see how we can improve the experience on the Pocket Android app. This month, we’re rolling out updates based on user feedback so you can easily find the stories and topics you care about. Read on to learn more about what’s new in the Pocket Android app.

    • Programming/Development

      • Joe Brockmeier ☛ Creating slides with Markdown using Marp

        Need to make a presentation, but don’t like using a GUI app? Take a look at Marp, the Markdown Presentation Ecosystem.

        Many folks like to knock slides as a format for conveying information. I don’t dislike slides as a way to convey and present (some) information. But I have never loved using apps like PowerPoint, Google Slides, or LibreOffice Impress. Converting Markdown to slides, though, is a great way for me to knock out a first draft of a presentation.

        When I work on work documents, I’ll often revert to Vim + Markdown to do a first draft. The important thing in a first draft is to get the outline in place and then fill out the text. Markdown offers enough formatting that I can do the headings (outline), bullets, minimal formatting, and links without needing to fuss with all the formatting options in a word processor.

      • Adriaan de Groot ☛ Ports updates in january 2023

        It’s been a really slow month for me on the Free Software front. Roughly since the KDE e.V. board meeting in Berlin I’ve been swamped with work-work (just lots of C++ code to grind through) and personal (family health matters) issues. The effect is that when I sit down at my FreeBSD workstation, I have at most 15 minutes a day to deal with whatever Free Software things affect me. That’s KDE, Calamares, and FreeBSD, so they all get short shrift. I finally did sit down this week and get a little more done, so here’s a brief report.

      • KDE Videos ☛ Healthy Mind, Healthy Code

        Let us explore ways to have a healthy relationship with free software work, and how to enjoy working in free software for decades.

      • Drew DeVault ☛ My plans at FOSDEM: SourceHut, Hare, and Helios

        FOSDEM is right around the corner, and finally in person after long years of dealing with COVID. I’ll be there again this year, and I’m looking forward to it! I have four slots on the schedule (wow! Thanks for arranging these, FOSDEM team) and I’ll be talking about several projects. There is a quick lightning talk on Saturday to introduce Helios and tease a full-length talk on Sunday, a meetup for the Hare community, and a meetup for the SourceHut community. I hope to see you there!

      • Perl / Raku

        • Perl ☛ Perl Testing in 2023

          With my open source work, I’ve historically taken an approach which relies more on integration testing than unit testing, but with some of my newer projects, I’ve tried adopting principles from $paidwork and applying them to my free software.

          This is a quick run-down of how I’m structuring my test suite in newer projects. It’s likely that many of my existing projects will never adopt this structure, but some may.

      • Rust

  • Leftovers

    • Tim Bray ☛ Class Reductionist

      Let’s start with the Urban Dictionary’s: “The idea in some leftist circles that all oppression based on gender, sex, race, etc. is just a byproduct of class struggle, and that once class disparity is solved, all those issues will vanish.”

      Salon goes deeper in Asad Haider’s How calling someone a “class reductionist” became a lefty insult. Specifically, it calls out the DSA Philadelphia Chapter statement on the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police. The DSA presented a very class-centric position: That the murder was a consequence of class oppression and that socialists such as the DSA were thus uniquely qualified to address the problem.

      You don’t have to be a Political Science Ph.D to notice that Floyd’s murder was a racist act that can only be understood in a racism-aware framework, and that omitting that dimension is clueless.

      On the other hand, ignoring the class dimension of oppression in general, racism in particular, and George Floyd’s murder in particular particular, would also be clueless. Mr Floyd was a man with a bunch of problems, but one of the biggest was that he was broke.

    • Hardware

      • The Next Platform ☛ Building The Perfect Memory Bandwidth Beast

        Memory bandwidth is holding back system performance, and there is something that you can do about it other than to just suffer.

        It is interesting to contemplate what HPC and AI computing might look like if CPUs were not so limited on memory bandwidth and in some cases memory capacity. Or to speak more precisely, if memory was not so expensive relative to compute. We can, perhaps, do something about the former and we will turn blue in the face and perhaps die waiting for something to happen about the latter, as we talked briefly about last week.

        Sometimes, all you can do is make a tourniquet and try to keep moving even if you can’t immediately and permanently address the problem at hand. Or foot or wherever the wound is. Which got us to thinking about how server buyers these days, with some modest tweaks from server CPU and system makers, might at least get the memory bandwidth per core more in balance.

