03.21.23
Posted in Microsoft, Rumour at 10:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Loss leader “Hey Hi” (AI) is used to distract from Bing layoffs, Azure layoffs, GitHub layoffs, Edge layoffs etc. even if its future is uncertain and there is no viable business model
Summary: Yesterday we shared rumours about Microsoft layoffs being planned for later today (there were 3 waves of layoffs so far this year). There are several more people here who say the same. How much noise will Microsoft make in the “media” in order to distract? Will the chaffbot "ChatGPT" help create enough chaff?
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Server
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When I worked at AWS, we had retrospective review meetings every Wednesday to review system incidents that occurred the previous week. All the managers and senior leaders from all across AWS met to discuss what had gone wrong and what we could do differently to ensure the issue didn’t repeat.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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As part of a recent project involving advanced sound cards, Bootlin engineer Miquèl Raynal had to find a way to automate audio hardware loopback testing. In hand, he had a PCI audio device with many external interfaces, each of them featuring an XLR connector. The connectors were wired to analog and digital inputs and outputs.
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Applications
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Ever wondered if the current configuration of your Linux system could be saved and reused?
Well, with SaveDesktop, it is possible.
It is an open-source application that lets you save and apply desktop environment configurations with a few clicks.
Let me show you what SaveDesktop can do.
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Hello! This is the first Alpha release for Authoritative Server 4.8.0. In this release, the LMDB backend gains a new Lightning Stream-compatible schema, which requires a data migration (this is automatic, and there is no migration back to the old schema).
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Instructionals/Technical
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Linux includes some useful commands for counting when it comes to text files. This post examines some of the options for counting lines and words and making changes that might help you see what you want.
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Large language models, known generally (and inaccurately) as AIs, have been threatening to upend the publishing, art, and legal world for months. One downside is that using LLMs such as ChatGPT means creating an account and having someone else’s computer do the work. But you can run a trained LLM on your Raspberry Pi to write poetry, answer questions, and more.
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Knowing who is connected to your network can be helpful at times. For instance, you may need to check the status of certain devices (whether they’re up or down), find spare static IP addresses, or make an inventory of devices. Furthermore, this information can also help you identify any unauthorized access to your network and shared resources.
While you can check the connected IPs from your router’s configuration page, it does not show the static IP addresses. Luckily, there are several other ways that let you find all the IP addresses on a network. Let’s explore some of them.
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Want to install packages on Arch Linux but don’t know how? A lot of people face this problem when they first migrate from Debian-based distributions to Arch Linux. It’s easy to manage packages on an Arch-based system, however.
Pacman is the default package manager that comes pre-installed on every Arch-based distribution. But still, there’s a need for other package managers like yay as Pacman doesn’t support installing packages from the Arch User Repository.
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Quake is one of the greatest multiplayer gaming experiences you will find. The follow-up to Doom is essentially a first-person shooter but also features a stunning multiplayer (co-op and versus) mode.
Like an FPS Fortnite, Quake delivers a memorable gaming experience. And you don’t need to pay for an expensive server (or lug a PC around as in the old days) to play it.
You can host Quake multiplayer sessions on a humble Raspberry Pi.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 43.5 brings a handful of changes, the most interesting ones being support for 32:9 aspect ratios and improved order of monitors in the Display panel in Settings, reduced memory bandwidth usage for some GPUs in Mutter (43.4), as well as improved drag and drop support and file ordering after renaming in Nautilus (43.3).
The Epiphany (GNOME Web) web browser has been updated to version 43.1 during this cycle, a release that adds proper encoding of URLs copied from the address bar, hides the bookmark star in application mode, and prevents autofill of passwords in sandboxed contexts addressing the CVE-2023-26081 vulnerability from version 43.0 and previous releases.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Leveraging the experience shared in the Node.js reference architecture can help you minimize problems in production. However, it’s a fact of life that problems will still occur and you need to do problem determination. This installment of the ongoing Node.js Reference Architecture series covers the Node.js reference architecture team’s experience with respect to how you can investigate common problems when they do occur.
7 Common problems include:
- Memory leaks
- Hangs or slow performance
- Application failures
- Unhandled promise rejections or exceptions
- Resource leaks
- Network issues
- Natives crashes
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Ubuntu Flatpak Remix is a community-built unofficial fork of Ubuntu that comes with native Flatpak support. It was released soon after Canonical’s announcement that it would not be supporting Flatpak by default on Ubuntu releases.
