GNU/Linux, which is not a direct descendant of the original bits of either AT&T or BSD, and thus not heir to the title of UNIX in the eyes of some purists, ironically brought UNIX to the masses in ways that the more pure-breeds could not. Capitalizing on the confusion created by the AT&T / BSD battles, Linux set its sights on world domination (albeit unwittingly), and the rest as they say is mostly history.
Today, GNU/Linux leads the pack among the Open Source UNIX variants that are active today (such as FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD). The commercial variants, still alive in data centers, continue to be pushed by big-name vendors, despite being caught in a death spiral and struggling to stay afloat in the face of the penguin tsunami. The once inimitable SunOS/Solaris fizzled away without even a proper goodbye, but continue to live on in Illumos and OpenIndiana, a shell of its former self.
And so it comes down to a handful. On the one hand, GNU/Linux, the irreverent and bastard poster-child that continues to evolve at break-neck speed, and the Right Honourable BSDs that continue to keep the original philosophy alive in its purest form and fighting valiantly into the next decade and into the twilight of most of its developer and user base.
The good news is that on the vast majority of Linux distributions, installing a printer is as easy as plugging it in. But what about minimal Linux distros like Arch Linux? What programs do you need to install? How do you get your printer drivers?
I've talked frequently about self documenting code and how I don't particularly like the concept but today I thought I'd explain why I think and where concepts of self documenting code can actually provide some value.
An address dependency involves a load whose return value directly or indirectly determines the address of a later load or store, which results in the earlier load being ordered before the later load or store. A data dependency involves a load whose return value directly or indirectly determine the value stored by a later store, which results in the load being ordered before the store. These are used heavily by RCU. Although they are not quite as fragile as control dependencies, compilers still do not know about them. Therefore, care is still required, as can be seen in the rcu_dereference.rst Linux-kernel coding guidelines. As with control dependencies, address and data dependencies are very low cost, so they are used heavily in the Linux kernel via rcu_dereference() and friends.
At the assembly language level on many weakly ordered architectures, a conditional branch acts as a very weak, very cheap, but very useful memory-barrier instruction. It orders any load whose return value feeds into the condition codes before all stores that execute after the branch instruction completes, whether the branch is taken or not. ARMv8 also has a conditional-move instruction (CSEL) that provides similar ordering.
Because the ordering properties of the conditional branch involve dependencies from the load to the branch and from the branch to the store, and because the branch is a control-flow instruction, this ordering is said to be due to a control dependency.
Because compilers do not understand them, control dependencies are quite fragile, as documented by the many cautionary tales in the Linux kernel's memory-barriers.txt documentation (search for the "CONTROL DEPENDENCIES" heading). But they are very low cost, so they are used on a few critically important fastpaths in the Linux kernel.
Out-of-thin-air (OOTA) values are a troubling theoretical problem, but thus far do not actually occur in practice. In the words of the Bard: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
But what is life without a little sound and fury? Besides, "mere theory" can loom large for those creating tools to analyze software. This post therefore gives a brief introduction to OOTA, and then provides some simple practical solutions, along with some difficult ones.
Sequence locks vaguely resemble reader-writer locks except that readers cannot block writers. If a writer runs concurrently with a reader, that reader is forced to retry its critical section. If a reader successfully completes its critical section (there were no concurrent writers), then its accesses will have been data-race free. Of course, an incessant stream of writers could starve all readers, and the Linux-kernel sequence-lock implementation provides extensions to deal with this in cases where incessant writing is a possibility. The usual approach is to instead arrange things so that writers are never incessant.
"I really love C," Torvalds said at one point. "I think C is a great language, and C is, to me, is really a way to control the hardware at a fairly low level..."
This week saw the annual check-in with Linux creator Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit North America, this year held in Seattle (as well as virtually).
Torvalds took the stage Tuesday in the ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Seattle for the event’s traditional half-hour of questions from Dirk Hohndel, an early Linux contributor (now also the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware) in an afternoon keynote session.
The ceremony opened by acknowledging a special moment in time with a birthday cake ceremoniously delivered to Torvalds to mark Linux’s 30th anniversary, drawing a round of applause from the audience. Hohndel added he was offering 30th-birthday wishes “to all of the kernel developers — it really is a community also.”
Torvalds also added that as far as he is concerned, Linux is done for the past 29 years. Every other feature that has been added later is about what other people needed, wanted or were interested in.
Many developers would relate to this. You work on a project and think that it has reached a ‘done’ state. If the project does not get enough traction, you lose interest to work on it and move to something ‘new and exciting’. The real motivation to continue the project comes from the users and the recognition.
When asked about what they should be doing for the 50th anniversary of Linux, Torvalds said that he doesn’t see himself doing kernel programming at the age of 70. Then he also chipped in that he didn’t imagine himself doing kernel programming at the age of 50 as well and yet he is doing that at present.
While earlier this year AMD shifted their Radeon Software driver focus to only supporting Polaris / GCN 1.4 and newer, when it comes to the open-source driver support on Linux there still is occasional activity going back to the ATI Radeon R300 days from nearly two decades ago.
The ATI R300 GPUs were first introduced in 2002 and ended up spanning the legendary Radeon 9000 series through the X300/X500/X600 series. (As well, the R300 Gallium3D driver also supports through the ATI Radeon X1000 series.) While AMD's open-source Linux developers no longer focus on this R300g driver in a long time or even the R600g driver for that matter in the rest of the pre-GCN GPUs, the community is able to make the occasional improvement to this legacy hardware support thanks to the nature of open-source.
