A Quick overview of Kali Linux 2021.3
This week we’ve been buying iPhones and playing with floppy disk emulators. We bring you new from the Ubuntu community and our favourite stories from past episodes of Ubuntu Podcast.
Last week was the article on noticing various workloads performing slower on the Linux 5.15 development kernel. There is now a patch pending that in testing so far does indeed correct the performance drop on this forthcoming kernel.
As outlined in that prior article, the Linux 5.15 performance regression was tracked down to memory accounting "memcg" changes that landed during the Linux 5.15 merge window.
The latest batch of miscellaneous Direct Rendering Manager changes are on their way to DRM-Next for Linux 5.16. Notable from this new drm-misc-next batch is the new "panel-edp" driver.
The panel-edp driver is focused on addressing the issue of right now most Embedded DisplayPort panels rely on hard-coded Device Tree files in the Linux kernel even though much of the information can be automatically probed. Most eDP panels are "99% probable" and this panel-edp driver effort works on that to make for more eDP panels to be probed dynamically at run-time rather than hard-coded.
Microsoft's "CLOn12" effort to allow OpenCL over DirectX 12 by leveraging Mesa now has landed a major rework to its code within Mesa.
There's been a five month old merge request to Microsoft's CLC code within Mesa to rework its compiler interface. The focus of this big patch series from Microsoft has been on being able to support SPIR and SPIR-V within CLOn12. Plus this reworked code is in better shape.
Sometimes new technologies can work on old hardware. Who needs one of the best graphics cards when you can just use older hardware? This week enthusiasts working on Mesa, an open source implementation of OpenGL and Vulkan APIs for Linux, created a merge request for the RADV ray tracing driver for AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs, enabling it to work with previous-generation graphics cards. The question is, how well will they work?
"This PR implements ray-tracing for older generations (Navi, Vega, Polaris, etc.)," wrote Joshua Ashton, a developer of DXVK and other Direct3D-on-Vulkan works for Valve, reports Phoronix. "It does this by emulating the AMD bvh intersection instructions in software. Right now this passes CTS the same as on RDNA 2 cards."
In recent times software and hardware ray tracing support has been the focus of many industrial discussion as the technology has to be implemented properly to bring significant quality improvements. But that also causes massive performance hits even on modern hardware that supports hardware acceleration for ray tracing, such as AMD's Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs based on the RDNA 2 architecture.
Ubisoft's decision not to implement ray tracing into Far Cry 6 for the latest game consoles greatly illustrates this controversy. But apparently Linux enthusiasts want to enable ray tracing support in Vulkan even on outdated architectures like the original RDNA from 2019 as well as GCN 4/5 from 2016/2017.
Data compression is the process of storing data in a format that uses less space than the original representation would use. Compressing data can be very useful particularly in the field of communications as it enables devices to transmit or store data in fewer bits. Besides reducing transmission bandwidth, compression increases the amount of information that can be stored on a hard disk drive or other storage device.
There are 2 main types of compression. Lossy compression is a data encoding method which reduces a file by discarding certain information. When the file is uncompressed, not all of the original information will be recovered. Lossy compression is typically used to compress video, audio and images, as well as internet telephony. The fact that information is lost during compression will often be unnoticeable to most users. Lossy compression techniques are used in all DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and most multimedia available on the internet.
The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the second development release in the unstable 1.19 release series.
The unstable 1.19 release series adds new features on top of the current stable 1.18 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series of the GStreamer multimedia framework.
The unstable 1.19 release series is for testing and development purposes in the lead-up to the stable 1.20 series which is scheduled for release in a few weeks time. Any newly-added API can still change until that point, although it is rare for that to happen.
Full release notes will be provided in the near future, highlighting all the new features, bugfixes, performance optimizations and other important changes.
This development release is primarily for distributors and early adaptors and anyone who still needs to update their build/packaging setup for Meson.