Here’s all you need to know to determine whether it’s worth trying Ubuntu Flatpak Remix.
Ubuntu Flatpak Remix is an unofficial flavor of Ubuntu based on the LTS release that has been altered using Cubic. This version supports Flatpak packages only–there is no Snap support.
Flatpak is preferred by many users since it differs significantly from other traditional packages. The best part is that you don’t need to install the dependencies while installing any applications as the dependent apps or libraries have been included in the package. They get installed automatically while installing the main application.
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Charmed Kubeflow is now certified in the NVIDIA DGX-Ready Software Program for MLOps! Canonical is proud to announce that Charmed Kubeflow is now certified as part of the NVIDIA DGX-Ready Software program.
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Welcome to the second article in the Craft team saga. Previously, on Craft Team, we gave you a brief introduction into the team’s function, we announced our desire to share the ins and outs of our day-to-day work with the community, and gave you an overview of roughly two weeks of coding and fun.
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It’s been six months since NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang took to the stage at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) ’22 and unveiled the high-performance low-power Jetson Orin Nano system-on-module (SOM), targeting artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge. Now, it’s GTC ’23 — and Huang is back on stage, this time launching the Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit bundle with immediate availability.
Offering a claimed “80x” the performance of the Jetson Nano, the new Jetson Orin Nano is designed to bring the company’s latest-generation Orin graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture to the entry level — but can it deliver on the company’s lofty promises?
[...]
The Jetson Orin Nano is designed to run Jetpack, NVIDIA’s embedded software stack based on Ubuntu Linux and formerly known as Linux 4 Tegra (L4T). All testing of the review unit was carried out on a pre-release version of Jetpack 5.1.1 with a few minor bugs — including one which limited available system memory to 6.3GB out of the physical 8GB, which the company assures us will be resolved in the very near future.
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Ubuntu Flatpak Remix is a community-built unofficial fork of Ubuntu that comes with native Flatpak support. It was released soon after Canonical’s announcement that it would not be supporting Flatpak by default on Ubuntu releases.
Here’s all you need to know to determine whether it’s worth trying Ubuntu Flatpak Remix.
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Devices/Embedded
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We quickly mentioned the Qualcomm Robotics RB1 and RB2 development kits in our post about Lantronix Open-Q 2210RB and 4210RB SiPs mostly to complain about the lack of information at the time.
But things have changed the Qualcomm Robotics RB1 and RB2 devkits for cheaper, smaller Linux-powered robots with lower power consumption are now available, and we have more details with three options: Core Kit, Vision Kit, and Full Kit. So let’s have a closer look.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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With the upcoming Firefox 112 release, Mozilla promises to let Ubuntu Linux users import their browser data from the Chromium Snap package. However, Mozilla says that this feature currently works only when Firefox is not installed as a Snap package too.
I’ve tested this feature with the latest Firefox 112 beta release using the official binary package and it works, as you can see from the screenshot below.
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Licensing / Legal
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Programming/Development
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TL;DR: We have released version 0.8.0 of Circomspect, our static analyzer and linter for Circom.
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Java
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New Java SE APIs, javax.net.ssl.SSLParameters.getNamedGroups() and javax.net.ssl.SSLParameters.setNamedGroups(), have been added to allow applications to customize the named groups of key exchange algorithms used in individual TLS or DTLS connections.
Note that the underlying provider may define the default named groups for each TLS or DTLS connection. Applications may also use the existing jdk.tls.namedGroups system property to customize the provider-specific default named groups. If not null, the named groups passed to the setNamedGroups() method will override the default named groups for the specified TLS or DTLS connections.
Note that a provider may not have been updated to support the new APIs and in that case may ignore the named groups that are set. The JDK SunJSSE provider supports this method. It is recommended that third party providers add support for these methods when they add support for JDK 19 or later releases.
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Version 20 of the Java SE platform has been released. See the features list for an overview of the big additions, or the release notes for the details.
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Leftovers
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Science
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Scotland’s plan to become one of the first countries to introduce minimum pricing of alcohol met with a “storm of protest” before it finally became law in 2018. The alcohol industry threw up legal challenges, while those on low incomes expressed anger that they were being unfairly penalized. <
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This year marks 30 years since the UN declared March 22 to be World Water Day, an occasion to raise awareness about access to clean water across the world.