After almost two years of development, the HexChat IRC client finally released new 2.6.0 version with a number of new IRCv3 features and strikethrough formatting support.
HexChat is a free open source Internet Relay Chat client that forked from XChat. It offers both command line and customizable graphical interface, allows to securely join multiple networks and talk to users privately.
The app supports features such as DCC, SASL, proxies, spellcheck, alerts, logging, custom themes, Python/Perl scripts, and even transfer files.
Virtualization in computing involves creating virtual machines, storage, hardware, computer network resources, or an operating system. You can create many instances of a given operating system on a single computer. These instances are called virtual machines. Virtualization software has become popular as they extend the capabilities of a system drastically. Virtualization is most preferred and applied for cloud computing.
The Linux community has created several virtualization tools or Virt tools like QEMU, KVM, Libvert, or libguestfs which act as the basis for creating open-source virtualization software. The article will highlight several open-source virtualization software like Oracle VM VirtualBox, Linux-KVM, Redhat virtualization, Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen Project, oVirt, and boxes in Fedora.
Here’s the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software.
For our entire collection, check out the categories below. This is the largest compilation of recommended software. The collection includes hundreds of articles, with comprehensive sections on internet, graphics, games, programming, science, office, utilities, and more. Almost all of the software is free and open source.
WhatsApp is a free messaging application used by over a billion people worldwide. WhatsApp provides secure, reliable voice and video calls that can be made locally or internationally with a Wi-Fi or cellular data connection. WhatsApp is available for multiple devices, like computers, tablets, and phones.
Though there doesn’t exist a download link for Linux on the WhatsApp website, it’s still possible to install WhatsApp on Ubuntu. In this tutorial, you’ll learn two methods of installing WhatsApp on Ubuntu.
JMP offers VoIP calling via XMPP, but it's also possibly to use the VoIP using SIP.
The underlying VoIP calling functionality in JMP is provided by Bandwidth, but their old Asterisk instructions didn't quite work for me. Here's how I set it up in my Asterisk server.
Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Debian come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, along with lacking the newest features, software technology, and support for the latest graphics card hardware. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Nvidia Graphic Drivers for the series 470.xx / 465.xx / 460.xx / 390.xx and 340.xx from the Nvidia Proprietary Repository, giving you the latest in software available.
Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Linux Mint come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s, which lacks the latest graphics card hardware’s latest features, software technology, and support. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Nvidia Graphic Drivers for the series 470.xx / 465.xx / 460.xx / 390.xx and 340.xx from the Nvidia Proprietary Repository, giving you the latest in software available.
Most of the intermediate and almost all advanced users prefer CLI over GUI mode, because there are plethora of command line tricks to make things much easier and faster. Today, I'd like to share one simple tip. This simple bash trick can help you to automatically switch to a directory without using cd command. All you need to do is just enter the path of the directory in the Terminal, and you will be landed in that particular directory. This could be useful in scripting and for those who use command line a lot at work. Read on.
MySQL Workbench is a graphical modeling tool and development system available in a free and a commercial edition… It offers a collection of tools for working with MySQL databases. In short, it provides a Graphical user interface to easily design and edit databases, display them clearly, and administer them. Workbench can be used on computers with the Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows operating systems.
The software is able to extract structures from existing databases and display them clearly. In addition, MySQL Workbench converts tables from SQL Server to MySQL tables; allow developers to visually design databases and then offline and host them on a MySQL server. The Community Edition can be downloaded for free. For advanced users who need additional functions, extensions with scripting languages ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹can be integrated into the tool.
An SSH jump server is a proxy standing between clients and the rest of the SSH fleet. Jump hosts minimize threats by forcing all SSH traffic to go through a single hardened location and minimizing an individual node’s SSH endpoints to the outside world. (Read more: “How to set up an SSH jump server.”)
One way to configure a multi-hop setup is by storing a private key for the destination server on your jump server. Do not do this. A jump server is usually a multi-user environment, meaning any single party with elevated privileges could compromise any private key. A solution to this security threat is enabling agent forwarding. Given how common this method is, it may surprise you to learn this is not recommended. To understand why, let’s dig a bit deeper.
Lenovo may be developing an Android-powered handheld gaming device called the Lenovo Legion Play.
The company hasn’t officially announce the Legion Play yet, and might never do so, but a set of images found on the Lenovo website indicate that the company was at least considering introducing the handheld game console earlier this year.
[...]
If Lenovo does decide to bring the Legion Play to market, it wouldn’t be Lenovo’s first Android-powered handheld gaming device. The company launched the $500 Legion Phone Duel for the Chinese market last summer, and followed up this spring with the Legion Phone Duel 2, a $925 phone with a 144 Hz AMOLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor, at least 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, RGB lighting on the back, plus a cooling fan.
No matter how many displays you use with your computer, you'll never be able to fit all the app windows on your desktop. Unless, of course, you have the right tool.
A window manager is a perfect tool that caters to this requirement very well and allows you to leverage the screen estate of your computer/external display to its full potential.
But what exactly is it, what can it do, and what are some of the best window managers you can use on Linux? Here's a guide with answers to all such questions.
