Dynamic resource allocation is a new API for requesting resources.
Kubernetes is an open-source platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It was originally developed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Kali Linux Xfce 2022.4 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Today our panel will discuss self-hosted software talking about how we will self-host, what we can do, and the benefits.
I've been keeping a close eye on the AI space for quite a while now so I thought it'd be fun to see what ChatGPT could do with a couple of Linux topics in a few different styles of speaking
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, is using a VM or WSL real Linux? Then we discuss the difficulty tiers of distros and Jill has a special review for the System76 Launch Heavy keyboard. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!
Kernels 6.0.13 and 5.15.83 are now available in the PCLinuxOS Software Repository.
Collabora have given an end of year update on how the work towards running the Windows compatibility layer on Wayland is coming along and it sounds good.
AMD has today released the Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs starting with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT.
We tested the software under Ubuntu 22.10. The project provides a convenient deb package.
If you’re not running a Debian-based distro such as Ubuntu, we recommend using the project’s AppImage file. AppImage is a universal software format for distributing portable software on Linux without needing superuser permissions to install the application. AppImage doesn’t really install software. It’s a compressed image with all the dependencies and libraries needed to run the desired software.
I was looking for a way of improving the Disk Usage feature in the Web Management. The graphs were being drawn using images with the width set which seemed sub optimal. In addition to this the disk usage information was being generated using the du command which does not cache results nor does it have a built in way of storing the information for later retrieval. This causes a problem in that users do not want to be waiting 5 minutes for the disk usage information to appear on the page. My earlier work in getting this to work was run from a cron job that ran once a week but was resulting in a lot of files being generated for the disk usage information, and I was hoping to replace this with a database solution using SQLite.
Follow the commands given in this tutorial to install Adminer Database manager on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using Terminal.
Just like PHPMyAdmin, Adminer is also an open-source web-based tool to manage databases. Earlier it was known as phpMinAdmin, however, later its developers changed its name to Adminer. Maybe to remove the confusion that appears with the similarity of its name with PHPMyAdmin.
Adminer is better than phpMyAdmin in terms of performance and is also a lightweight alternative. Further, it natively supports a wide range of database systems. Such as MariaDB/MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and SQLite. Elasticsearch and more…
When partitioning a hard disk or other storage device, you have a choice on what type of partition scheme to use. By far, the two most common partition schemes to use are MBR (Master Boot Record, sometimes also referred to as msdos) and GPT (GUID Partition Table). When preparing to partition and format your hard drive, it is important to understand the differences between these two schemes in order to choose which one is ideal for your situation.
In this tutorial, we will look at the differences of MBR/DOS vs GPT partition schemes. We will specifically look at them through the context of a Linux system, and give you some pointers so you can quickly and reliably determine which of these two schemes you should be using for your storage devices. Read on to learn about the differences.
The lscpu command is a helpful utility for displaying information about the CPU (Central Processing Unit) on a Linux system. This command can be used to obtain detailed information about the CPU, including the number of CPU cores, the CPU type, the CPU speed, and the type of CPU architecture.
Memory usage on Linux is generally measured in terms of the amount of RAM being used by a particular process. This can be monitored by using the free command which displays the total amount of memory, used memory, and free memory available on the system.
CPU usage on Linux is generally measured in terms of the number of CPU cores being used by a particular process. This can be monitored by using the top command which displays the amount of CPU cores and the total amount of CPU time being used.
Two updates for the Steam Deck today as Valve has not only put out another Steam Deck Client Beta, they're also finally trying to make the actual Steam store better on Steam Deck.
Finally, after years of waiting, Valve has now fixed the Steam Remote Play bug that basically made the feature useless for a Linux host.
Thrive just continues to impress. It's a free and open source evolution sim built with Godot Engine and version 0.6 is out now with big new helpful features.
Do you love over-the top repeatable action horde games like Soulstone Survivors, Vampire Survivors and all the others? You'll never guess what, another developer is making one that sounds and looks quite good.
LEGO Bricktales was already a lot of fun and now perhaps it's even better with some new options and improvements for their Native Linux version too.
Three different bits of news to cover for Steam Deck updates today, as Valve pushed out three different upgrades. Here's all that's new.
The massive free next-gen update for The Witcher 3 is here, and out of the box now on Steam Deck it will just crash when you try to load into the game. Here's how to sort it out.
Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order have launched a new mini-expansion with Cities: Skylines - Financial Districts, along with another free update for all players.
Heroic Games Launcher continues to get cleaned up after the last major update, with v2.5.2 HOTFIX #2 now available. This game manager will help you deal with Epic Games, GOG and you can side-load anything else into it across Linux desktop, Steam Deck, macOS and Windows too.
Here come a bunch more gamers using Linux, as Tesla have rolled out a software update that enables Steam in Beta.