Today I will be doing a better overview of some basic networking commands in Linux.
I recently created a short and sweet thread on twitter with these commands, so right now, I will be going over them a bit more with more detail and information.
Recently I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on my Dell Inspiron 5547 laptop. I have replaced the HDD on this laptop with a SSD, swapped WLAN card with a Killer WLAN card. With Linux running, it’s very fast and responsive. However, I needed to disable the touchscreen on Ubuntu permanently.
Distributed firewall rules are applied at the VM (vNIC) level and control East-West traffic within the SDDC. Traffic attempting to pass through the dfw is subject to the rules that have been defined. The firewall rules are grouped into policies, which in turn belong to a category.
In this small guide, I will explain how to check timezone in Linux using 4 Easy Methods. System time is usually defined by timezone. Please aware that entire globe divided into multiple timezones which determines its local time.
There are a number of time management utilities available on Linux such as date and timedatectl commands to get the current timezone of system and synchronize with a remote NTP server to enable an automatic system time handling.
I can’t believe that I’ve forgotten to write about one of my most used Neovim plugin ever. The plugin I’m talking about is called Goyo.
It adds a distraction free mode that helps me focus on my writing by centering the content and hiding all other elements.
In this guide, we will show you how you can change the login screen background image of Fedora Workstation (GNOME edition).
An open-source, object-based relational database PostgreSQL, provides the user with the implementation of SQL and is commonly hosted on Linux. With PostgreSQL users can expand the system by defining self data types, functions, and operators.
PostgreSQL is used by many large companies to save and store their data for various applications and it supports various programming interfaces as well as videos, texts, and images. In this article we’ll first go through the installation of PostgreSQL on ubuntu 20.04 then we’ll configure it to allow remote connection
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kubectl on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Kubectl is a command-line client for running commands against Kubernetes clusters. It is capable of deploying applications, managing the clusters, viewing their logs, etc.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Kubectl on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
You probably are aware of variables in Bash shell scripting.
Like other programming and scripting languages, you use variables to store the data and then reference them later in future commands.
name="Linux Handbook" echo "Hello $name!" And it will print "Hello Linux Handbook!".
Outside of the example above, there's also a surprisingly large amount of things you can do with variables, such as filling in a default value when the variable isn't set, and assigning multiple values to a single variable.
Let me show you these unusual and advanced usage of variables in bash scripting.
Vim a contraction of Vi IMproved) is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program for Unix
Vim is a popular text editor for Linux, It’s one of its special features is support for encrypting text files using various crypto methods with a password.
We will explain one of the simple Vim usage tricks; password protecting a file using Vim in Linux.
Nagios is a free open source tool to monitor various network devices and servers in a network. It support both Linux and Windows OS and provides intuitive web interface to monitor network resources. When configured it can alert you via Email in case of a network device or server goes down or malfunctions. We will move towards installation and configuration of Nagios Core and NRPE (plugin).
Today we will learn how to configure bind with Debian 11. World of the internet is not possible without DNS service. For Linux BIND to that DNS jobs. So what is bind or DNS? Well, its basic role is to patch a specific domain name with a specific IP address. When you are looking for a website over the internet it will resolve the domain name to IP address and vice versa. Usually, 53 is the port number for DNS services. Let’s have a look at how we can configure that service step by step.
After the third episode of The Long Dark releasing back in October 2019, Hinterland Studio has confirmed Episode 4 will appear on October 6. Two years of waiting, hopefully it will be worth it.
This episode has been given the title "FURY, THEN SILENCE". Here's the synopsis: "A murderous gang of convicts have captured Mackenzie. Desperate to escape one of the darkest corners of Great Bear Island, he must somehow survive his fiercest enemy yet. Can Mackenzie recover the Hardcase, continue his search for Astrid, and save the innocents caught up in this deadly confrontation?"
Here comes a new progress report about the Tiles editor rework. This is most likely the last progress report before the 4.0 alpha. The previous blog post can be found here.