The other day I was thinking about how I came to create Gwenview and realized the story of its genesis and the reason behind its unusual (for a KDE application) name is not widely known. Time to write an article on this topic. At least one long-hidden secret is going to be revealed in this article… so let's get started!
In the late 90s I was getting started with Linux, running Mandrake with GNOME on my PC. I probably tried KDE at that time, but either it did not work for me or I didn't like it back then. I was using GQview to browse images, but was not super happy with it, so I decided to write my own image viewer. At that time my experience with UI development was on Windows, using Borland C++ Builder and its VCL toolkit. I looked at what was available to create graphical application using C++ on Linux. I found Qt, but quickly dismissed because of the infamous MOC. Heresy, that was not pure C++! Having been burned by the numerous extensions added by C++ builder to the language, I was not going to accept impurity again! I was young and foolish back then (Now I am less young, and hopefully a bit less foolish).
Version 0.6 of helloSystem is now available as the FreeBSD-based open-source operating system project taking design cues from Apple's macOS.
helloSystem 0.6 brings improvements to window management, new window animations, Filer file manager enhancements, and a wide range of other desktop refinements and bugs have been fixed. HelloSystem 0.6 also marks the point in switching from the Openbox window manager over to KDE's KWin window manager.
Our Horde docker images have switched over from Tumbleweed to openSUSE LEAP once again.
Recently our container build CI job in github.com broke down unexpectedly. An investigation showed that Tumbleweed’s core libraries, especially libc, were too new for the CI’s build system, based on Ubuntu LTS.
This is the second time we abandoned the Tumbleweed basis for Horde docker containers. OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 uses a relatively old, but well-maintained, set of base libraries. Both Leap and Tumbleweed deliver PHP 7.4 as a basis for Horde. In both systems, we skip the packaged composer version for a static pick which we will update from time to time. We may switch over to packaged composer if we feel confident.
For the past 15 years, the main Finnix web site, finnix.org had been a MediaWiki site, being used as a CMS. Actually, for the first few years, it was a public wiki which anyone could edit, but spammers ruined that. But as of today, the site has been relaunched, as a single, simple HTML page which provides the essential information to download and use Finnix.
Looks like arm64 build is coming up with Pop OS 21.10 Impish Indri release.
The Raspberry Pi is an awesome little computer, whose capabilities won't stop increasing. As such, you should make sure that you have the best apps installed on it. Whether you're running Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) some apps are unmissable.
Here are the best Raspberry Pi apps you can install today.
Came to around $60-$70. Considering the Mark I originally sold for $150 a pop, that’s not bad. True, it’s not as cheap as a Google or Amazon assistant, but then it’s not listening to my every word trying to gather as much information about me and my family as possible. That’s worth the extra cost to me.
The vintage IBM circuit board below has a large metal block on it that caught my attention, so I investigated it in detail. It turns out that the board is part of a modem, and the large metal box is a transformer. This blog post summarizes what I learned about this board, along with a bit of history on modems.
A mask was made from vinyl sheet and a squeegee used to deposit a thick layer of silver and glass particles 1 um or less in size. This was then sintered in a small kiln, which was controlled with a Raspberry Pi running PicoFlow, and after a little bit of scrubbing, the surface resistance was a very usable 2 mé/square. Holes cut with the laser, together with some silver material being pushed through with the squeegee formed through holes with no additional effort. That’s pretty neat!
The design is open source, with all the relevant information and files available on GitHub. This looks like a fun craft even if you don’t plan on doing research with it, and [Stephen] also created an FPV specific canopy cover.
Timetagger is an open-source time-tracker package for users who enjoy managing their time.
It has a unique interface which is easy to use and learn in almost no time.
Timetagger implements a Pomodoro method in a nice visualized time-flow view that makes it easy to track and monitor improvements and improve the user productivity.
The application is a web-based self-hosted app, which means you can run it on your local machine or server.
With mass vaccination programmes and careful application of public health measures it almost feels for some of us as though the pandemic is under control. Any thoughts of it being over are illusory though, and if further reminders were needed we have the news that once more this year’s Chaos Communication Congress has been cancelled due to the safety of its attendees and the extra precautions that its organizers would have to undertake.
This event in Leipzig between Christmas and New Year is probably the largest of the European gatherings in our community, and its loss will be a great disappointment. Last year’s cancelled event was replaced by a remote one, we’ll see whether they repeat that feat in 2021. If so, we’ll be there, virtually.
The specific change has the title "Use DBus remote when Firefox is built with --enable-dbus", and is apparently to fix bug 1724242, "Background update applied when mixing X11/Wayland and opening remote link". The broad outline of the problem (which has been an issue for years) is that a Firefox running on Wayland must use D-Bus remote control, but if an X program running in XWayland then tries to start Firefox (for example to open a URL), the new Firefox may (only) try to find a running Firefox via the X mechanism and then fail, with various consequences. The Mozilla solution is to only use D-Bus remote control and basically drop X11 remote control.
Let’s Encrypt did, in fact, implement a new root and intermediate certificates some time ago, but after the built-in certificate stores in the Mozilla applications shipped with all versions of ArcaOS 5.0 to date (5.0 through 5.0.6) were configured. Thus, these new certificates were not included in those builds, and as a result, the new root certificate is indeed unknown.
An in-depth comparison of MariaDB vs MySQL based on license model, popularity, features, performance, and support.