In the latest Steam Client Beta for Desktop released December 13th,€ Valve has now fixed the New Big Picture Mode not working for those with NVIDIA GPUs along with plenty of other fixes.
We’re releasing today a new bugfix release. This probably will be the last 5.1 bugfix release, since we’re updating our dependencies and builds after this. Next will be 5.2 with a ton of changes!
Season of KDE is an opportunity to contribute to KDE, while at the same time improving your skills with guidance from experienced mentors.
Apart from code, software projects require artwork, translations, documentation, community management, and funds acquired through fundraising campaigns. With Season of KDE, you too can get the chance to hone your skills in one or more of these areas over a 12-week period. Participation is open to people of all ages with an interest in learning about open source.
At KDE we have multiple levels of quality assurance ranging from various degrees of a humans testing features to fully automated testing. Indeed automated testing is incredibly important for the continued quality of our software. A big corner stone of our testing strategy are so called unit tests, they test a specific piece of our software for its behavior in isolation. But for many aspects of our software we need a much higher level view, testing pieces of Plasma’s application launcher in isolation is all good and well but that won’t tell us if the entire UI can be easily navigated using the keyboard. For this type of test we require a different testing approach altogether. A couple months ago I’ve set set out to create a testing framework for this use case and I’m glad to say that it has matured enough to be used for writing tests. I’d like to walk you through the technical building blocks and a simple example.
Let us start of by looking at the architecture at large. So… there’s Selenium which is an incredibly popular, albeit web-oriented, testing framework. Its main advantages for us are its popularity and that it sports a server-client split. This means we can leverage the existing client tooling available for Selenium without having to write anything ourselves, we only need to grow a server. The server component, called a WebDriver, implements the actual interaction with UI elements and is generic enough to also apply to desktop applications. Indeed so thought others as well: there already exists Appium – it extends Selenium with more app-specific features and behaviors. Something for us to build upon. The clients meanwhile are completely separate and talk to the WebDriver over a well defined JSON REST protocol, meaning we can reuse the existing clients without having to write anything ourselves. They are available in a multitude of programming languages, and who knows maybe we’ll eventually get one for writing Selenium tests in QML
I believe it’s kind of vital for the GNOME Infrastructure Team to outline not only the amazing work that was put into place throughout the year, but also the challenges we faced including some of the architectural designs we implemented over the past 12 months. This year has been extremely challenging for multiple reasons, the top one being Openshift 3 (which we deployed in 2018) going EOL in June 2022. We also wanted to make sure we were keeping up with OS currency, specifically finalizing the migration of all our VM-based workloads to RHEL 8 and most importantly to Ansible. The main challenges there being adapting our workflow away from the Source-To-Image (s2i) mechanism into building our own infrastructure images directly through GitLab CI/CD pipelines by ideally also dropping the requirement of hosting an internal containers registry.
KaOS is a KDE Plasma-based Linux distribution that has a new version that includes some of the latest releases and some new tools.
KaOS Linux 2022.12, a rolling release distribution based on Arch Linux, is now available and includes some exciting additions. First off, the distribution ships with Linux kernel 6.0. Next, KaOS Linux 2022.12 adds KDE Plasma 5.26.4, which is the latest version of the desktop environment. Along with that update are KDE Gear 22.12 and KDE Frameworks 5.101.
Some of the improvements to the desktop include: the Dolphin file manager finally including a selection mode, which makes it easy to quickly select files and folders you want to work with; the Gwenview image viewer now offers brightness, contrast, and gamma controls; Kate (text editor) now includes a Keyboard Macro tool; Kalendar now displays events within popup windows.
The three years old release. Minor bugs fixed. Many improvements of the GUI. Adding the exegol tool!
Codename: Rolling
This release is the final of the 2.2 revision of Kaisen Linux Rolling.
To begin with, let's wish Kaisen Linux a happy birthday! Kaisen Linux is now three years old! As tradition dictates, the 2.2 release and its batch of new features and the specifications of the features planned for 2.2 are available for the 3 years of the project!
This changelog will resume the changelog of the 2.2RC1 and the 2.2RC2 releases (Release Candidate of the 2.2 version) and will add all changes after the releasing of the 2.2RC2 version.
The big news of this release is the arrival of the Exegol tool on Kaisen Linux!
The openSUSE Project will have a workshop on Jan. 10 at 15:30 UTC at meet.opensuse.org/meeting that will focus on increasing mentorship for this year’s Google Summer of Code.
There is a long tradition of the openSUSE Project participating in the GSoC and community members that want to participate as either a mentor or mentee are encouraged to attend.
Budgie is a GTK-based desktop environment built on GNOME technologies, traditionally associated with Solus as its flagship desktop environment. Its design emphasizes simplicity, minimalism, and elegance. In addition, Budgie is extensible through its plugin architecture and offers a variety of customization options.
