 You have probably heard a lot of times that it is better to program on Linux, and programmers use it more often than Windows. Of course, operating systems based on Linux kernel are free and open-source. This is a huge advantage compared to Windows, but what are the important benefits of programming?
An open-source system does not help if you are a web programmer. However many programmers prefer Linux. In this article, https://jatapp.com/ web developers will explain why to program on Linux.
I’m no Linux expert – by any stretch of the imagination -so my experiences using the Linux sub-kernel/docker virtual machine under ChromeOS was… less than ideal, with me fighting the command line to install pretty much anything – be it a browser, an IDE or, well, anything to a point. Not what I’d call a great to use the experience here – although others will probably rave about it and that I should spend more time educating myself about Linux.
It took a bit of effort – but eventually, I managed to get LibreOffice deployed to the ChromeBook – this is useful, as you can edit and create documents offline.
With the Google Chrome browser as its principal user interface, the Chrome OS is based on Gentoo Linux. That being said, Google recently released Chrome OS 97 for those having a Chromebook.
It used to be that you could leisurely deploy a L.A.M.P. server, and stop caring about it for years because PHP’s releases, and the dependency changes in web applications, were happening really slowly. Not so anymore. With the 7.x and 8.x series, PHP has considerably sped up its releasing cadence, and shortened the shelf life of releases. I’ve seen a drastic shift happen in the policies of web application developers, including Matomo (née Piwik) and Kanboard. Even WordPress, one of the most conservative behemoths of the industry (understandable, given that they power roughly half of the websites in the world), requires PHP 7.4 and no longer runs on PHP 5.x.
“Just put everything in containers and continous-deploy all that shit!” I hear you say, “It’s the future!” But I’m not a sysadmin, I’m not day-in-day-out into that crap, and the only reason I run a dedicated server machine in the office is because Matomo doesn’t scale well on shared hosting and their SaaS prices are quite expensive for an individual when you don’t like being artificially capped to a certain number of visitors per month, and, y’know, “How hard can it be, really?”… but I am happiest when I never have to touch/upgrade that server and don’t have to learn rocket science to deploy something. I understand now how infrastructure work would eventually turn you into a Bastard Operator from Hellââ¢.
Circa 2014, I deployed CentOS 7 on my personal server to be able to run Matomo with better performance, because the Pitivi website had a lot of visitors (which is useful to derive knowledge such as “what screen resolutions do people actually use and what can we afford for our UI’s design?”) and its Matomo database weighted multiple gigabytes.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I’ve fallen behind on Matomo updates because, in part, of newer PHP requirements needing me to resort to third-party repositories to get a recent-enough version of PHP to run it. But I eventually did, and it worked, for a time.
If you're running an foss project you shouldn't be operating on discord or at least that's what Drew DeVault says however I don't entirely agree.
If you are in the rare group of folks still relying upon floppy disks and doing so while running up-to-date software stacks, Linux 5.17 will be of interest to you.
Back in early December I wrote about the pending Linux fix where a hang could happen if trying to read a broken floppy and then ejecting it. For Linux 5.17 that niche bug is indeed addressed.
Have you ever found yourself lacking motivation for doing even the simplest of tasks? The Pomodoro technique is a well-known time management system you can use to get things done, within the time limit you set for yourself.
But getting a tomato-shaped timer is a task you might add to your "not today" list, which completely defeats the purpose of the technique. Lucky for you, you don't need to rely on a physical timer to fix your time management skills, as several Pomodoro apps are available on the internet for free.
In this article, we'll take a look at some of the best Linux Pomodoro apps anyone can use to take their productivity to the next level.
Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media have released SVT-AV1 0.9 with nearly one year worth of changes to this high performance CPU-based AV1 video encoder. SVT-AV1 0.9 is now even faster as shown by our latest benchmarks.
This release of SVT-AV1 was going to be version 0.8.8 and was covered at the end of last year. But they opted for relabeling it as v0.9.0 due to the significant number of changes found with this release. SVT-AV1 0.9 features a variety of performance optimizations for existing preset levels plus adds new levels 9 through 12. As shown in that earlier Phoronix article and more benchmarks in this article, these new preset articles can really speed up the AV1 video encode process if looking to accomplish very speedy encodes.
Let’s run a few commands to disable or turn off the SELinux on AlmaLinux 8 using the command terminal.
Well, in a conventional system, there are many different programs that all need to run with root privileges in order to be able to do their job, but should not have full root privileges (why should Apache have access to the mail pool files, for example?). SELinux is based on the TE principle (Type Enforcement): all resources are assigned to specific domains and access rules are defined on them.
Let’s run a few commands to disable or turn off the SELinux on Rocky Linux 8 using the command terminal.
SELinux is now the standard in the Linux environment when it comes to the use of mandatory access control. Initially, the system had a reputation for being difficult to configure and only usable for experts. Those days are over. SELinux can now also be used and configured by “ordinary” admins.
Well, in a conventional system, there are many different programs that all need to run with root privileges in order to be able to do their job, but should not have full root privileges (why should Apache have access to the mail pool files, for example?). SELinux is based on the TE principle (Type Enforcement): all resources are assigned to specific domains and access rules are defined on them. In short- all files are labeled, i.e. assigned to a specific domain; this means, for example, that all files belonging to Apache can be assigned the “apache_t” type. The Apache binary is also plugged into this domain. If the rest of the system is set up correctly, Apache can only access the data that is in its domain; any access to files located within other domains (e.g. “postfix_t”) is prevented by the kernel.