    • Proprietary

    • Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

      • FOSS Post ☛ 5 Ways a Linux User Can Make Use of ChatGPT [Ed: 'Linux' sites are helping Microsoft plagiarism agenda, and hype which distracts from Microsoft crises]

        You probably have already heard about ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that took over the world faster than a Skynet apocalypse.

    • Defence/Aggression

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • David Frum

        I’m doing an experiment. On my computer, I am checking the latest tweets by people I follow. On my phone, I’m checking whether their most recent tweets are showing up in the “Following” column. I’m just getting started, but even in the first dozen cases, Twitter failed to show me an absolute majority of the tweets I had requested to see. That’s the reason your engagement is down, people: Twitter is withholding requested content from those who requested it.

        For me, Twitter is most valuable as an information source. But Twitter is now rapidly mutating into a source that capriciously withholds information I asked for – including from such highly official sources as the Tate Gallery in London.

        It’s as if, in the days of the old newspaper, my subscription were delivered with random stories scissored out by the publisher itself, for some capricious whim of the publisher’s own.

      • John Gruber ☛ Twitter’s Infrastructure Continues to Crumble, Silently

        Twitter is no longer able to do that. Here’s a speculative thread explaining what might be going on — sounds like a very solid guess to me. In short: after cutting back on servers and entire data centers, Twitter can no longer keep up with its own content.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:00 am by Needs Sunlight

Also available via the Gemini protocol at:

Over HTTP:

HTML5 logs

HTML5 logs

#techrights log as HTML5

#boycottnovell log as HTML5

HTML5 logs

HTML5 logs

#boycottnovell-social log as HTML5

#techbytes log as HTML5

text logs

text logs

#techrights log as text

#boycottnovell log as text

text logs

text logs

#boycottnovell-social log as text

#techbytes log as text

Enter the IRC channels now

IPFS Mirrors

CID Description Object type
 Qmaf4SqKFjkh6Rn1GdfLRFbcRZAuB9SyW5PXo2CFPuUBQr IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmSKnjt68Zk4QxxKpNq3VN18xr56pHK2ruWMNzgch6FAES IRC log for #boycottnovell
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmdHHXHGriox1aSLc4SHAAwdRCGt8ACzhbvz3V2brHkNe5 IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmNTc89bVxPzcAKqU2h4iStYzSXDGciF4jAufZXxcCY3LY IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmTTpLdG6HUBRjqbVEXvGMfSYnDnwvSRnbssJHgkRAuhwV IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmRGyzRbJcpHKWARaQFxoTn6TcdGyC3ptoJWWhkgBnbyfk IRC log for #techbytes
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs
 QmdMEwCkjhJ5wjF5a4ti2GhL9dYBpRQsHZVDXC5oZc4XZZ IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as HTML)		 HTML5 logs
 QmP5N9K75ZmTP9LeMCsvovXdExBNddRpuAZFz64xSVF7ri IRC log for #techrights
(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)		 text logs

IPFS logo

Bulletin for Yesterday

Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmTbEVdKr9BDpRERsQf4pzrxBWAxqYjWiz4D7tHPWP23Xr

ISO Certification Hardly Tackles Any of the Real Issues

Posted in Deception, ISO at 1:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 826d1eaa331010c952d7b97f3736f836
ISO Certification Did Nothing
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The real-world threats faced by private companies or non-profit organisations aren’t covered by the ISO certification mill; today we publish the last post on this topic before proceeding to some practical examples

WORKING for a company that publicly and openly boasts 2 ISO certifications means that expectations (or perception) can be compared to reality. At Sirius ‘Open Source’, where I had worked since 2011, I saw all sorts of poor security practices, even in more recent years when ISO certifications were bragged about to existing/potential clients.

“Free software is a pragmatic choice, but when managers use proprietary software they go not ‘get’ that.”There is no point trying to deflect the attention to accuser. At the moment the company is too broke for workers to sue (and eventually truly win in a monetary sense); it’s also too broke for its clients to sue. Winning in court against an insolvent company would be a Pyrrhic victory. What matters here is the truth. It can hopefully caution others.

We still have quite a bit left to cover. We’re going to cite practical examples of stuff being done to the detriment of privacy and security of staff, not to mention clients. Free software is a pragmatic choice, but when managers use proprietary software they go not ‘get’ that. █

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