Although not as popular as leading GNOME and KDE Plasma, Budgie has a large fan base and a long history in the Linux community dating back to 2013. Leading distros such as Ubuntu, Debian, Arch Linux, Manjaro, and opensSUSE have included it in their releases, either as a separate spin or available for installation in their repositories.
Fedora is our overall open source project and community working on packaging components and software for the various outputs that the Fedora community delivers. Think of the Fedora community a bit like a big group of people providing well tested and maintained building blocks to be used to build operating systems and applications. As part of that bigger community you have a lot of working groups and special interest groups working to build something with those building blocks and Fedora Workstation is the most popular thing being built from those building blocks. That means that Fedora Workstation isn’t ‘Fedora’ it is something created by the Fedora community alongside a lot of other projects like Fedora Server, Silverblue and Fedora spins like Fedora KDE and Fedora Kinoite. But all them should be considered separate efforts built using a shared set of building blocks.
Putting together an operating system like Fedora Workstation is more than just assembling a list of software components to include though, it is also about setting policies, default configurations, testing and QE and marketing. This means that while Fedora Workstation contains many of the same components of other things like the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop spin, the XFCE Desktop spin, the Cinnamon spin and so on, they are not the same thing. And that is not just because the feature set of GNOME is different from the feature set of XFCE, it is because each variant is able to set their own policies, their own configurations and do their own testing and QE. Different variants adopted different technologies at different times, for instance Fedora Workstation was an early adopter of new technologies like Wayland and PipeWire. So the reason I keep stressing this point is that I to this day often see comments or feedback about ‘Fedora’, feedback which as someone spending a lot of effort on Fedora Workstation, sometimes makes no sense to me, only to reach out and discover that they where not using Fedora Workstation, but one of the spins. So I do ask people, especially those who are members of the technology press to be more precise in their reviews, about if they are talking about Fedora Workstation or another project that is housed under the Fedora umbrella and not just shorten it all to ‘Fedora’.
It’s time to prepare for the end of maintenance support.
It’s been almost ten years since the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, and its maintenance support phase will come to an end in June 2024.
When maintenance support ends, the Extended Life Support phase will begin. During this period, Red Hat will provide limited ongoing technical support. No bug fixes, security fixes, hardware enablement, or root cause analysis will be available, and support will only be supplied on existing installations.
WebAssembly (WASM) is a technology widely used in browsers, video gaming and content streaming. Today, it’s also being adapted for use with containers, and as a back-end technology for enabling Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
The Boston Children’s Hospital FNNDSC team is using DevOps to improve its delivery on ChRIS, a solution helping to democratize healthcare platforms
As a leader in open source technology, Red Hat believes in using an open development model and DevOps best practices to create more stable and innovative technologies built with IT security needs in mind. We have spent decades collaborating with customers to develop software solutions that drive our customers—and the world—forward.
If the first definition resonated, then this new blog series is for you. STIGs, a concept originally designed for the US Department of Defense, are increasingly seen as a critical security guide for security-conscious computing in a variety of places across the public and private sectors, especially in regulated industries or sensitive environments like energy and banking. While STIGs are incredibly important, cybersecurity is built around an ecosystem, good risk management practices and conscientious cyber hygiene, not a single implementation standard.
STIGs, as a framework for platform hardening, provide incredibly useful guidance for helping to attain the often required approvals to place systems in production, also known to some as an “Authority to Operate” (ATO). They do not, however, address all of an organization’s IT security needs for their environments, Even before a systems hit production, organizations need to consider:
DH2i’s DxEnterprise multi-platform smart high availability clustering software has earned Red Hat OpenShift certification on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
This certification verifies that DxEnterprise is a containerized solution that is fully supported on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to accelerate the delivery of intelligent applications across hybrid and multi cloud environments.
“By combining Red Hat OpenShift with DxEnterprise, organizations can use containers to create lightweight execution environments for applications to help deploy critical workloads faster and more consistently across physical, virtual, private and public cloud, and edge environments. Red Hat is pleased to collaborate with DH2i to certify DxEnterprise containers on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to further enable customers across the hybrid cloud,” said Mark Longwell, director of alliances, Hybrid Platforms Business Unit, Red Hat.
Zoom is a communications technology platform that provides video telephony and real-time online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform. The client can be used in various ways to improve communication and collaboration. Its easy-to-use platform lets users connect with colleagues, classmates, and customers in real time from any device.
I’m so happy to write this article. With Packit and Copr, we are improving the RPM ecosystem so much that we can work on User Experience (rather Developer Experience) more and more. Finally \o/
Context: Sorin recently reached out to us that we should improve readability of RPM build logs by highlighting the cause. Completely valid request. Although I saw much more in the ask, especially after Mirek recently nudged us to be creative with ideas what to work on next (= go big).