Hence, if any service is running with the wrong security policy, files in the incorrect domain, any security breach detection- SELinux restricts the access/function of that particular file or services.
File-system management is an important skill to have if you are working with Linux systems often. If you are from a Windows background, you may not yet be familiar with the ways and commands to rename directories on Linux. This article aims to help you out if you need to rename a directory on Linux, or multiple directories at the same time. We will start by giving some simple examples of how to do so using the command line tools commonly available on Linux distributions, then move onto some more advanced examples. I’ll be using my CentOS system for the examples in this article, but it will be much the same for other distributions.
The command most often used to rename directories in Linux is the mv command, so that is where we will start!
A quick post on how to resolve an issue with Gitbash that prevents MFA prompts while using AWS CLI.
Obsidian’s Gems of the Year 2021 nomination has been a great source of cool ideas to add tweaks to my Obsidian setup.
In particular, Quick Capture (mac/iOS) and Inbox Processing was a great gem to uncover as I try and implement the weekly review stage of my Second Brain/PARA setup!
I noticed that the archive/move script was a little slow, taking several seconds to open up the dialog for selecting a folder, breaking my flow. I checked the code and noticed it built a set of folders recursively.
Have you forgotten your NextCloud Server login password? Then here are the steps to reset your Admin password using the command line of the server where you have installed it.
NextCloud is popular for providing a self-hosted platform to store and access media and documents from anywhere, just like Dropbox. It also offers apps to edit documents, view images, calendars, and more… Well, the thing which may create problems is the habit of forgetting things such as a complicated password. It is very common, we set some strong passwords to enhance the security but later forget the same. That’s why it is recommended to use the Open source Password Manager Application. or have a look at Best Free Password Managers for Windows 10 | 11 in 2022.
This is a list of multimedia production software on Ubuntu and how you can install them. You will find in this article from graphics, photography, printing press, audio & video editing, to animation and even game making tools available. You will also know the proprietary software counterparts of many of them. All software are Free/Libre Open Source (FLOSS) and use for commercial purposes are permitted. Happy working!
Most torrent clients today have ability to detect clipboard for magnet links. However, after copied an URL link, user has to manually open the downloading app and then click ‘Open URL’ (or ‘Add Torrent Link’) option to let it paste the link automatically.
Instead of using web browser pop-up to choose app to open an URL, KDE desktop has a built-in feature ‘Klipper Actions‘ that detects clipboard contents and automatically pops-up a menu allows to open link with desired app.
Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat app used by tens of millions of people ages 13+ to talk and hang out with their communities and friends. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media, and files in private chats or as part of communities called “servers.” Discord is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux Distros.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Discord client on elementary OS 6 using three different methods.
This tutorial will show you how you can easily configure Logstash Elasticsearch Basic authentication. If you have secured your Elasticsearch cluster with authentication/authorization, then for Logstash to be able to publish the events to the Elasticsearch cluster, it must provided valid user credentials that is authorized to publish events to specific indices.
A Zabbix agent is a program that runs on a remote machine that needs to be monitored through the Zabbix server. The agent collects the data on the remote server and send back to Zabbix server when requested. Zabbix agent must be installed on all the remote systems that need to be monitor through the Zabbix server.
Django is a Python-based free and open-source web framework that allows model-template-view architectural patterns. Django encourages rapid development and clean and pragmatic codes. It takes care of much of the hassle of web development so that you can focus on the code without reinventing the wheel.
Wine is a free and open source tool that makes it possible to run many Windows apps and games on Linux and other operating systems including Android, macOS, and FreeBSD. And the latest version brings a number of significant new features and improvements.
Updates in Wine 7.0 include improved support for theming, improved graphics, support for using multiple displays while playing games or running apps that make use of Direct3D, and thousands of other changes.
Wine 7.0 recently rolled out, and the update includes over 9,100 changes. Wine is a compatibility layer that allows people to run a large library of Windows apps and games on Linux. It's a popular way for gamers to enjoy the best PC games on non-Windows systems.
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The update to Wine 7.0 adds support for some of the best GPUs to the Direct3D graphics card database. Among the newly supported graphics cards is the AMD Radeon RX 6800. Here's the complete list of the GPUs that were recently added to the Direct3D graphics card database:
Valve officially confirmed that those who pre-ordered the Steam Deck when it was released should be getting their devices by the end of February. The Steam Deck was launched back in July, 2021, and it promised PC games in a portable form factor. The device will be able to play AAA titles and run compatible Steam games.
Valve, creators of the newest Steam Deck handheld to release this year, is financing further continuous integration (CI) testing of Mesa commits and Radeon Drivers testing. This information is welcoming for Linux users but also for Steam Deck players.
Valve is gearing up for the upcoming consumer launch of the Steam Deck (supposedly in February) and they have in the past few days started going through the Steam Deck verification process. In case you don’t remember or you missed it, there is going to be a rating process to ensure that games are in 4 different categories, the best one being “Steam Deck Verified“, which means that games are adapted to work great on the Deck. Next is “Steam Deck Playable“, where games may launch and work fine, but where the experience may be sub-par (text or interface not adapted to the deck, presence of a launcher, etc.).
So, at Boiling Steam, we are going to track how fast things are going with the verification process in the coming weeks, using SteamDB as an intermediate. We’ll try to have a chart like the one below, progressively going up as Valve provides more and more ratings. Not sure right now how often we will provide updates, maybe once or twice a week, depending on how fast things go.
As good news not only to future Steam Deck users but all Linux gamers making use of the Mesa open-source graphics drivers, Valve is sponsoring additional continuous integration (CI) testing of Mesa commits.