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Residents of a Louisiana parish located in the heart of a cluster of polluting petrochemical factories filed a lawsuit in federal court raising allegations of civil rights, environmental justice and religious liberty violations. In the lawsuit, filed against the St. James Parish, residents and environmental organizations claim that the parish council approved the construction of several factories in two Black districts of the parish that emit harmful amounts of toxic chemicals that negatively affected the health of the areas Black residents. The lawsuit calls for a moratorium on the construction of new petrochemical plants like one under construction by Formosa Plastics, which was approved by the council in 2019.
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India has been one of the least happy countries in the world in recent years.
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Proprietary
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Linux Foundation
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2), Oracle (firefox, nss, and openssl), Slackware (curl and vim), SUSE (dpdk, firefox, grafana, oracleasm, python-cffi, python-Django, and qemu), and Ubuntu (ruby2.7, sox, and tigervnc).
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Vali Cyber, Inc. announces the release of SecurityPerf 1.0, an open-source framework designed to benchmark the impact of security solutions on typical workloads run in Linux environments.
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The discovery that $1.3 million worth of nickel kept in a warehouse in the Netherlands was actually just bags of stones has renewed scrutiny of the London Metal Exchange (LME), one of the world’s oldest marketplaces for non-ferrous metals.
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Not only was Ferrari dealing with grid penalty and car development problems with their F1 car this past week, but it now seems they were also dealing with a cybersecurity incident.
Ferrari has revealed that it was the victim of a data breach and extortion demand. The firm’s email to customers, reproduced below, states that customer names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers may have been acquired by the threat actors. There is no indication that any customer financial data or corporate intellectual property was stolen.
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Italian automaker Ferrari has warned its well-heeled customers that their personal data may be at risk.
“We regret to inform you of a cyber incident at Ferrari, where a threat actor was able to access a limited number of systems in our IT environment,” opens a letter sent to Ferrari owners, including one Reg reader who was kind enough to share it.
“As part of this incident, certain data relating to our clients was exposed including names, addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers,” the letter continues, before warning: “Your data may have been included as part of this incident.” The letter to customers adds that Ferrari has verified the data dangled before it by whoever demanded the ransom.
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As the public knows by now, Oakland, California was hit with a ransomware attack by the Play ransomware gang on February 8, and has been struggling since then to recover. Data from the attack started to be leaked on March 4. Play leaked about 10 GB of files, compressed, and threatened to leak more if there was no response. They have not leaked any additional data since that date, and the city’s last update was on March 8.
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But if clicked, the validation link would have taken me to a url on IPFS.io. The url did not point to the exact same url that Cook reported last June, but the url pointed to the same directory as Cook had reported: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/
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When BreachForums owner “Pompompurin” was arrested on March 15, forum members knew nothing about it until March 17, when Bloomberg broke the news. But BreachForums administrator “Baphomet” had suspected something was wrong and had already taken steps to secure the forum from law enforcement access.
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At least 17 current or former members of Congress had personal information exposed in the hack of the District of Columbia health insurance data system, according to a top Democrat investigating the matter. And that number is expected to rise, he said.
In an interview with CBS News, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) said hundreds of congressional staff may also have suffered a breach of their personally identifiable information. Morelle said, “I think the number can and may grow. I don’t know what the probability is. But we’ve only been able to look through some of the data that’s gotten out.”
According to multiple reports, the breach might have impacted more than 56,000 people.
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Poorly managed Linux SSH servers are being targeted as part of a new campaign that deploys different variants of a malware called ShellBot.
“ShellBot, also known as PerlBot, is a DDoS Bot malware developed in Perl and characteristically uses IRC protocol to communicate with the C&C server,” AhnLab Security Emergency response Center (ASEC) said in a report.
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Defence/Aggression
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At a meeting of the General Affairs Council of the European Union in Brussels on March 21, Latvian Foreign Affairs Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs reiterated the stance that sanctions must be held firm against Russia and Belarus, the Foreign Ministry said in a release.
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This year, a total of 500 cases of suspected violations of sanctions imposed on Russia have been noticed at the customs service. Meanwhile, the Financial Intelligence Service receives more and more reports of suspicious transactions that may have been attempted to circumvent sanctions, Latvian Television reported on March 20.
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Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Military invasions don’t produce democracies – who knew? Whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, somehow the U.S. government worked to convince itself and the American people that democracy could be exported at rifle point.
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Twenty years ago on this coming weekend, I was in Mongolia as the Deputy US Ambassador.