Tile atlas editing
Some improvements were made to the tile atlas editor.
I first reorganized the tiles creation menus, which are now split into 3 modes. The first mode allows editing the atlas properties and creating/removing base tiles, the second one allows selecting and editing tiles properties, and the last one is to paint properties over the tiles.
In this third mode, I implemented a dedicated editor for tile shapes (collision shapes, occluders, naviagation shapes). Set by default to the tile's base shapes, it then can be painted over tiles.
Valve continue upgrading and tweaking the Steam client with a fresh Beta version being released today with a couple of tweaks that are interesting for Linux users.
Some of the issues fixed are for everyone including slow startup after suspend, Cloud Sync will now happen as soon as possible to avoid delays launching games and for Remote Play they fixed using multiple PS5 controllers from the Steam Link app.
The Gnome project has released version 41 of its Linux / Unix desktop. In addition to a significantly improved settings dialog, it offers an improved calendar application, “Connections” for remote connections to other computers and improvements to the Nautilus file manager. On top of that, the developers promise more oomph through various performance improvements.
The now updated Gnome is one of the established desktop environments in the open source world. Similar to KDE, Gnome has existed for over two decades and has reinvented itself several times during this time. Today Gnome sets itself apart from most other environments: The Gnome shell as the main element of the desktop, for example, does not imitate the classic look of Windows, but arranges the desktop completely differently. The previous major version of Gnome, 40th, also brought significant visual changes compared to the previous version.
GNOME 41, the latest stable version of an easy and elegant desktop user interface, just released Wednesday 22 September 2021 six month after the previous version. This article overviews the release with step by step guide for you to download and try it out on computer. Thanks to GNOME, now software freedom is more user friendly and accessible for all computer users!
I’m happy to announce the availability of MidnightBSD 2.1 for amd64 and i386. This is an incremental release focusing on bug fixes, improvements to the package manager and a new system compiler.
As an experiment, I've started assembling a simple binary package hosting mechanism for Gentoo. Right now this comes with some serious limitations and should not be used for security or mission critical applications (more on this below). The main purpose of this experiment is to find out how well it works and where we need improvements in Portage's binary package handling.
It gives me great pleasure to announce the winners of the 2021 SUSE One Partner Awards! The awards are to honour those partners who have gone above and beyond for our joint customers in what has undoubtedly been one of the most challenging years for many.
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.9.6 is generally available as of September 22, 2021.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
All organizations are susceptible to information security threatsââ¬â¢from cybercrime, which was predicted to cost the world US$6 trillion in 2021, to human error, which accounts for 95% of cybersecurity breaches.
No matter the type of threat, your organization needs to protect itself by maintaining security controls across its stack. That’s where DevSecOps comes in. Security shouldn’t be an afterthought. DevSecOps means thinking about application and infrastructure security from the start, building it into every phase of the life cycle and stackââ¬â¢especially now that workloads are spread across environments.
The good news: 74% of organizations that responded to our 2021 "Kubernetes adoption, security, and market trends" survey have a DevSecOps initiative in place, and 25% have an advanced initiative, integrating and automating security throughout the life cycle.
There comes a time in the life of an application when someone asks: "Should we move this to the cloud?" Public and private clouds often breathe life into existing applications with more flexibility, simpler maintenance, and better performance. However, these lift and shift migrations come with tradeoffs.
Should the application be migrated? If so, should you take the opportunity to make changes to the application along the way? How do you make a plan and stick to it? This post answers those questions and more.
Here's a lengthy missive from Lennart Poettering taking Linux distributors to task for inadequately protecting systems from physical attacks.
Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data enables building no-/low-code line of business applications using data, machine learning, and optimization from IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Ontology managers can define business-oriented data models integrating data from IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Application builders can use Palantir tools to create applications using these data models. Additionally, applications can integrate machine learning models from IBM Cloud Pak for Data to infuse predictions, as well as decision optimization result data from IBM Cloud Pak for Data to determine optimized actions based on data and predictions.