MySQL and MariaDB are relational database management systems (RDBMS) best known for their mutual compatibility and their identical command and query syntaxes. In fact, MariaDB is a free and open source fork of MySQL that inherited many of that database’s characteristics.
The MariaDB and MySQL database management systems have a lot in common, which can make it difficult to choose when you need to decide on a database solution for your needs.
But before we get into an in-depth analysis on the topic MySQL vs MariaDB, let’s start at the very beginning.
Here are some of the different strategies you can use to write tests that read or write data from a database, and the benefits and drawbacks of each. I'm usually writing Go code, so the examples here are for Go, but the notes should generalize to any language that runs tests against Postgres, MySQL, or any other database.
In this article I'll show you how to make a responsive layout in Qt / QML that automatically adjusts the amount of columns and rows based on the window dimensions, including scrollbars for when the content does not fit inside the window. This also works if you have a portrait and landscape orientation of your application, since the screen or window dimensions will be different across those two builds. I also explain how the dynamic resizing works with an explanation of property bindings in QML and as a bonus this works on mobile (Android/iOS) as well.
About two months ago, the Changelog had a show about Vim in general and why, after all these years, it’s still the favorite text editor of a lot of folks. That episode also contained a segment where each of the panelists talked about how they got into Vim in the first place. I thought I should share my story there too (at least as far as I can still remember it)!
On top of the OpenBSD related changes I've been contributing upstream to LLVM, I've been continuing my experiments with the build system. I've also been reading documentation about various parts of the toolchain, sending diffs when encountering mistakes or things which could be improved.
Facebook this week announced the open-sourcing of CompilerGym as their effort to improve compiler performance by leveraging machine learning to tackle optimization work.
OpenBLAS 0.3.18 is out today as the latest feature update to this widely-used, open-source BLAS implementation.
OpenBLAS 0.3.18 brings a wide assortment of improvements and fixes, some of the highlights include:
- Support for LoongArch (LoongArch64) as the new Loongson MIPS-based CPU architecture.
Intel on Friday formally released their oneAPI Toolkits 2021.4 release as the latest collection of their various software components for a multi-vendor, multi-architecture software platform across CPUs and XPUs (GPUs / accelerators).
Starting with Benjamin Franklin, one postmaster general after another endeavored to speed up the U.S. Mail.ââ¬â In this ongoing quest to move mail faster, a series of transportation advances were eagerly adopted, from stagecoaches to steamships to railroads to airplanes.ââ¬â But the current postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, is pursuing a course of action that departs from the goals and aspirations of his predecessors.ââ¬â While previous postmasters generals sought faster mail delivery, DeJoy stands out for his wish to make it slower. Beginning this October 1, many Americans can expect permanently slower mail, especially if they live on the West Coast.ââ¬â ââ¬â
Reading aloud is the best bang for your buck, Siriboe says, adding that she hasn't seen anything yet that gives a higher return on investment.
You then realise that when we discovered that 2 million more people listen to the radio than use the [Internet]. The 2 million was mostly the rural based individuals.
For urban users, almost the same proportion has access to both the [Internet] (74%) and the radio (70.7%).
Finally, someone decided to answer the question that nobody was asking: what if [Benjamin Franklin] had had a drone rather than a kite?
Granted, [Jay Bowles] didn’t fly his electricity-harvesting drone during a thunderstorm, but he did manage to reach some of the same conclusions that [Dr. Franklin] did about the nature of atmospheric electricity. His experimental setup was pretty simple: a DJI Mini2 drone with enough payload capacity to haul a length of fine-gauge magnet wire up to around 100 meters above ground level. A collecting electrode made of metal mesh was connected to the wire and suspended below the drone. Some big nails were driven into the soil to complete the circuit between the drone and the ground.
The Nintendo 64 was one of the consoles that properly heralded in the era of 3D gaming. However, its controller is of a design we wouldn’t consider ideal today. For the FPS games that were so popular on the N64, a mouse and keyboard could do much better. [The Hypocaust] set out to make it happen.
The N64 polls the controller and receives button and analog stick data in return. Four bytes are sent by the controller, with 14 bits covering the buttons and 8 bits covering the horizontal and vertical axes of the analog stick, respectively. Thus, if keyboard presses and mouse movements from a PC could be pumped to a microcontroller which reformatted the data into signals the N64 could understand, everything would work nicely.
Legged robots span all sorts of shapes and sizes. From the paradigm-setting quadrupeds built from a pit-crew of grad students to the Kickstarter canines that are sure to entertain your junior hackers, the entry point is far and wide. Not one to simply watch from the sidelines, though, [Oracid] wanted to get in on the quadruped-building fun and take us all with him. The result is 5BQE2, a spry budget quadruped that can pronk around the patio at a proper 1 meter-per-second clip.
While conventional safes can be a good place to put valuables, sometimes it’s even better to hide your things where nobody will even look in the first place. [Wesley Treat] has a build that will allow you to do just that, which secrets away papers, money, or small items within the body of a bolt.
Facebook has been in an uproar over the past few weeks, which the meetings were held to quell. The tumult began after The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles last month that showed Facebook knew about the harms of its services, including teenage girls saying that Instagram made them feel worse about themselves. The articles were based on a trove of Facebook documents, which were leaked by an unidentified whistle-blower.