Charlie Turner of Igalia shared the news today with an MR setting up more dEQP runners. The dEQP is the drawElements Quality Program that is already used by Mesa CI for testing with both Vulkan, EGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenGL APIs. This has been very useful for Mesa's CI testing for ensuring problematic commits don't reach mainline Mesa for regressing OpenGL/Vulkan graphics API behavior.
Welcome to a Godot showcase developer interview! This week, we interviewed Ben Kurtin about his experience developing and releasing a VR recreation of the hit rhythm game Friday Night Funkin'.
GtkSourceView has the concept of “style schemes” which map language features (types, keywords, strings, etc) to various colors and font properties. Creating them can be a bit laborious even if you’re starting with a color palette prepared. The artistic process is iterative so reducing the time between iterations is paramount.
Furthermore, I have aphantasia which means I need to be able to see things visually because I lack the wiring to simply imagine it in my head.
The GNOME extension featured in this post won’t revolutionise your life but it may make finding your favourite apps a bit faster in GNOME 40 and above.
It’s called ‘Alphabetical App Grid’ and —prepare those faux shocked faces, folks— it rearranges app shortcuts in the applications grid into alphabetical order.
— Hey, I did say it wasn’t revolutionary!
See, GNOME devs made a few changes to the app grid starting with GNOME 40 (used in Ubuntu 21.10 and above) that affect the order of app shortcuts in the full-screen launcher. It’s not much easy for us to rearrange the order of apps, which can lead to things get jumbled intentionally (by re-ordering) or accidentally (newly installed apps add their shortcut to the end of the grid).
I switched to Fedora silverblue not too long ago and was quite surprised how everything works out of the box. One day we got a question about CMake and the backend we use for our CMake plugin. This is the start of a long adventure:
Why is GLFW not resolving correct?
The demo project i got my hands on was some example code of the GLFW library (a OpenGL game library). I spun up my podman development container and installed the library.
Garuda Linux is not your regular Arch-based distro. It transforms Linux, especially Arch, into a user-friendly operating system for newcomers.
Garuda Linux is an Arch-based distribution that makes Linux installation and setup easy while maintaining the stripped-down, high-performance OS model that Arch is known for. Of all the Linux distros that strive to make it easier to install Arch, Garuda is quite possibly the one that comes closest to the spirit and intent of its upstream parent.
Garuda is the perfect distribution for those who want absolute, granular control over what is installed on their system but don’t have the time or technical knowledge necessary to successfully navigate the notoriously complex installation procedure of Arch Linux.
While our last pfSense/Lenovo effort was overboard with a $3,000 system, these ThinkCentre units can be found for a few hundred dollars on eBay but have been discontinued by Lenovo in favor of the new SE30. Be advised that there’s also an AMD version that is currently sold by Lenovo, the M75n Nano IoT. While it shares the same case, they’re not configured with the second network port at the moment. Anything with dual-LAN though should od just fine for this, we just prefer these more rugged builds for a homelab or edge use case where environmental concerns may be more prevalent.
 I’ve just received an early sample of Radxa E25 dual 2.5 GbE carrier board for Radxa CM3 Plus (RK3568) system-on-module, a 2.5GbE TP-Link switch, and Xiaomi AX6000 WiFi 6 + 2.5GbE router.
Here’s the back story before looking into the devices. I’ll soon have to review UP Xtreme i11 mini PC with a 2.5GbE port, and after writing about the upcoming ROCK5 Model B SBC with both 2.5GbE and WiFI 6/6E, I realized I should really get some hardware to test 2.5GHz and WiFi 6. So I started to ask what could be the best options for a $200 budget. While thinking about it, I remember Radxa was working on the Radxa E23 board with 2.5GbE, and adding a WiFi 6 USB dongle might be an option. But they told me Radxa E25 would be a better option with two 2.5GbE ports and support for WiFi 6, although that one is tricky because AX1800 dissipates 10W.
The Steam Foundation and MakerBot have teamed up to bring 3D printing to more students across the U.S. Founded by Aadhav Prabu and Akshar Raikanti, The Steam Foundation is a California-based nonprofit with a mission to make STEAM education equally accessible to all students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The organization, which is also run by a team of students, offers free workshops that teach 3D printing, robotics, graphic design, and coding to students as well as programs to help bring 3D printing into schools.
If you only need the smallest of Raspberry Pi chips, but you need a lot of them, you can now buy the gang's RP2040 microcontrollers directly from the farm supplier in lots of 500 or 3,400.
Because the Raspberry Pi range is so cheap, people use lots of them – even in places where a complete Linux computer is arguably overkill. That's probably why, this time last year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the Raspberry Pi Pico, a $4 device based around the RP2040 microcontroller – its first in-house CPU design.
The end-user version of the Pi Pico is a tiny PCB containing the RP2040 system-on-a-chip (SoC) and 2 MB of flash memory. (The board is a hair over 2Ãâ5cm, so only slightly bigger than an old-style DIP chip such as a Z80.) The RP2040 is still an ARM, but a tiny one: a dual-core 133 MHz Cortex M0+, plus 264 kB of RAM.
Multiple segments of the automotive industry have been embracing open source software, especially Linux-based code over the last decade.
Here we focus on an open framework called robotic operating system (ROS). Apex.AI is leveraging ROS, adding new automotive capabilities discussed below.
ROS has been around for over decade and increasingly used by autonomous vehicle (AV) developers. Apex.AI has greatly improved ROS for automotive applications.
I summarize the importance of ROS and then profile Apex.AI. With its focus on the automotive industry and software-defined vehicles, the company is gaining support, making it a future player in AV development and a likely acquisition target.