I completely support Sorin’s request. RPM build logs are a pain to process (no offense to RPM). ALL build logs are a pain to process. They are huge, unstructured, plaintext, cryptic and unfriendly. If you don’t have enough experience with building RPMs, they are a puzzle.
Linux Mint is one of the most successful distributions based on Ubuntu. And with the number of Ubuntu derivatives out there, that’s saying something. Linux Mint must be doing a lot of things right—at least, according to its passionate user base.
Linux Mint is focused on desktops and laptops. It provides customized desktop environments with a choice of Cinnamon, Xfce, and Mate. It has the Snap store disabled by default, a move first made in Linux Mint 20.
Linux Mint doesn’t have a server version. Its purpose is to provide a simple, intuitive, attractive desktop Linux experience for its users, especially newcomers to the Linux world. The Linux Mint team want a mac or Windows user to be comfortable with Linux Mint within a short time.
Mint uses a traditional desktop layout, with a status bar—called the panel—at the bottom of the screen. A start menu is accessed by a button at the left-hand end of the panel, and there’s a cluster of icons in a control area at the right-hand end of the panel.
Linux Mint uses the apt package installer, just like Ubuntu and Debian. It also has its own Software Manager software. It’s similar to the Ubuntu one, but it defaults to installing from DEB files, not Snap packages. Many of the packages offered give you the choice of installing from a DEB or flatpak, but a few packages, such as Zotero, are flatpak only.
Linux Mint is more than a de-Snapped Ubuntu though. It feels like using a slick, polished, simplified, and less prescriptive Ubuntu, with sensible defaults. Linux Mint 21.1 Vera, which is based on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, is due to be released on Christmas Day, 2022. We fired up a beta version to give you a heads-up on what’s new in this release.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to delete the repository and GPG key on Ubuntu Linux. For those of you who didn’t know, A repository is a collection of software packages that are stored on a remote server and can be downloaded and installed on a computer. In the case of Ubuntu Linux, a repository is a collection of packages that are maintained by the Ubuntu team and made available to users of the operating system. In addition to the official repositories provided by the Ubuntu team, users can also add third-party repositories to their system. This can be useful if you want to install software that is not included in the official repositories, or if you want to use a different version of a package than the one provided by the official repositories.
A GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) key is a digital signature that is used to authenticate the identity of the person or organization that created a piece of software. In the context of Ubuntu Linux, a GPG key is used to verify the authenticity of the packages in a repository.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step remove of the repository and GPG key on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
Docker is an open-source platform that enables developers to create, deploy, and manage applications in a lightweight, secure, and efficient manner. It uses containers, which are lightweight and portable, to package applications and related dependencies into isolated environments. Docker containers can be deployed on any operating system and can be used to run applications in any language or framework.
Docker is based on the idea of containerization, which is the process of packaging applications and their dependencies in isolated environments. This helps developers quickly and easily deploy applications without having to worry about managing dependencies and configuring system settings.
MLOps is the short term for machine learning operations and it represents a set of practices that aim to simplify workflow processes and automate machine learning and deep learning deployments. It accomplishes the deployment and maintenance of models reliably and efficiently for production, at a large scale.
MLOps is slowly evolving into an independent approach to the machine learning lifecycle that includes all steps – from data gathering to governance and monitoring. It will become a standard as artificial intelligence is moving towards becoming part of everyday business, rather than just an innovative activity.
The JetHome JetHub D1+ ships with Ubuntu 22.10 built with Armbian, and the earlier JetHub D1 is officially supported in Armbian with Linux 5.19 kernel, so I’d expect there may soon be specific Ubuntu and Debian images available for download for the JetHub D1+ considering the RAM has been updated to DDR4. From Armbian, you can install any Linux-compatible home automation framework or packages including Home Assistant with Z2M or ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT, ioBroker, openHAB, Domoticz, MajorDomo, and more. As noted previously there’s a detailed Wiki (in English) explaining how to use the controller.
Forlinx released this week the FET3588-C System-on-Module based on the octa-core Rockchip 3588 which also integrates the Arm Mali-G610 MP4 GPU and a 6 TOPs NPU. Forlinx is also offering a dev. board to get access to peripherals as dual GbE LAN ports, multiple display interfaces, PCIe slots and optional wireless connectivity. €
Before succumbing to the Whos’ Christmas cheer, the Grinch’s heart was two sizes too small (or three in the text) and that sounds like a medical condition that warrants immediate surgery. What better way to celebrate Christmas this year than by performing that surgery yourself after building this Grinch-themed Operation game.
This project from Hanzlica puts a grumpy green spin on the classic Operation game. The gameplay is the same and there are six maladies to remedy, including a broken heart, butterflies in the stomach, and the ol’ nail in the arm. As in the standard Hasbro game, the goal is to pull those pieces from the patient’s body without touching the sides of the cavities. But this version is enlarged to the point where players don’t need to use special tweezers and can instead pull the pieces using their hands. The cavities have aluminum foil lining and act as capacitive touch sensors to detect contact.