This blog post explains how to create AI-infused apps using Palantir ontology and application building tools together with IBM Cloud Pak for Data model deployments and data and AI catalog. It also outlines the underlying integration architecture.
After half a year of development, the GNOME project announced version 41 of its popular Linux desktop environment.
GNOME 41 comes with some exciting new features. The upper right corner system tray menu now includes option to make it easy to switch Power Mode between “Balanced” and “Power Saver”. It’s said that “Performance mode” is only visible on hardware that supports this feature, though I don’t understand which hardware required, may be a dedicated graphics card.
I’ve just received my first Rockchip RK3566 platform with Zidoo M6 Arm mini PC that supports Ubuntu 18.04, Android 11, and Station OS.
I was sent the standard version with 4GB RAM and 32GB eMMC flash that will be suitable for most applications. I’ll start Zidoo M6 review with an unboxing and a teardown to check the hardware design and “hidden” features before reviewing with the device with Android 11 and/or Ubuntu 18.04.
There’s nothing special about the package (and that’s a good thing in order to go more easily through customs), so let’s check out the package content.
The “Knowles AISonic IA8201 Raspberry Pi Development Kit” is based on a homegrown IA8201 DSP with wake-on-voice processing for low latency voice UI and ML inferencing. The kit offers a choice of mic array boards with 2x or 3x mics.
Knowles, a leader in microphone and audio processing technology, has launched a development kit for the Raspberry Pi for prototyping products based on its new IA8201 DSP. The Knowles AISonic IA8201 Raspberry Pi Development Kit supports wake-on-voice processing for low latency voice UI with noise reduction, context awareness, and accelerated machine learning inferencing.
Oftentimes in computing, we start doing a thing, and we’re glad we’re doing it. But then we realise, it would be much nicer if we could do it much faster. [Ricardo de Azambuja] was in just such a situation when working with the Raspberry Pi Zero, and realised that there were some techniques that could drastically speed up Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) on the platform. Thus, he got to work.
The trick is using the Raspberry Pi Zero’s GPU to handle the FFTs instead of the CPU itself. This netted Ricardo a 7x speed upgrade for 1-dimensional FFTs, and a 2x speed upgrade for 2-dimensional operations.
Bluetooth has become widely popular since its introduction in 1999. However, it’s also had its fair share of security problems over the years. Just recently, a research group from the Singapore University of Technology and Design found a serious vulnerability in a large variety of Bluetooth devices. Having now been disclosed, it is known as the BrakTooth vulnerability.
Full details are not yet available; the research team is waiting until October to publicly release proof-of-concept code in order to give time for companies to patch their devices. The basic idea however, is in the name. “Brak” is the Norweigan word for “crash,” with “tooth” referring to Bluetooth itself. The attack involves repeatedly attempting to crash devices to force them into undesired operation.
The plethora of wireless technologies has made internet-connected devices the norm, but it’s not always necessary if you don’t need real-time updates. Whether it’s due to battery life, or location and range constraints, downloading data directly from the device whenever possible might be a viable solution. [Malcolm Mackay] demonstrates an elegant solution on the open source cuplTag temperature/humidity logger, using any NFC-enabled smartphone, without requiring a custom app.
The last time we saw the Cortex 2 it was still only about half built, and we can’t wait to see how it performs. Rocketry is a field that has benefited greatly from things like 3D printing, the availability of highly-integrated electronics, and even such things as a rocket design workbench for FreeCAD. Better tools enable better work, after all.
Ha ha, the saga continues. Not sure if I should plug away at this, or just give in and use the official binary package. This was the previous attempt:
https://bkhome.org/news/202109/another-attempt-to-compile-chromium.html
I learnt a lot from that, so applied some of that new knowledge and had another go. Started the compile at 10am this morning, has just now failed, at just on 10pm. There was one failure in the morning, that I caught just after it happened, and applied a hack to fix it. Here are my notes...