ROS is a software framework focused on developing systems and applications for robotics products. Robotics includes most types of autonomous systems—terrestrial, airborne and seaborne. The table below provides an overview of ROS. Sources include the Open Robotics website.
A subtitle is a text representation of the dialogue, narration, music, or sound effects in a video file. Subtitles are available in multiple formats.
Subtitles can literally make the difference between being immersed in a movie or only watching the screen, trying to keep up with developments. Good subtitling does not distract but actually enhances viewing pleasure, and even native speakers can find subtitles useful, not only where the individual is hearing-impaired.
 Atlassian Corporation Plc is a software company founded in 2002 that develops products for software developers, project managers and other software development teams. It employs over 7,000 people and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
Atlassian’s range of proprietary software includes software for collaboration, development, and issue tracking software for teams. Atlassian dominates several markets where it still has intense competition.
The open source Apache Hop data orchestration platform has achieved a big milestone, becoming a Top Level Project at the Apache Software Foundation.
Hop, a recursive acronym for the Hop Orchestration Platform, first came to the Apache Incubator in September 2020.
The Apache Incubator is often the initial entry project for technologies into the ASF. After a project is able to demonstrate community and technology growth over a period of time, a project can be elevated to Top Level Project status, which signifies a milestone for project maturity.
Apache Ignite has been updated with improvements including Change Data Capture (CDC), an Index Query API, and several vulnerability fixes. Ignite is a distributed database for high-performance computing with in-memory speed.
Ignite can be used as a traditional SQL database via JDBC drivers, ODBC drivers, or its own native SQL APIs. By default, it runs purely in-memory, but clusters can be configured to run on a mix of disk and memory.
Mozilla Firefox is easily one of the most popular open-source web browsers among Linux users.
In fact, it is one of the best web browsers available for Linux. But, what about its add-ons (or extensions)?
Considering that you prefer open-source solutions, are you using add-ons for open-source services? What are some of the best open-source Mozilla Firefox add-ons that you can install?
Database vendor MongoDB is continuing to expand the capabilities of its namesake platform with the release of MongoDB 5.2.
The vendor introduced MongoDB 5.0 in July 2021 as a major update and has been updating it continually in the months since.
The new MongoDB 5.2 update, released on Jan. 19, is part of a quarterly release cycle that the vendor refers to as a rapid release, with the goal of bringing features to users faster than waiting for a major milestone version update.
Among the innovations first introduced in MongoDB 5.0 is time-series data support, which is improved in the update.
MongoDB 5.2 also introduces a series of more efficient data queries for both time- series data and operational analytics.
BuddyPress 10.0.0 "La Pino'z" is the first major release of 2022 for the WordPress plugin. BuddyPress is a plugin to build online communities and includes features such as user profiles, groups, activity streams, notifications and can be integrated with the WordPress plugin bbPress to enhance community forums.
Phala Network today announced that it has joined the Blender Developer Fund as a Corporate Gold Member. Participating alongside companies including Intel, Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia, and Adobe, Phala will contribute its decentralized Web3 compute services to Blender’s (blender.org) powerful 3D modeling platform so that organizations can develop and scale their emerging Metaverse worlds.
With a global decentralized network of blockchain-based confidential compute nodes, Phala offers high-performance compute services for 3D modeling and rendering. Phala’a worker nodes will host the Blender rendering service in Secure Enclaves, a distributed privacy technology embedded in modern processors. This enables versatile and confidential execution while creating a powerful, secure, and scalable trustless public computing cloud.
The normal Linux kernel is not recommended by the FSF, because it allows for the use of proprietary firmware with devices. Instead, they recommend Linux-libre, which disables support for proprietary firmware by ripping out code which allows for the firmware to be loaded on to devices. Libreboot, being FSF-recommended, also has this policy of disallowing firmware blobs in the source tree, despite it being a source of nothing but problems.
The end result is that users who deploy the FSF-recommended firmware and kernel wind up with varying degrees of broken configurations. Worse yet, the Linux-libre project removes warning messages which suggest a user may want to update their processor microcode to avoid Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities.
While it is true that processor microcode is a proprietary blob, from a security and reliability point of view, there are two types of CPU: you can have a broken CPU, or a less broken CPU, and microcode updates are intended to give you a less broken CPU. This is particularly important because microcode updates fix real problems in the CPU, and Libreboot has patches which hack around problems caused by deficient microcode burned into the CPU at manufacturing time, since it’s not allowed to update the microcode at early boot time.
GNU Parallel 20220122 ('20 years') [stable] has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4 No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.
German courts made new rulings on Open Source licenses in 2021, such as the decision by the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court dealing with the effect of the copyleft clause of the GPL-2.0. According to the Court, an infringement of the copyleft clause leads to the loss of the rights to use and modify this Open Source software. The infringement, however, does not entitle a third party to publish the source code of modifications of Open Source software on its own authority. The following article reviews this ruling.
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At the same time, the GPL-2.0 contains a copyleft clause for "protection". The copyleft clause ensures that each recipient of the software also receives the same rights in all derivative works of the software, with the consequence that the source code must also be published to the recipients of the software. Thus, clause 2 b) of the GPL 2.0 states:
The headlines are hard to resist. Salaries for programmers are said to be soaring. Annual paychecks for AI experts are topping $1 million. Why dream of winning the lottery when coding bootcamps are springing up with promises to teach everyone what they need to get a ticket on the gravy train?