Many apartment buildings in urban areas have intercom systems that give residents the ability to unlock the building’s front door when a visitor calls. The visitor selects the resident from a list and the system connects them to that resident’s intercom. The idea is that the resident will recognize their visitor and push a button on the intercom to allow them entry. herzogshandicraft’s handy device utilizes the intercom system to automatically unlock the door when it detects a specific audio pattern.
This device serves two purposes: it lets the resident gain entry to the building without needing a key and it lets the resident give access to visitors when they aren’t home. It listens for a pattern of noise created by the visitor pressing and releasing the “talk” button on the intercom. When they press that button, audible noise comes through—even when nobody is speaking. In this case, it listens for noise above a threshold (the button pressed) for one second, no noise (button released) for one second, and then noise again for another second. If it hears that pattern, it uses a servo to press the door unlock button on the intercom.
A technical paper titled “HULK-V: a Heterogeneous Ultra-low-power Linux capable RISC-V SoC” was published by researchers at University of Bologna, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and ETH Zurich.
Anecdotally the Matplotlib maintainers were told
"About 15% of arXiv papers use Matplotlib"
arXiv is the preeminent repository for scholarly preprint articles, especially in scientific fields like physics, mathematics, and chemsitry. It stores millions of journal articles used across science. It's also public access, and so we can just scrape the entire thing given enough compute power.
The last Libreboot release, version 20220710, was released on 10 July in 2022. This new release, Libreboot 20221214, is released today on December 14th, 2022. This is intended to be a testing release.
This release is based on the osboot merger that happened last month. Many new boards are now supported!
Many ARM-based chromebooks have also been added, and they were added just before the osboot merge.
Both the osboot merge and ARM chromebooks (with u-boot payload) were mentioned in the osboot/libreboot merge news post back in November 2022.
Adding Linux support to existing Android, RTOS, and bare metal support gives developers new flexibility and control over connected product development and device operations
Welcome to the third part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Today we cover the various syslog-ng editions (open source, commercial and appliance), and where to get them from. The focus of this tutorial series is the Open Source Edition (OSE), but to avoid confusion, I also briefly introduce the other two.
[...]
Some of our commercial customers might now wonder why I mentioned an accidental discovery and how widely used syslog-ng became due to this single deal. The explanation is simple: syslog-ng also has an open-source version. Actually, syslog-ng started as an open-source project and it kept most of its users. The commercial editions started almost a decade later.
Members and supporters of LibreItalia, the not for profit association that promotes the use of open source software and open formats, met on Saturday, December 10, in Empoli (near Florence) to discuss the adoption of these solutions – which ensure the independence of companies and users from multinational technology corporations, and guarantee the freedom and privacy of content – in public administrations, in order to comply with the dictate of the Digital Administration Code, one of the most ignored Italian laws ever.
The use of software and document formats that are not controlled by a single company, and that are not driven by its business strategies, is a prerequisite in the direction of the independence of a country – starting with individual citizens and ending with institutions – that is the basis of the so-called “digital sovereignty,” that is, self-sufficiency with respect to digital technologies controlled by Big Tech.
Important disclaimer: This solution is not secure! - It is fine for a quick and temporary solution for your local network, but it is not a secure solution for important ressources that are available over the internet.
As a side note: without TLS (HTTPs), the credentials will be sent in plain text, and are easily accessable.
YottaDB is available free of charge. Install YottaDB on your Linux machine, or use a Docker container, and begin working today!
Dear GNUHealth community: I am happy to announce the maintenance release 4.0.2 of the Hospital Management client (GTK). Release 4.0.2 of the GNUHealth HMIS client includes bug fixes (see the Changelog[1]) and is REUSE compliant[2]. As usual, the source code can be downloaded from the official GNU ftp site[3]. You can also install it directly via pip[4]. You can join us at Mastodon for the latest news and events around GNUHealth! (https://mastodon.social/@gnuhealth) Happy and healthy hacking! Luis
First, and absolutely most importantly, we (the Rust project) need to sort out our governance and leadership issues. This blocks so much potential work and the longer it goes on, the more 'governance debt' the project accrues and the more problems will build up down the line. It is embarrassing that a year after the core team imploded there still isn't even a proposal for a new leadership team. (Shout out to those working on it, I know it's a hard problem because people.).
LunarG released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.3.236, including new extensions and new loader environment variables to support advanced debugging of layer and driver issues.