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Finance
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For his nation’s businesses in the global market, Russian president Vladimir Putin endorsed the yuan as the currency of choice on the second day of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow.
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Data published on March 21 by the Central Statistical Bureau show that in February 2023, compared to February 2022, the level of producer prices in Latvian industry increased by 22.0 %.
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HSBC’s slow crawl away from oil and gas is still too much for Texas.
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Switzerland’s government says it’s ordering Credit Suisse to temporarily suspend bonuses for employees after orchestrating a plan for the No. 2 Swiss bank to be taken over by rival UBS. The Swiss Department of Finance said Tuesday that federal law allows the government to set “remuneration-related measures” in cases involving Switzerland’s biggest banks. Authorities in Switzerland scrambled late last week and this weekend to cobble together a $3.25 billion sale of Credit Suisse to UBS. An outflow of deposits and years of trouble raised fears that it could fail and trigger an international financial crisis after the collapse of two U.S. banks.
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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is bailing out Sri Lanka.
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These days it seems a new term catches hold on social media every few weeks to describe the current weirdness of the labor market.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Spain’s parliament is debating ahead of a confidence vote brought by the nation’s far-right Vox party against the governing left-wing coalition. The motion has little chance of succeeding. No other party has said it will support the attempt by Vox’s 52 lawmakers to topple the government of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez when the vote is held on Wednesday. Vox is presenting an independent candidate instead of its leader in attempt to lure votes. The 89-year-old former communist and university professor Ramón Tamames has pledged that if the vote succeeds, he will immediately call national elections.
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Russia and China are showcasing their “no limit friendship” during a pomp-laden Kremlin ceremony intended to further cement ties amid the fighting in Ukraine. After hosting Chinese leader Xi Jinping over private dinner for 4 1/2 hours the previous night, Russian President Vladimir Putin greeted him for Tuesday’s official talks in the Grand Kremlin Palace. Putin greeted the Chinese leader in St. George’s hall where walls are covered by white-marble plaques with gold engravings of of the names of military units and soldiers awarded with the order of St. George, a top military award established by Catherine the Great. The imperial-style pageantry reflected the importance of Xi’s three-day visit to Russia that gave a strong political boost to Putin.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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A Fox News producer claims the network “coerced” her testimony during a deposition in a libel lawsuit filed by a voting machine company. The $1.6 billion lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems alleges that Fox amplified false allegations that its machines changed votes in the 2020 presidential election. Abby Grossberg, a former producer for Fox host Maria Bartiromo, has filed a separate lawsuit contending that Fox pressured her to give misleading testimony during her deposition in the Dominion case. Grossberg’s claim is part of a gender discrimination lawsuit she filed against Fox. The network denies her allegations and countered with its own lawsuit, seeking to bar Grossberg from sharing confidential discussions with company lawyers.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Hong Kongers won’t get the chance to watch Winnie the Pooh go feral on the big screen.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Ugandan lawmakers passed a bill prescribing jail terms of up to 10 years for offenses related to same-sex relations, responding to popular sentiment but piling more pressure on the East African country’s LGBTQ community. The bill was passed late Tuesday inside a packed parliamentary chamber, and after a roll call ordered by the House speaker, who had repeatedly warned it was necessary to identify those who might oppose the bill. It was supported by nearly all of the 389 legislators present. An earlier version of the bill enacted in 2014 later was nullified by a court on procedural grounds. Human Rights Watch has described the new bill as “a more egregious version” of the 2014 law.
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Amazon
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The Canadian Heritage committee moved ahead yesterday with a Bill C-18 motion that should strike fear in any group that participates in the political process. In a chaotic few minutes toward the end of the meeting, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather introduced a new motion that removed some of the worst of the authoritarian-style provisions previously proposed by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage that demanded the private communications of potentially thousands of Canadians.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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The current sunrise time and azimuth make it difficult for me to get a proper sunrise photo right now, but on a cloudy day the sky above it looks good. And the leafless trees make a nice foreground.
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Talislanta: The Savage Land came out in a port that used D&D 5e rules but there’s no overview of monster CRs, and such lists can be useful when creating dungeon-like locations such as ruin sites.
Of course, don’t neglect to use normal archetypes (both PC and NPC archetypes), which you can stat up at any level.
You need to look up the monster’s text to find their habitats and what regions they’re in, but at least having CR at a glance will be useful. I didn’t read all the text blocks carefully but when I did happen to see a note in the text about whether a creature is particularly solitary or if it travels in herds, I noted that under “# app”.