The good news is that schools and camps often deliver enough knowledge to turn some people into great programmers. The bad news is that the lessons alone are far from enough. Programming isn't a least-resistance path to a more secure, better-paying, work-life balanced job. It's a difficult occupation that not everyone is suited for. If it were easy, everyone could do it—and then it wouldn't be as valuable.
Earlier, IT companies faced significant problems to deliver optimal services with agility and accuracy. But the integration of DevOps has simplified this process and has yielded several solutions that can be used by IT companies to deliver engaging services and products seamlessly. Over the past couple of years, the adoption of DevOps technologies has exponentially increased as it can bring together all functions of the organisation and provide reliable software with better quality and faster delivery. Operational automation is one of the key advantages of DevOps, but it requires the engineers to possess robust programming and scripting skills. Programming languages are used in the core development of DevOps systems, hence, it can be rightly said that the DevOps professionals require the knowledge of the right programming languages that can be used in these systems. In this article, we have listed the top programming languages that professionals working in DevOps should learn in 2022.
Not too long ago, someone on Twitter shared a story about the creation of Atari’s classic video game Pongââ¬Å —ââ¬Å The Lies that Powered the Invention of Pongââ¬Å —ââ¬Å IEEE Spectrum. I love stories about the dawn of home computing, so I curiously opened the link on my phone.
The second release of the still fairly new qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today.
qlcal is based on the calendaring subset of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.
If you look hard enough, most of the projects we feature on these pages have some practical value. They may seem frivolous, but there’s usually something that compelled the hacker to commit time and effort to its doing. That doesn’t mean we don’t get our share of just-for-funsies projects, of course, which certainly describes this online 3D ASCII art generator.
But wait — maybe that’s not quite right. After all, [Andrew Sink] put a lot of time into the code for this, and for its predecessor, his automatic 3D low-poly generator. That project led to the current work, which like before takes an STL model as input, this time turning it into an ASCII art render. The character set used for shading the model is customizable; with the default set, the shading is surprisingly good, though. You can also swap to a black-on-white theme if you like, navigate around the model with the mouse, and even export the ASCII art as either a PNG or as a raw text file, no doubt suitable to send to your tractor-feed printer.
An object-oriented programming language can model real-world data, while a functional language focuses on functions (code that can be reused). Python supports both object-oriented and functional programming features. It is portable and highly flexible, meaning, a Python code written for a Windows machine or a Linux machine can also run-on iOS, and vice versa you don’t need to make any alterations in the code. This article lists the top 10 real-world applications of Python in 2022.
Python powers some of the most sophisticated server-side programs and daily web applications available today. Python, as a language, is used extensively with its numerous libraries. These libraries support developers in scientific and mathematical research, AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, respectively) programming, robotics, and much more.
If you're a frequent Python user, you might have realized the importance of IDEs and their usage while coding. IDEs are code editors with extra built-in tools that pave the way for efficient and effective development.
If you've grown tired of using the default Python text editor, you should check out these Python editors every developer should know.
A discussion ensued about our crazy hacker ways the other night. I jokingly suggested that with as many stickers as we each had on our trusty companion machines, they might literally be as unique as a fingerprint. Cut straight to nerds talking too much math.
First off, you could wonder about the chances of two random hackers having the same sticker on their laptop. Say, for argument’s sake, that globally there are 2,000 stickers per year that are cool enough to put on a laptop. (None of us will see them all.) If a laptop lasts five years, that’s a pool of 10,000 stickers to draw from. If you’ve only got one sticker per laptop, that’s pretty slim odds, even when the laptops are of the same vintage.
A Tesla driver has seemingly become the first person in the US to be charged with vehicular manslaughter for a deadly crash in which the vehicle's Autopilot mode was engaged.
According to the cops, the driver exited a highway in his Tesla Model S, ran a red light, and smashed into a Honda Civic at an intersection in Gardena, Los Angeles County, in late 2019. A man and woman in the second car were killed. The Tesla driver and a passenger survived and were taken to hospital.
Prosecutors in California charged Kevin George Aziz Riad, 27, in October last year though details of the case are only just emerging, according to AP on Tuesday. Riad, a limousine service driver, is facing two counts of vehicular manslaughter, and is free on bail after pleading not guilty.
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles said it’s “revisiting” its opinion of whether Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving feature needs more oversight after a series of videos demonstrate how the technology can be dangerous.
“Recent software updates, videos showing dangerous use of that technology, open investigations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the opinions of other experts in this space,” have made the DMV think twice about Tesla, according to a letter sent to California’s Senator Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach), chair of the Senate’s transportation committee, and first reported by the LA Times.
American aviation regulators have banned the use of autoland at some of their country's airports as the local debate about 5G phone mast emissions and airliners continues – while Japan claims to have solved the problem a year ago.
This morning Emirates, the largest airline of the United Arab Emirates, declared it was suspending flights to nine US airports as mobile network operators in the States said they were suspending their planned switch-on of 5G services. It follows Japan's All Nippon Airways (ANA), Japan Airlines and Air India, according to the Daily Mail.
Life on Super-Earths may have more time to develop and evolve, thanks to their long-lasting magnetic fields protecting them against harmful cosmic rays, according to new research published in Science.
Space is a hazardous environment. Streams of charged particles traveling at very close to the speed of light, ejected from stars and distant galaxies, bombard planets. The intense radiation can strip atmospheres and cause oceans on planetary surfaces to dry up over time, leaving them arid and incapable of supporting habitable life. Cosmic rays, however, are deflected away from Earth, however, since it’s shielded by its magnetic field.
A machine-learning algorithm has helped scientists find 690 human genes associated with a higher risk of developing motor neuron disease, according to research published in Cell this week.