Two steps forward, two steps back. The year of 2022 has felt like a return to normalcy in some ways but a retreat from normalcy in others. (On the other hand, were things ever really normal? Let’s just agree to disagree on that one, methinks.) Nonetheless, we are very much at that time of year where Tedium looks back at the year’s numerous issues in a mishmash of art and commerce we call our last-minute holiday gift guide. Last year, we changed things up slightly, in part because of rules that prevent us from running affiliate links from Amazon directly in the newsletter in email form, and as a result we decided to do an Amazon idea list, which you can find here. If you’re reading on the web, the links still work. But as a reminder, this helps us out so we can do great things like support writers and write terrible jokes month after month. However, if that’s not your speed and you just want to read a recap of 2022, this is a pretty good piece for that, too. May your 2022 holidays be a little less painful this year.
New Zealand will phase in a near-total tobacco ban from next year, prohibiting anyone born after 2008 from ever purchasing cigarettes and reducing the amount of nicotine in products sold in the meantime.
The Xen Project, an open source hypervisor hosted at the Linux Foundation, today announced the release of Xen Project Hypervisor 4.17, which introduces a variety of features allowing for safety certification, static partitioning of embedded devices, increased performance, enhanced security and improved device pass-through reliability. Thanks to the active Xen Project community, a wide range of developers from many companies and organizations contributed to this latest release.
InfraGard, a program run by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to build cyber and physical threat information sharing partnerships with the private sector, this week saw its database of contact information on more than 80,000 members go up for sale on an English-language cybercrime forum. Meanwhile, the hackers responsible are communicating directly with members through the InfraGard portal online — using a new account under the assumed identity of a financial industry CEO that was vetted by the FBI itself.
The CharlieCard is a contactless smart card used for transportation fare payment in the Boston area. It is the primary payment method for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (aka MBTA or the T) and several regional public transport systems in the U.S. state of Massachusetts.
A free resource, updated monthly, lists the most-popular, highly rated OSS projects.
CISA has added one new vulnerability to itsââ¬Â¯Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. This type of vulnerability is a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and poses a significant risk to the federal enterprise.
The subtle policy shift turns on a requirement for large online platforms to tackle the so-called “legal but harmful” content. This is a legally-problematic, grey area. It is about content that is not illegal but which the government wants to ban, and understood to include eating disorders, self-harm, and false claims about medicines.
The government has announced a plan to delete this requirement, but only for adult users, not for children. An amendment will be tabled next week.
A further, legally problematic, amendment requires platforms to allow adult users to filter out these kinds of harmful content for themselves. The idea is a kind of filter button where users can select the type of harmful content that they don’t want to see.
According to a February 2020 report in the publication Bitter Winter, police in Qinghai Province in China have conducted a program of compulsory iris scan collection targeting residents of the city Tsoshar (Haidong). Building on Bitter Winter’s work, this report finds further evidence of police-led mass iris scan collection in Qinghai, a region with a population that is 49.4% non-Han, including Tibetans and Hui Muslims. The evidence in this report includes details of iris scan collection in three regions of Qinghai, the history of the program, how police collect data, the involvement of Chinese surveillance company Super Red, and how many iris scans police have collected.
Explosions rocked Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi District on Wednesday morning, according to the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko.
Vladimir Putin will not address Russia’s Federal Assembly in 2022, TASS reported on Wednesday, citing a source from the federal parliament.
NLB, a group of pro-Ukrainian hackers, has released more than three million personal records from the state-run Moscow Electronic School website — an educational platform used by Moscow public schools.
MPs have now been obliged to report meetings with interest groups for a little over a year. Nevertheless, most still fail to do so, stated Pirate spokesperson Jerry Weyer during Monday's press conference. He further noted that, aside from their own MPs, only those from the Greens register all of their meetings.
Earlier this year, a published study by sustainability marketing agency Yard looked into "the usage of private planes by celebrities in order to track carbon emissions and find out the worst celeb contributors to climate change."
This is just a quick shout-out to Molly White, who has emerged as one of the most effective communicators among the cryptocurrency skeptics, not just with the outstanding Web3 is Going Just Great, but also with a blog that provides a distinctive and valuable perspective, a newsletter, talks and excellent contributions to panels for the White House and Financial Stability Oversight Council.
For the first time ever in a laboratory, researchers were able to generate more energy from fusion reactions than they used to start the process. The total gain was around 150%.
The achievement came at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a $3.5 billion laser complex at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. For more than a decade, NIF has struggled to meet its stated goal of producing a fusion reaction that generates more energy than it consumes.
But that changed in the dead of night on Dec. 5. At 1 AM local time, researchers used laser beams to zap a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. The lasers produced 2.05 megajoules of energy, and the pellet released roughly 3.15 megajoules.
Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that they had crossed a major milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory.
Scientists for decades have said that fusion, the nuclear reaction that makes stars shine, could provide a future source of bountiful energy.
The result announced on Tuesday is the first fusion reaction in a laboratory setting that actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction.