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I sit at a table in the aeroport in Houston, awaiting my flight to Orlando. I am filled with an inchoate rage as I observe the remainder of humanity, going about their movement from place to place as if there is no overhanging emptiness waiting to engulf them.
They pursue minutiae in subconscious hopes that it will give meaning to moments they just place aside never to return to. Some of them have succumbed to biological imperative and descended into tribal lust for the survival of a small bubble they label ‘family’.
I am apart. Though i always have been apart. Shouldn’t I be used to it? Nope. One can never become used to it. I see them sat like puddles and others flow like streams around them, all in their own atmospheres, unfortunate and rotting.
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I went on a little bit of a road trip last weekend and tried something slightly new. Instead of relying on my phone or personal CD collection for music, I made a run to the local library and stocked up on music CDs there.
They actually had a pretty decent selection which made it easy to find enough music for the trip.
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Technical
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The Story Engine RPG popped into my head the other day, for apparently no reason. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I have long been interested in this game, original published by Hubris Games as Maelstrom Storytelling and then as Story Engine. It is now published by Precis Intermedia Gaming, and in 2011 they published a revised version, Story Engine Plus. They have in beta a further development of the system, Story Max, which I should really look at. Anyway, I really enjoyed Story Engine, the few times I got to play it.
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I was reading on SDF user candide’s gopher hole about their adventures
with TinyCore Linux[1]. If you’re looking for a well-thought-out dive
into what TinyCore is and why it’s awesome, go read that post. In this
post you’ll just get a few random rantings.
The post by candide made me recall that I have a system in the garage
with TinyCore installed. It’s an older Point of Sale terminal with
very limited resources. It came to me (if memory serves) with a
stripped down version of XP. I wiped that out and installed TinyCore,
to make the box more interesting and useful.
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Internet/Gemini
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Since we moved into our new house last year I have realized that my favorite thing about it, aside from its location, is the big front porch. The house is small and the porch is a nice living area that helps make it not feel as small as the official square footage would suggest. It is an old house and it has one of the big and deep front porches that were typical on houses 100 years ago. It has been really nice out the last couple days so we’ve been sitting out there a lot and it is just really cozy. The loveseat is something we already had so we’re using it for now but we want to replace it with a porch swing.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
EPO President António Campinos does not want anyone to know that the EPO sponsors Putin's war on Ukraine (an open secret); the German government protects him no matter what…
Summary: The chief UPC ‘judge’ is basically seeking to break the law (and violate constitutions, conventions etc.) to start a kangaroo court while dodging real courts, just like Vladimir Putin does
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 11:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Cannot make memes that highlight crimes of the EPO; that’s “illegal” [1, 2]
Can Mr. Campinos rely on ‘copyright nazis’ to silence critics of the Unitary Patent ploy?
Summary: António Campinos and Team UPC are intimidating people who simply point out that the Unified Patent Court (UPC) is illegal and Klaus Grabinksi, shown above, strives to head a de facto kangaroo court in violation of constitutions and conventions (the UK does not and cannot ratify; Ireland hasn’t even held a referendum on the matter)
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft, Rumour at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
And it’s already happening, with lots more rumoured for tomorrow:
Summary: Lots of Microsoft layoffs lately and so-called ‘journalists’ aren’t reporting these; they’re too busy running sponsored puff pieces for Microsoft, usually fluff along the “hey hi” (AI) theme
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Posted in Deception, Fraud, Free/Libre Software at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Compare to this.
Summary: Amid fraud investigations the management of Sirius ‘Open Source’ finally removed our names from its “Meet the Team” page (months late); but it left in the page about half a dozen people who left the company years ago, so it’s just lying to its clients about the current situation
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Posted in Deception, Fraud, Free/Libre Software at 10:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
One week ago (March 14th):
Today (he also deleted clients of Sirius so as to dodge association with the company; the names are redacted):
Summary: Not only did the Sirius ‘Open Source’ CEO purge all mentions of Sirius from his Microsoft LinkedIn account; he’s racing against the clock as crimes quickly become a legal liability
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Posted in Africa, Microsoft, Windows at 10:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A Web survey that measured Microsoft Windows at 97% in Africa (back in 2010) says that Windows has become rather small and insignificant; the Microsoft-sponsored mainstream media seems to be ignoring this completely, quite likely by intention…
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