Neuronal cells in the central nervous system and brain break down and die in people with motor neuron disease, like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, named after the baseball player who developed it. They lose control over their bodies, and as the disease progresses patients become completely paralyzed. There is currently no verified cure for ALS.
Individual cell types of human tissues have their own CpG site methylation profiles, which might be utilized for the development of methylation markers to denote tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs). We aimed to develop DNA methylation markers that recapitulate the densities of TILs in gastric carcinoma (GC). Through genome-wide methylation profiling, NCOR2, PARK2, and ZSCAN12 were found to be highly methylated in CD3-positive and CD8-positive cells and rarely methylated in tumor cells. Scores of the three methylation markers were analyzed for their relationship with the overall survival and recurrence-free survival of patients with advanced GC (nââ¬â°=ââ¬â°471). The scores of three methylation markers were closely associated with densities of CD3-positive or CD8-positive cells at the tumor center or invasive front of GCs and found to be a significant prognostic factor in univariate analysis of overall survival and recurrence-free survival. In multivariate analysis, the highest score showed hazard ratios of 0.513 (CI 0.306–0.857) and 0.434 (CI 0.261–0.720) for overall survival and recurrence-free survival, respectively. The findings suggest that methylation markers signifying TILs might be utilized for the recapitulation of TIL density in GCs and serve as biomarkers for predicting prognosis in patients with GC.
A couple of months ago my Jolla tablet was getting close to retirement, and I was looking for alternatives. The PineTab (and PineNote for that matter) wasn’t really attainable. And iOS and Android tablets don’t impress me much.
Since I was mainly using my tablet for reading my newspaper online and other reading, such as PDFs, I started looking at E-ink devices. More than ten years ago I had given e-book readers a try, without much success, the 6ââ¬Â³ screen was too small for reading documents, the navigation was very cumbersome and the DRM situation with e-books was horrendous. But I did some research on the current situation and decided to get the 10.3ââ¬Â³ PocketBook InkPad X. And so far I’m quite happy with it.
China's cold war with the US on chips isn't slowing down the country's rapid growth in semiconductors, the Semiconductor Industry Association said this week.
The US sanctions on Chinese companies didn't have the intended effect of restricting China's semiconductor industry. In fact, the saber-rattling is only serving for China to get its act together on semiconductors, the industry body warned.
China's semiconductor industry sales totaled $39.8bn in 2020, a growth rate of 30.6 per cent from 2019, the SIA said. In 2015, China chip sales were just $13bn, or a 3.8 per cent market share.
We evaluated the effect of three teaching strategies to facilitate teamwork in a systems analysis and design course during the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) offering a HyFlex version of the course, (2) facilitating scheduled online teamwork sessions for all students, and (3) providing conflict resolution training to help teams overcome collaboration challenges.
Expanding rapid testing stands out as an affordable way to help mitigate risks associated with COVID-19 and emerging variants. Infectious disease researchers have developed a new model that tailors testing recommendations to new variants and likely immunity levels in a community, offering a new strategy as public health leaders seek a way out of a pandemic that has so far thwarted the best efforts to end its spread.
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced Ubuntu Security Guide tooling for compliance with the DISA Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The new automated tooling builds on Canonical’s work designing Ubuntu for high security and regulated workloads, powering U.S. government agencies, prime contractors, and service providers.
The US Federal Communications Commission is considering imposing stricter rules requiring telecommunications carriers to report data breaches to customers and law enforcement more quickly.
Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel drafted a document outlining the new proposal to strengthen the FCC’s powers for disclosing data breaches and leaks to customers and federal agencies of “customer proprietary network information.” The updated rules, published this week, would keep the FCC in line with other federal and state data breach laws, she said.
At the moment, companies have to wait seven business days before they can disclose a data breach to their customers. Under the new plan, the waiting period will be scrapped altogether so people can be notified sooner.
Ukrainian police have arrested five people on suspicion of operating a ransomware gang, including a husband-and-wife team, following tipoffs from UK law enforcement.
"The organizer of the group, a 36-year-old resident of Kyiv, together with his wife and three acquaintances carried out cyberattacks on foreign companies," cops alleged in a characteristically blunt statement (in Ukrainian).
They claimed "more than 50" companies were targeted by the alleged gang, causing damage estimated at "more than one million US dollars."
Humanitarian organization the International Red Cross disclosed this week that it has fallen foul of a cyberattack that saw the data of over 515,000 "highly vulnerable people" exposed to an unknown entity.
The target of the attack was the organisation's Restoring Family Links operation, which strives to find missing persons and reunite those separated from their families due to armed conflict, migration, disaster, detention and other catastrophic events. The service is free, but is currently offline.
Fuzz testing, regularly known as fuzzing, is a product testing procedure that incorporates embedding flawed or arbitrary information (FUZZ) into a product framework to recognize coding issues and security issues. Fuzz testing involves infusing information into a framework utilizing robotized or semi-computerized procedures and investigating the framework for different exemptions, for example, framework crashes or implicit code disappointment.
After last week's website defacements, Ukraine is now being targeted by boot record-wiping malware that looks like ransomware but with one crucial difference: there's no recovery method. Officials have pointed the finger at Belarus.
US companies should be on the lookout for security nasties from Ukrainian partners following the digital graffiti and malware attack launched against Ukraine by Belarus, the CISA has warned.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it "strongly urges leaders and network defenders to be on alert for malicious cyber activity," having issued a checklist [PDF] of recommended actions to take.