The thing is… once you have watched these charts a few times, you kind of get the hang of it, and then never really need to look at them, or go near the battery ever again. Its just a magic box somewhere in your house that cuts your energy bill by 75%. The only tweak I have made is that now its even colder, and we are cooking more and for longer, I’ve adjusted it to fill to 96% instead of my original 90%, because we need a bit more energy each day (and if I can possibly avoid any prime-time energy consumption…I will!).
The arrest was made at the request of the U.S. government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the Southern District of New York, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a tweet also on Monday night.
Williams expects to unseal the indictment on Tuesday morning, and he "will have more to say at the time."
Wearing a baseball cap with FTX’s logo, Mr. Bankman walked onstage to help announce the winners of two $500,000 checks. Behind the scenes, he played the role of FTX diplomat, introducing his son to the head of a Florida nonprofit organization that was helping adults in the area set up bank accounts linked to the [cryptocurrency] exchange’s platform. Two months later, Mr. Bankman-Fried promoted the partnership in testimony to Congress, where he was pushing [cryptocurrency]-friendly legislation.
In the months before FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, Mr. Bankman was a prominent cheerleader for the company, helping to shape the narrative that his son was using crypto to save the world by donating to charity and giving low-income people access to the financial system.
Sam Bankman-Fried faced widespread charges of fraud Tuesday after the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, and his arrest in the Bahamas. Here’s what we know: [...]
The indictment was made public Tuesday morning, showing that the government has charged the 30-year-old with committing fraud, conspiracy and other crimes.
Meanwhile, the top U.S. financial regulators — the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — filed civil charges against him, FTX Trading and Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried's [cryptocurrency] hedge fund, on Tuesday.
But the pressure hasn’t let up yet, as Mr. Bankman-Fried — or S.B.F., as he’s commonly known — faces yet more charges, fights efforts to extradite him to the United States and confronts the possibility that some of his lieutenants may be working with prosecutors. (He’ll also undoubtedly be pilloried at a hearing about [cryptocurrency] held by the Senate Banking Committee this morning, which will also include a “Shark Tank” judge and the actor Ben McKenzie of “The O.C.” fame.)
To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said. Twitter has also refused to pay a $197,725 bill for private charter flights made the week of Mr. Musk’s takeover, according to a copy of a lawsuit filed in New Hampshire District Court and obtained by The New York Times.
Twitter’s leaders have also discussed the consequences of denying severance payments to thousands of people who have been laid off since the takeover, two people familiar with the talks said. And Mr. Musk has threatened employees with lawsuits if they talk to the media and “act in a manner contrary to the company’s interest,” according to an internal email sent last Friday.
The council had been scheduled to meet with Twitter representatives Monday night. But Twitter informed the group via email that it was disbanding it shortly before the meeting was to take place, according to multiple members.
The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation. The email said Twitter was "reevaluating how best to bring external insights" and the council is "not the best structure to do this."
With so much money at stake, it’s little wonder that military contractors sent the House trucks full of cash before the NDAA went to the floor. The 430 members who cast votes on the bill received $14.5 million in campaign and PAC contributions from the arms industry from 2021 through October 2022, according to data from OpenSecrets.
Researchers at the DFR Lab have suggested that tweeting over 72 times a day is bot-like behavior. NPR identified over 3,500 accounts that have done so and mentioned China's three largest cities at least once a day from Nov 21, 2022 to Nov. 30. The data shows an uptick in the number of these accounts, peaking on Nov. 28.
Internet and phone use is heavily regulated (and heavily surveiled) in China. Whatever was already working is being intensified. And whatever hasn’t been applied yet is being put into motion. No longer will it take creating or sharing content the government doesn’t like to earn police visits, criminal charges, or both. Now, as CNN reports, it will only take a nearly passive sign of approval directed at content the Chinese government dislikes to attract the government’s negative attention.
The previous installment, released by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, focused on the confused and chaotic decision on the part of Twitter executives to offer a "hacked materials" rationale for suppressing the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story; as such, the files mostly provided more evidence of what was already fairly well-known.
The Weiss installment, on the other hand, offers significant evidence of something that many people merely suspected was taking place: wholesale blacklisting of Twitter accounts that were perceived to be causing harm.
The Ukrainian parliament has passed a new law for regulating the media.€
Janine Jackson interviewed Crushing Colonialism’s Jen Deerinwater about efforts to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act for the December 9, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Before the end of 2022, a group of Russian parliamentary deputies and senators will introduce a bill to ban remote work for certain workers, the independent outlet Verstka reported Wednesday, citing two sources from the State Duma.
We are not absolutely helpless! It is unfortunate that we have to deal with it, but, as they say - it is what it is. At least we have a small toolbox of viable options on how to react and what we can try out.
U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald signed an order on Dec. 12 dismissing the action "in its entirety with prejudice", according to court documents obtained by ABC News.