[...]
That last error means nothing to me.
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces that the first release candidate of PostgreSQL 14 is now available for download. As a release candidate, PostgreSQL 14 RC 1 will be mostly identical to the initial release of PostgreSQL 14, though some more fixes may be applied prior to the general availability of PostgreSQL 14.
The planned date for the general availability of PostgreSQL 14 is September 30, 2021. Please see the "Release Schedule" section for more details.
Static website generators and JAMStack have taken off in recent years. And with good reason. There is no need for complex backends with only static HTML, CSS, and Javascript to serve. Not having backends means better security, lower operational overhead, and cheaper hosting. A win-win-win!
[...]
The command jekyll serve is great for local testing. But once you're done with local testing, you'll want to build the final artifact to publish. The command jekyll build --source source_dir --destination destination_dir builds your website into the _site folder. Note that this folder is cleaned up before every build, so don't place important things in there. Once you have the content, you can host it on a static hosting service of your choosing.
You should now have a decent overall grasp of what Jekyll is capable of and what the main bits and pieces do. If you’re looking for inspiration, the official JAMStack website has some amazing examples.
Qing Zhao of Oracle presented yesterday during the LPC2021 GNU Tools Track around the work they and others have been engaged in for improving the security of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).
In some areas this GCC security work is about catching up with security features already implemented by LLVM Clang. Among the features have been for zeroing out caller-used registers on return, auto initializing of stack variables, unsigned overflow detection, and more. For instance with GCC 11 is the zero-call-used-regs compiler feature and now with Linux 5.15 that feature can be optionally used to enhance the kernel security.
We talk about how Till got involved in Free Software, highlight the short and long term impacts of the first court decisions, about some of the most common misunderstandings of Free Software licensing, as well as the role of the FSFE's legal network in fostering the discussion and knowledge for Free Software legal and licensing topics. I highly appreciate Till for being able to explain complex legal topics, so non-lawyers can understand them.
Typically, detecting glyphosate — a herbicide — in a beverage requires a sophisticated test setup. But Washington State University has a 3D printed sensor that uses nanotubes to simplify the detection of the toxin.
The idea is very similar to inexpensive blood glucose monitors. The test will eventually find use for human samples, but the initial testing was for detecting contamination in orange juice.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, is proud to announce there have been two million enrollments to date across all of its online courses offered on the edX platform. These open source training courses have continually increasing rates of enrollment growth as the curriculum continues to expand, with offerings covering technologies like cloud infrastructure, blockchain, networking, and DevOps.
ROT8000 is the Unicode equivalent of ROT13. What’s clever about it is that normal English looks like Chinese, and not like ciphertext (to a typical Westerner, that is).
Cisco has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple Cisco products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ruby-kaminari and tomcat8), Mageia (389-ds-base, ansible, apache, apr, cpio, curl, firefox, ghostscript, gifsicle, gpac, libarchive, libgd, libssh, lynx, nextcloud-client, openssl, postgresql, proftpd, python3, thunderbird, tor, and vim), openSUSE (chromium, ffmpeg, grilo, hivex, linuxptp, and samba), Oracle (go-toolset:ol8, kernel, kernel-container, krb5, mysql:8.0, and nodejs:12), SUSE (ffmpeg, firefox, grilo, hivex, kernel, linuxptp, nodejs14, and samba), and Ubuntu (ca-certificates, edk2, sqlparse, and webkit2gtk).
The federal government has prioritized the transition of federal networks to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) since the release of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Memorandum 05-22 in 2005. In 2020, OMB renewed its focus on IPv6 through the publication of OMB Memorandum 21-07. That memorandum specifically entrusts CISA with enhancing the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) program to fully support the implementation of IPv6 in federal IT systems.