"If working with Ukrainian organizations, take extra care to monitor, inspect, and isolate traffic from those organizations; closely review access controls for that traffic," added CISA, which also advised reviewing backups and disaster recovery drills.
The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), GitHub, and Google announced on Wednesday the launch of Scorecards V4, which includes larger scaling, a new security check, and a new Scorecards GitHub Action for easier security automation.
An improperly implemented API that stores data on browsers has caused a vulnerability in Safari 15 that leaks user internet activity and personal identifiers.
The vulnerability was discovered by fraud detection service Fingerprint JS, which has contacted the WebKit maintainers and provided a public source code repository.
As of 28 November last year, the issue had not been fixed, so the team at Fingerprint JS decided to make the finding public to encourage the expedition of its repair.
The commonly used low-level JavaScript API, called IndexedDB, follows same-origin policy, meaning documents or scripts associated with one origin should not interact with resources associated with other origins. A webpage opened in one tab of the browser should not be able to share data with the next tab, for obvious reasons, such as if one tab was used to access a user's bank and the other a malicious website.
Today, anyone can contribute to some of the world’s most important software platforms and frameworks, such as Kubernetes, the Linux kernel or Python. They can do this because these platforms are open source, meaning they are collaboratively developed by global communities.
What if we applied the same principles of democratization and free access to cybersecurity? In other words, what if anyone could contribute to security initiatives and help build a cybersecurity culture without requiring privileged access or specialized expertise?
To explore those questions, it’s worth considering the way that open source has democratized software development and comparing it to the potential we stand to realize by democratizing security.
Recently, there’s been a lot of attention paid to software supply chain security. In particular, here’s a quote from the May 2021 presidential executive order on improving the nation’s cybersecurity: “The Federal government must … advance toward zero trust architecture; accelerate movement to secure cloud services, including … platform as a service (PaaS).”
There are two parts necessary to create a truly trusted software supply chain; securing the non-technical areas and securing the technical areas.
Non-technical aspects of any secure software supply chain involve having individuals or teams focused on security and audit compliance. Internal company policies that act as a regulatory system and set standards for developers are a must, as are efforts to enforce compliance with security best practices. While this can bode well for large organizations, small software engineering teams and startups do not have the bandwidth, budget or culture to make this a reality.
Toronto-based Citizen Lab has warned that an app required by Beijing law to attend the 2022 Olympics contains vulnerabilities that can leak calls and data to malicious users, as well as the potential to subject the user to scanning for censored keywords.
"To support the successful delivery of the Games and the safety of all Games participants, Beijing 2022 has developed the 'My 2022' application, which includes information provided by the Organising Committee, the City of Beijing and also general information," reads the International Olympic Committee's Beijing 2022 playbooks.
The playbooks [PDF], which are documents that serve as info guides for Olympics-goers, instruct international visitors to download the app and use it to monitor health for 14 days prior to their departure for China.
The mandatory smartphone app that athletes will use to report health and travel data when they are in China for the Olympics next month has serious encryption flaws, according to a new report, raising security questions about the systems that Beijing plans to use to track Covid-19 outbreaks.
Portions of the app that will transmit coronavirus test results, travel information and other personal data failed to verify the signature used in encrypted transfers, or didn’t encrypt the data at all, according to the report by Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto cybersecurity watchdog. The group also found that the app includes a series of political terms marked for censorship in its code, though it does not appear to actively use the list to filter communications.
Some 15 server infrastructures used by crims to prepare ransomware attacks were seized by cops yesterday as part of an international sting to take down VPNLab.net.
The VPN provider's service gave users "shielded communications and internet access" that was used in "support of serious criminals acts such as ransomware deployment and other cybercrime activities," Europol said today.
The UK's data watchdog has issued the Ministry of Justice with an Enforcement Order [PDF] after the government department broke data protection laws by failing to process thousands of subject access requests (SARs) without undue delay.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said it was made aware of the backlog by the MoJ – the data controller – in January 2019 and spoke to the ministry over the course of the year, mulling potential action. Then the pandemic hit, leading to a change in the ICO's approach to regulatory action, and it paused the probe.
By October 2020, the ICO asked for an update on the number of outstanding SARs, but the MoJ said it too was struggling under the COVID-19 outbreak and had sought to prioritise requests that were "urgent" due to legal proceedings like immigration hearings or police investigations.
Between March and mid-April last year, the MoJ told the ICO it had 5,956 SARs that it had only partially responded to, including 372 that were made in 2018. In a further update in May 2021, the number of SARs only partially responded to had climbed to 6,398. The MoJ informed the ICO that full service for SARs would resume in October notwithstanding any further unforeseen restrictions.
Netflix’s "Don’t Look Up" may be one of the most prevalent satirical climate change commentaries of its time, created under the guidance of astronomer Amy Mainzer.
Featuring dozens of A-List celebrities — such as Kid Cudi, Cate Blanchett, Ariana Grande, Jonah Hill, Meryl Streep— it is Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, who play two Michigan State University astronomers, who lead the cast.
Noticing a discrepancy in space satellite footage, Lawrence’s character, Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky, discovers a comet is heading straight towards Earth and will make an impact in six months and 14 days, creating an extinction-level event.
A new colony of breeding Gentoo penguins has been discovered living on Antarctica’s Andersson Island, an unusually southern location for the generally more temperate birds. The research by Stony Brook University and Greenpeace highlights the effects of climate change as until recently the region was too icy for Gentoo penguins to successfully raise chicks.