The revelations immediately set off a wave of criticism from regulators and lawmakers, many of whom moved swiftly to call the company to account. As scrutiny mounted, Facebook delayed the Instagram service for children. On Thursday, Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, was questioned for more than two hours by lawmakers about the mental and emotional toll its services could take on kids.
[...]
The furor is unlikely to die down. On Sunday, the whistle-blower who leaked the internal research and is a former Facebook employee is set to reveal her identity and discuss the documents on “60 Minutes.” She will then appear at a Senate hearing on Tuesday to testify about what she discovered while conducting research at Facebook.
Senators fired a barrage of criticism Thursday at a Facebook executive over the social-networking giant's handling of internal research on how its Instagram photo-sharing platform can harm teens.
The problem is due to unpatched vulnerabilities in both the Apple Pay and Visa systems, according to an academic team from the Universities of Birmingham and Surrey, backed by the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). But Visa, for its part, said that Apple Pay payments are secure and that any real-world attacks would be difficult to carry out.
The team explained that fraudulent tap-and-go payments at card readers can be made using any iPhone that has a Visa card set up in “Express Transit” mode. Express Transit allows commuters around the world, including those riding the New York City subway, the Chicago El and the London Underground, to tap their phones on a reader to pay their fares without unlocking their devices.
“If a customer gets their ââ¬ÅiPhone 13ââ¬Å display replaced by a third-party repair store or provider, such as those not licensed or affiliated with Apple through its Independent Repair Program, Face ID on the iPhone will no longer be usable,” MacRumors reported. “Despite this, if an ââ¬ÅiPhone 13ââ¬Å display is replaced with a ‘non-genuine’ or even a genuine, original ââ¬ÅiPhone 13ââ¬Å display, Face ID stops working, despite there seemingly being no hardware within the display itself needed for Face ID to function.”
In testing, the media outlet found that this apparently wasn’t a glitch. “The repair provider swapped two original ââ¬ÅiPhone 13ââ¬Å screens and, in both cases, Face ID was inoperative after the new screens were installed. It seems to be the case that if the original screen is put back with the original ââ¬ÅiPhone 13ââ¬Å, Face ID returns, ruling out the possibility of an improper installation.”
The built-in version of curl on any Power Mac version of OS X will not be capable of TLS 1.1 or higher, so most of you who need it will have already upgraded to an equivalent with MacPorts. However, even for later Intel Macs that are ostensibly supported -- including my now legacy MacBook Air with Mojave I keep around for running 32-bit Intel -- the expiration of one of Let's Encrypt's root certificates yesterday will suddenly mean curl may suddenly cease connecting to TLS sites with Let's Encrypt certificates. Yesterday I was trying to connect to one of my own Floodgap sites, unexpectedly got certificate errors I wasn't seeing in TenFourFox or mainline Firefox, and, after a moment of panic, suddenly realized what had happened. While you can use -k to ignore the error, that basically defeats the entire idea of having a certificate to start with.
The real hell of it is that Mojave 10.14 is still technically supported by Apple, and you would think updating the curl root certificate store would be an intrinsic part of security updates, but you'd be wrong. The issue with old roots even affects Safari on some Monterey betas, making the best explanation more Apple laziness than benign neglect. Firefox added this root ages ago and so did TenFourFox.
The impulse to pull out my phone and micromanage my persona was constant: post at the right time, tag the right people, pin comments that supported my views, leave my own smart, witty comments on other influential accounts, re-share mentions of my work with just enough faux humility so as to not appear gross — all of it had become as reflexive as scratching an itch. Except this itch never stopped.
I realized I had become numb to the life I’d worked so hard to save when I got sober.
So I decided to leave.
What Bosworth failed to say is that Facebook doesn’t just have the capacity to poison the individual; it’s poisoning the world. When 2.9 billion people are involved, what’s needed is moderation in scale, not moderation in personal intake. The freedom to destroy yourself is one thing. The freedom to destroy democratic society is quite another.
b Facebook sold itself to the masses by promising to be an outlet for free expression, for connection, and for community. In fact, it is a weapon against the open web, against self-actualization, and against democracy. All of this so Facebook could dangle your data in front of advertisers.
Driving the news: Facebook spent Thursday fielding attacks from senators over its internal research into Instagram's negative impact on teen girls.
Apple iPhones are adding spyware that uses the camera to detect mental illness.
While there are many things that can be said about this, I think most people would agree that it’s intrusive, and it may even be illegal under various privacy laws, including the Biometric Information Privacy Act of Illinois.
The first thing Apple will probably do with it is determine how to use people’s depression and insecurities to sell them more junk using “retail therapy”. Then what? Will they share it with the government? Potential employers? Advertising companies?
If they do get sued, what compensation will you get? $50 after the lawyers get done taking $50 million out of the settlement pot?
NSA is releasing this guidance as part of our mission to help secure the Department of Defense, National Security Systems and the Defense Industrial Base.
How-To guides need to stop saying that by adding an TLS cert, somehow that has “secured the server.” It has not. TLS != Security
On that Friday night, Islamic State terrorists targeted six sites across the city—the Bataclan concert hall, the Stade de France soccer stadium, and numerus restaurants and bars—leaving 130 people dead and 416 injured. The attacks caused the worst loss of life on French soil since World War II and forged an indelible mark on French society.