It takes the tortoise in the video more than eight minutes to devour the strawberry, blueberry, broccoli floret, and piece of pumpkin laid out in front of it. The microphones poking into the top half of the frame capture every satisfied crunch and nibble. The audio will only trigger ASMR in people who are sensitive to the phenomenon. If you don't experience the "brain tingles" that characterize ASMR, you may still enjoy watching the cuteness on display below.
China's moves are about control of data of tech firms, say civil society groups, who fear other governments may follow suit
[...]
China last month banned under-18s from playing video games during the week, with play restricted to just one hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays.
It also instructed gaming companies to prevent children playing outside these times and ensure they have real-name verification systems to limit abuse.
Last week, the short video app Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, said that all its authenticated users below the age of 14 will now access the app in "youth mode" - limiting users access for up to 40 minutes a day, between 6 am and 10 pm.
Authorities have also sought to increase oversight of the algorithms tech companies use, saying that companies must abide by business ethics and principles of fairness, and ordering food delivery companies to provide better protection for workers.
Today, Access Now joined a coalition of civil society organizations to support the U.S. House Energy and Commerce committee’s proposal to increase the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) funding by $1 billion over ten years. The funding would be used to create a new FTC bureau that will focus on policing privacy, security, and data abuse matters.
“Privacy and data protection issues have human rights and racial equity implications,” said Willmary Escoto, U.S. Policy Analyst at Access Now. “With such paltry funding and staffing, the FTC has been forced to ration its limited resources to focus on cases with the biggest impact, likely letting many violators off the hook. Increased funding will allow the Commission to hire more staff and take more cases that help reduce racial inequity.”
The world wide web has become an annoying, ultra-commercialized space. Many websites today are prioritizing the interests of the company behind the domain, at the expense of the user’s experience and well-being. This has been a frustrating problem for several years, but lately there’s been a heartwarming trend of users fighting back against the corporate web and stepping up to help and serve each other’s needs in spite of them, through what I’ve come to think of as Internet reclamation projects.
I think the first of these which appeared on my radar was Invidious, which scrapes information off of a YouTube page and presents it in a more pleasant, user-first interface— something which NewPipe also does well for Android. These tools pry data out of YouTube’s hands and present it on a simple UI, designed for users first, with no ads or spyware, and with nice features YouTube would never add, like download links, audio mode, and offline viewing. It shows us what users want, but YouTube refuses to give.
Another project which has been particularly successful recently is Nitter, which does something similar for Twitter. Twitter’s increasingly draconian restrictions on who can access what data, and their attitude towards logged-out users in particular, has been a great annoyance to anyone who does not have, and does not want, a Twitter account, but who may still encounter Twitter links around the web. Nitter has been quite helpful in de-crapifying Twitter for these folks. I have set up an automatic redirect in my browser which takes me straight to Nitter, and I never have to see the shitty, user-hostile Twitter interface again.
Cambond is pleased to announce that it has received a Notice of Allowance from the EU Patent Office for one of its core technology patents – Biocomposites and Methods of Use.*
Chimeric Therapeutics Ltd (ASX:CHM) has gained European patent protection for its cancer-fighting, clinical-stage CAR T asset, CHM 1101.
The patent covers certain applications of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) technology using chlorotoxin (CLTX), including CHM 1101, with patent protection expected until 2036.
Chimeric Therapeutics (ASX:CHM, “Chimeric” or the “Company”), a clinical-stage cell therapy company, is pleased to announce the European Patent Office’s decision to grant patent EP 3,362,470 B1, which was published in the European Patent Bulletin dated September 22, 2021.
Yesterday, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office affirmed an additional three patents in a long-term dispute between the companies over intellectual property for Medtronic’s Interstim sacral neuromodulation (SNM) system, completing the review process initiated by Axonics to challenge the validity of the seven total patents in the case brought by Medtronic, according to a news release.