New penguin colonies not previously known to science have been found in the Antarctic by researchers from Stony Brook University. These include a new gentoo penguin colony never before recorded at Andersson Island, on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, as well as the first ever recorded findings of gentoo penguins in an unexplored archipelago just off the Antarctic Peninsula’s northern tip.
Photo and video is available here.
These are some of the southmost records for Gentoo penguins breeding on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, where until recently it was far too icy for the more temperate Gentoo penguin to successfully raise chicks. Before this discovery, only one solitary Gentoo nest had been found this far south, but researchers have now discovered a colony of 75 gentoo chicks on Andersson Island.
Unmanned vehicles are a key component in the fight to protect oceans and lakes.
To asrobiologists and astronomers, our earth is an ocean planet, a water world. And it really is unique. So far, it is the only planet composed of rocky materials that also is known to possess ample quantities of water. Most of that water is found in oceans that cover some three-quarters of its surface.
Over time, a wide array of human activities has been upsetting their equilibrium.
Likewise, over billions of years, the vast majority of water on Earth has become salty through a continual erosion process that brings into it solution chemicals such as sodium. But it wasn’t always that way. The Great Lakes that both bind and separate Canada and the U.S. are among the largest bodies of “fresh” water on the planet. Although far from primordial in any sense, they are a collective reminder of a time when vast bodies of water were less salty.
Self-proclaimed visionaries of our times like to explode myths about what can and cannot be done. Inhabiting mars? Let's get on it, electric car maker Elon Musk says.
He also said that the internet faces a number of challenges such as getting everyone online and data being used against people, perhaps brought into focus by disinformation campaigns.
The creator of the world wide web was speaking at Fujitsu's ActivateNow: Technology Summit, a virtual event focused on the part technology can play in shaping a better future, and covered his vision for the internet.
Carriers and Big Tech are happily continuing to use network address translation (NAT) and IPv4 to protect their investments, with the result that transition to IPv6 is glacial while the entire internet is shaped in the image of incumbent players.
That's the opinion of Geoff Huston, chief scientist at regional internet registry the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC).
Huston's opinion was published in the conclusion to a lengthy post titled "IP addressing in 2021" that reports on IPv4 and IPv6 usage across last year.
Limited communication is being restored in Tonga through satellite, high-frequency radio and motorboat after a violent underwater volcano severed a fiber-optic cable connecting the remote island to the world.
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai underwater eruption – equivalent to a 10 megaton blast, it's estimated – on Saturday damaged two cables that were the backbones of international and domestic communications in Tonga.
The internet still remains cut off though communications is being restored through other means, the government of Tonga said in its first official statement, posted on Twitter by the Tonga Embassy in Tokyo.
Tonga has deployed patrol boats as the first step in restoring communication across Tonga's islands.
Apple warned in a letter sent to lawmakers Tuesday that antitrust bills being considered in the Senate would increase the risk of security breaches to iPhone users, in part because they could force it to allow sideloading, where apps are downloaded outside the App Store.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DoJ) Antitrust Division are launching a joint public inquiry as a first step to modernising merger guidelines and preventing anticompetitive deals.
"Times have changed because the advent of the digital economy has transformed industry," said the DoJ's assistant attorney general, Jonathan Kanter, in a press conference on Tuesday. "The digital revolution has not only impacted new markets like tech, but markets across our economy, many of which have been rebuilt from the inside out."
FTC chair Lina Khan said it was time for a merger review because the number of global deals reached in 2021 was the highest ever recorded – at a whopping $5.8 trillion – with the DoJ receiving twice the number of merger filings as in 2020.
BALANCED Media|Technology (BALANCED), in partnership with the Retina Foundation of the Southwest (RETINA) and Southern Methodist University (SMU), today announced a patent-pending medical imaging technology (U.S. Patent Application Serial No.16/538,662) that uses automated software and a video game to provide standardized, accurate, and precise identification of ocular diseases including age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of visual impairment in the world.
BALANCED, RETINA, and SMU also signed a 10-year exclusive license, development, and commercialization agreement for BALANCED to bring the medical imaging technology to the $35 billion AI healthcare market.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) requested that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia “block enforcement of onerous copyright rules that violate the First Amendment and criminalize certain speech about technology, preventing researchers, tech innovators, filmmakers, educators, and others from creating and sharing their work.” Specifically, EFF wants the court “to reverse a district court decision in Green v. DOJ, a lawsuit [EFF] filed in 2016 challenging the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on behalf of security researcher Matt Green and technologist Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang. Both are pursuing projects highly beneficial to the public and perfectly lawful except for DMCA’s anti-speech provisions.”
Ad-filtering biz Eyeo on Tuesday celebrated the defeat of a copyright claim that threatened to break the web, though that risk hasn't entirely been put to rest in the US.
Eyeo was sued last year by German publisher Axel Springer for allegedly violating its copyrights by altering its websites with its browser extension AdBlock Plus.
The publisher has tried unsuccessfully for years to have the German court system declare Eyeo's business model illegal. Eyeo offers its ad-blocking browser extension and simultaneously runs a program called Acceptable Ads which displays approved ads to consenting AdBlock Plus users and requires large publishers to pay a fee if they want to participate.
A US court has found Oracle support specialist Rimini Street in contempt of court and ordered it to pay $630,000 in sanctions – peanuts for the $40bn-revenue Big Red software company.
In a dispute dragging on for more than a decade, the District Court of Nevada also imposed reasonable attorneys' fees and costs against Rimini, to be decided at a later date.
District Judge Larry Hicks found Rimini in contempt of court on only five of the 10 issues presented at the hearing. "The Court's finding of willfulness on the majority of these issues clearly supports the award," the ruling said.