The trial will be historic for its sheer scale alone; an entirely new courtroom was constructed to accommodate everyone involved. There are 330 lawyers and nearly 1,800 plaintiffs—of which 300 are victims, a group that includes the wounded and families suing on behalf of killed relatives. Twenty men stand accused of planning and carrying out the attacks. Six are being tried in absentia, although sources suggest the terrorist network could be much wider.
Some activists say the presence of the French forces itself was a catalyst of the jihadist violence. France has long opposed negotiations with jihadists, an option favoured by some Malians.
Capt. Andrew Wood succinctly framed the concerns when he told the AP that the RFID tags “[increase] the digital signature of Marines on a battlefield, increasing the security/force protection risks.”
Security experts who talked to the AP said the tags would be detectable up to a much farther distance than advertised, meaning adversaries could track troop movements, make fake RFID tags and more.
The social web is doing exactly what it was built for. Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence. The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of QAnon, for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That’s because Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.
After French President Emmanuel Macron recalled his ambassadors from the U.S. in the wake of a submarine deal with Australia that was torpedoed by President Joe Biden's administration, French media are now reexamining everything about America.
The latest target? "Woke" ideology.
One of France's leading magazines, Le Spectacle Du Monde, ran a cover story titled "The Suicide of America." The magazine blamed America's retreat from Afghanistan on "a woke dictatorship" and questioned whether the American "empire was collapsing."
Nonetheless, the Oath Keepers was always an extremist group, she said. It was founded in nonsensical and hateful conspiracy theories and always had an anti-government bent.
She and other experts said they were concerned about law enforcement officers who joined the Oath Keepers at any point.
“I don’t think police officers should be involved with extremist groups,” Beirich said. "You are a part of the government, you represent the full, whole community as a police officer, and there’s obviously a problem when you’re in a group that’s questioning the government’s right to do the things that the government has the right to do.”
The 11 subpoenas sent this week went to people who organized or worked at the rally at the Ellipse where Trump encouraged the crowd to march to the Capitol and told them “you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”
Most of the organizers had worked on Trump’s presidential campaign or in his administration and could provide new details of how the rally that launched the violent attack came together.
"Enbridge drills so far under the water that they risk hitting the aquifers," Kier said, referring to a spill of drilling fluids known as a frac-out. Such frac-outs have released thousands of gallons of drilling fluids in the region this summer, which can disrupt ecosystems, including suffocating mussels and fish.
[...]
"You can live without oil," said Kier, gesturing to the assemblage of tents and teepees around her, "But you can't live without water."
Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who is campaigning for the French presidency, has been burnishing her credentials as an ecologically minded Socialist candidate. She has earned admirers and enemies alike with a bold program to transform greater Paris into the world’s leading environmentally sustainable metropolis, reclaiming vast swaths of the city from cars for parks, pedestrians and a Copenhagen-style cycling revolution.
She has made highways along the Seine car-free and last year, during coronavirus lockdowns, oversaw the creation of over 100 miles of new bike paths. She plans to limit cars in 2022 in the heart of the city, along half of the Right Bank and through the Boulevard Saint Germain.
Parisians have heeded the call: A million people in a metropolis of 10 million are now pedaling daily. And Paris now ranks among the world’s top 10 cycling cities,
On Sept. 24, the People’s Bank of China, Beijing’s monetary authority, released a statement saying cryptocurrencies lack the status of other monetary instruments. The notice, issued in tandem with nine other government agencies, including the Bureau of Public Security, declared all related business illegal and warned that cryptocurrency transactions originating outside China will also be treated as crimes.
The Daily Stormer website advocates for the purity of the white race, posts hate-filled, conspiratorial screeds against Blacks, Jews and women and has helped inspire at least three racially motivated murders. It has also made its founder, Andrew Anglin, a millionaire.
Anglin has tapped a worldwide network of supporters to take in at least 112 Bitcoin since January 2017 — worth $4.8 million at today’s exchange rate — according to data shared with The Associated Press. He’s likely raised even more.
So, one of two things is going to happen. Either the world is going to head for 3€°C and society collapses, in which case the "Slow AIs" profits, stock prices and reserve assets are irrelevant. Or there will be a discontinuous drop in their stock prices and bond ratings as they are forced to cut production and restate the value of their reserves.
Although it is 6 years since fossil fuel companies were counted in the top ten most valuable companies, as a group they are still very large. For example, as I write BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, PetroChina, Royal Dutch Shell and Total Energy are together worth $1.1T, or a bit more than Facebook.
A report released a few years ago stated that only 13% of rural households had access to any kind of electricity. Rural households account for 67% of the population and that would mean 100% of urban households had electricity. That’s obviously false. We can assume that the 13% figure referred to those connected to the national grid.
Back to the 37.1%, that 37.1% is for households that are connected to the national grid and ignores all other sources of electricity. Turns out solar has been rising in popularity.
Nord Stream 2 is not yet operational, but the Kremlin’s tightening grip on energy supplies is already being felt across Europe. The price of gas futures continues to hit record highs and has increased by over 600% in a matter of twelve months.
What we are currently witnessing in Europe is a rerun of the oil shocks America experienced in the 1970s. The commodity is different, the safeguards are stronger, but the underlying dynamics are the same. It was not a lack of oil tankers that pushed up prices of crude and triggered an economic recession in the US almost 50 years ago, but politically motivated decisions by the dominant oil producers to withhold supplies.
In A Furry’s Guide to Cryptocurrency, I briefly mentioned that NFTs are a dumb idea and not a valid reason for anyone–but especially furries–to get involved with cryptocurrency.
The legitimate reasons for furries to consider cryptocurrency are to protect porn artists and sex workers from the overreach of the conservative finance sector. To bank the unbanked, especially if they provide your spank bank, as it were. Also, to offset the risk of chargeback fraud to cryptocurrency exchanges, which in turn have the lawyers and capital that independent artists do not–especially fursuit makers.
Corporations large and small have left the financial feast of that post-9/11 surge in military spending with genuinely staggering sums in hand. After all, Pentagon spending has totaled an almost unimaginable $14 trillion plus since the start of the Afghan War in 2001, up to one-half of which (catch a breath here) went directly to defense contractors.
"Polarization" is the word most associated with the positions of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The mass media and the commentators never tire of this focus, in part because such clashes create the flashes conducive to daily coverage.
House progressives hit back Friday night after right-wing Democrats accused them of trying to derail President Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda by vowing to withhold support for the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill until after the more ambitious $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package is passed.
"96% of Democrats agree on how we deliver the president's entire Build Back Better agenda. A few conservative Democrats are standing in our way of delivering transformational change to families across America."
Points two through four are pretty reasonable, we saw something similar in Kenya with its Digital Services Tax last year. However, point one is a little worrying because there are many ways to interpret “National Security and Cohesion”. I don’t want to speculate but in the African context that isn’t a good recipe. As for point five, I am pretty sure that Nigerians tweeting constitutes local content.
SOS won't apply to all open-source projects. The Linux Foundation says that its criteria for critical projects is informed by the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity issued in May and corresponding guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The foundation also says that it will consider the impact of the project—such as the importance of its security infrastructure and how many users it affects—as well as its rankings in the Harvard 2 Census Study of most-used packages and an OpenSSF Critically Score of 0.6 at minimum.
“When he told me to ‘look out for the FBI report’ proving Hillary Clinton tortured babies and drank their blood to live forever, I knew with 200 percent certainty that I had lost him,” Mathieu* recalled. “It was finished. I would never again see the person he was before.”
Rudy Giuliani appears to have finally let slip the source for at least some of his evidence of widespread voter fraud in last year's presidential election: social media.
One would argue that censoring such channels would stop spreading such ideas. I would argue that one who wants to spread this kind of ideas would find its ways. They won’t be restricted or limited to one Telegram channel and Telegram is not the only place for them, it’s not even the safest.
“These proposals threaten the confidentiality of private correspondence, encourage error-prone ex-ante upload filtering, introduce excessively short content take-down delays, enforce excessive national laws (e.g. in Poland or Hungary) throughout the EU, turn ââ¬Å¡trusted flaggers‘ into ââ¬Å¡trusted censors‘ and much more. I don’t think all my colleagues in the Legal Affairs Committee are aware of the implications. They reflect massive lobbying by the content and rights holder industry.”
An Islamic State (ISIS) linked armed group in northern Mozambique is kidnapping boys and using them to fight government forces in violation of the international prohibition on the use of child soldiers, Human Rights Watch said today.
The armed group, known locally as Al-Shabab, has abducted hundreds of boys, some as young as 12, trained them in bases across Cabo Delgado province, and forced them to fight alongside adults against government forces. In the town of Palma, parents said that they watched their sons wield guns when they returned with other fighters to raid their village.
Amid an escalating Republican assault on reproductive rights and a looming U.S. Supreme Court reckoning, women and allies across the United States and around the world took to the streets Saturday to #RallyForAbortionJustice and defend Roe v. Wade.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Washington, D.C, New York City, Los Angeles, and more than 600 other cities and towns, according to Women's March, the event organizer.
Ezgi Mola, a popular Turkish actress, was convicted on insult charges after she protested in a tweet in August 2020 the release of a former soldier accused of raping an 18-year-old Kurdish woman, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported on Friday, citing Turkish media outlets.
The misery at Rikers is not for lack of resources. The jail’s population fell by half between 2012 and 2020, yet its budget grew by 24%. It costs $438,000 to jail one person there for one year. Of this $379,216 goes to personnel costs; less than 5% goes to services like substance-abuse treatment. The average salary for guards, after five and half years on the job, is $92,073. In 2012, the ratio of inmates to officers in the city was 7:5. In 2020 it was 1.6 officers per inmate.
The LAPD would not tell him, and at first showed no interest in the tape. But he and Maria both thought it should be seen. The local KTLA TV channel took it, cagily at first, and ran it on the news that evening. But then they shared it with CNN, and his world exploded. He opened the door on a sea of reporters, so that he could hardly get to work. His phone rang off the hook. Everyone wanted copies of the tape, but he had no equipment to make them. Instead he had left the master-tape with KTLA, for just $500, and soon enough higher authorities took it away and kept it.
In 1992 the officers were tried and, despite his video, acquitted of assault. The southern section of Los Angeles went up in flames then for almost a week, with more than 60 dead and $1bn-worth of damage. And, having been a five-minute hero, he got the rap now for sharing the tape. Even in Lake View Terrace, a quiet, horsey, middle-class place which saw no riots, his customers blamed him, and death-threats were stuck on the windshield of his van.
The EPO and CNIPA have launched a user survey on the pilot that enables nationals and residents of the People's Republic of China to select the EPO as their International Search Authority for PCT applications filed in English with CNIPA or the International Bureau of WIPO as receiving Offices. You can submit your comments in Chinese, English, French or German until 15 October 2021.
Whether or not you have already participated in the pilot, we sincerely hope that you will share your input and expectations by taking a few minutes to complete the survey. Your feedback is essential as it helps the EPO and CNIPA continuously improve the services offered to patent applicants.
[...]
Survey replies are anonymous, confidential and personal data is processed in accordance with the Guidelines for the Protection of Personal Data in the EPO.
On 27 August 2021, the Commissioner of Patents lodged an appeal (case no. VID496/2021) against the decision of Justice Beach in the Federal Court of Australia finding that the ‘AI’ machine known as DABUS could be named as sole inventor on an Australian patent application. Unusually, and presumably in recognition of the media and public interest generated by this case, IP Australia took the step of announcing the filing of the appeal, while emphasising that ‘[t]he appeal is centred on questions of law and the interpretation of the patents legislation as it currently stands’ and that ‘[t]he decision to appeal does not represent a policy position by the Australian Government on whether AI should or could ever be considered an inventor on a patent application.’ The appeal will most likely be heard by a Full Bench of the Federal Court comprising three judges, although in rare cases deemed sufficiently significant a five judge panel may be assigned. A hearing could take place as early as November this year, but at this stage it seems more likely to be scheduled for early in 2022.
[...]
I will cover these latest developments in the DABUS saga over a series of three articles. In this first article, I will look at the approach taken to the role of the inventor in the US, how it differs from other jurisdictions, and the recent decision from the EDVA. The second article will cover the split decision in the UK, and how the differing opinions of eminent patent jurists Arnold LJ and Birss LJ stack up. Finally, in the third part I will look at where Australia sits, and consider whether either of the US and UK decisions may be of any relevance in the upcoming Full Court appeal.
In the first article in this series I looked at the US approach to the role of the inventor in patent law and practice, and at the recent decision of Judge Leonie M Brinkema in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (‘EDVA’) upholding the USPTO’s decision to refuse two patent applications on the basis that the ‘AI’ machine DABUS is not a human being and therefore cannot be an inventor under US law (Stephen Thaler v Andrew Hirshfeld and the US Patent and Trademark Office, Mem. Op. [PDF 998kB]). In this article, I shall turn my attention to the split decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in Thaler v Comptroller General of Patents Trade Marks And Designs [2021] EWCA Civ 1374, in which parallel efforts to name DABUS as an inventor have also been rejected, with Thaler’s appeal being dismissed despite a weighty dissent by Lord Justice Birss.
The issues in the UK case are somewhat different, and more nuanced, than in the US. While all three judges on the Court of Appeal agreed that an ‘inventor’ under the UK law must be a human being, the fact that DABUS is a machine was not immediately determinative of the outcome. An inventor is not required to play any active role in the filing, prosecution, or grant of a patent in the UK, so arguably there remains a question as to whether an application can be permitted to proceed even if a legally valid inventor has not been – or cannot be – named. In the event, the answer to this question turned on whether or not the applicant (i.e. Dr Thaler) could satisfy statutory requirements to name the inventor, and to indicate how he is entitled to be granted patents on inventions that he did not claim to have devised himself.
[...]
Arnold LJ is the preeminent patent law specialist on the Court of Appeal. He was elevated to the Court of Appeal in 2019, after being appointed to the High Court in 2008, and as Judge in Charge of the Patents Court in April 2013. In March 2016 he was appointed as an External Member of the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office. Impressive as this is, however, Birss LJ is no lightweight. In 2010 he was appointed as a Specialist Circuit Judge sitting in what was then the Patents County Court. In 2013 he was appointed to the High Court, and in 2019 he filled the place formerly held by Arnold LJ as Judge in Charge of the Patents Court, before being elevated to the Court of Appeal in January 2021.
The Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) case dates back to August 2019, when a team of academics from the University of Surrey in the UK filed two patent applications in the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), the European Property Office (EPO) and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), for inventions developed by artificial intelligence (AI).
According to the applications of these patents, no human being was responsible for the development of the inventions they intended to protect, which instead were formulated by DABUS, created by AI expert Stephen Thaler. It was the world's first AI to invent viable products without human intervention.
DABUS uses its complex and varied interconnected neural networks to create its own "ideas". By varying the connections between the neural networks, and then using a secondary layer to predict the potential critical consequences, it was able to create two different inventions.
The first is a new type of plastic food container that uses fractal geometry to change shape. The second is a type of flashing light device designed to attract attention during an emergency incident, that can be used in search and rescue missions.
The system follows a familiar pattern – use an anti-piracy monitoring firm to collect IP addresses in BitTorrent swarms, obtain court orders compelling ISPs to hand over the personal details behind those IP addresses, and send letters asking for cash to make potential lawsuits go away.
In Denmark, thousands of Internet users have paid settlements to the law firm equivalent to around $1,200 each but with a rising number of lawsuits being kicked out of court when they dared to venture there, this attracted the attention of the authorities.
Following an investigation that began in 2020, in January it was revealed that the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime (SÃËIK) had charged Njord Law and partner lawyer Jeppe Brogaard Clausen with serious fraud offenses in connection with their settlement work.