No information about arrangements of settlement were provided, including whether there was any payment of monetary damages or songwriting credit.
A Texas man who sold access to the pirate 'Super Arab IPTV' service through Amazon and Walmart, is liable for more than $2 million in damages. The default judgment, requested by broadcaster Dish, also targets two Chinese companies. The court also issued a broad injunction that targets hosting providers, domain registries, and other IPTV sellers.
Six months ago MPA-Canada, ACE, and Rogers Media teamed up to shut down IPTV provider SmoothStreams in Canada. The lawsuit already lists 224 records but no trial is expected anytime soon, even if it gets that far. In the meantime, photos of the service's servers and new details of the shutdown operation have appeared in a Federal Court order.
Moscow Basmanny Court has ordered the arrest in absentia of Andrey Zayakin. Zayakin is best known as a co-founder of Dissernet, an online community for fighting plagiarism in the Russian academia. He is being charged with “sponsoring extremism.” The pretext for his arrest was his 1,000-ruble ($16 in today’s money) donation to Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption team.
It orders a cup of tea at the bar, and sits down in a dimly lit corner. It’s Antennae spinning around picking up on strangers conversations. Wondering if it should chime in…
I agree. Similarly, there are sometimes things being said and done in the name of intersectional feminism and in the social justice community that are counter-productive, contradictory, or otherwise not completely thought-through. (Sometimes by me.)
I still think that intersectional feminism has a bigger kernel of truth than its enemies: anti-PC, gamergaters, anti-SJW, anti-woke… an old movement with many names that’s founded on misrepresentations and second-hand accounts.
I’ve said before that the right wing don’t even see the problems (“whaddayamean racist? You had Obama, didn’t you?”), while we on the left has great analyses of how messed up everything is but we don’t always know the best way to make it better.
A few years ago, the last time I moved, I donated lots of books and comics. Stuff that didn't move me ended up not moving with me. So, lots of scifi paperbacks from many eras of the genre, entire manga collections, even some hardbacks and up to four of five books of that infamous GRRM saga that won't ever be finished.
Also, life got in the way and I didn't read as much as I did before. Easier, more instantly-gratifying passtimes such as videogames, streaming, or (yep) social media filled up my disposable time. But I always wanted to get back into reading. I love scifi and soooo many new books were coming out, new and exciting subgenres and voices and themes.
Within the past week, the United States and Russia exchanged two high-profile prisoners in a deal that I am sure all of my readers are familiar with. In exchange for basketball star Brittney Griner, Russia received Viktor Bout, a notorious arms dealer and ethnic Russian native of Tajikistan.
Regarding the ethics of the deal, I am not so inclined to question it. In the United States there has been some moral outrage that Viktor Bout was too big and bad to give up for a lowly basketball player. It's not my intention to weigh all the possible moral implications of it, but on the US side the focus seems to be placed more on evaluating the two based on what they did for a living than other factors.
I've been playing around a lot with the ChatGPT thing, essentially trying to make friends with it before it steals my job ("write me some code that produces a violin plot from a csv file").
Considering the opposite is a tool I sometimes use when considering different philosophical positions. It’s not the be-all end-all, just another tool in the toolbox as a complement to other ways of reasoning. Clarification (only for logic nerds): We need to use the scalar negation ("none" vs "some", "all" vs "some not") rather than the polar opposite ("all" vs "none") to help prevent the "excluded middle" fallacy. "Non-zero" is a weird word but one that helps me a lot when thinking. I'm not saying that it's always the case that there's some. "There are some flying teapots in orbit around the sun." I'm just saying that what I'm talking about here is that "it's the case that X" vs "It's any other case than X".
You may see some downtime here on skyjake.fi while I'm migrating stuff between servers. The main Gemini capsule (skyjake.fi:1965) has already been migrated, so it should continue to run just fine.
AI mania has swept the Internet. People generate imagery with Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E, talk to ChatGPT, write code with Copilot, and make "hot AI selfies" with Lensa. Deep learning technology has been moving almost shockingly quickly, leading some to predict that AGI is just around the corner.
I’m not even sure if I did it right, but I updated the Python script from yesterday that processes all of my content to publish and made it generate an `atom.xml` file. I’m too tired to publish yet, but when I wake up I’ll push it and see if anything breaks.
It basically just saves off the last modified (from git) for all of the documents that get parsed, sorts them, takes the newest 10, and dumps them into the `atom.xml` file. I honestly don’t remember what’s supposed to be in the file, I just loosely based it off of some that I looked at.
Since tweaking the on-screen keyboard, my phone has been a lot more usable. I’ve actually removed the hardware keyboard to force myself to make more useful additions to the UI because it was awkward to use it without a physical keyboard.
I didn’t have time to do anything useful as I worked right up to bed time, and should actually be sleeping right now, but I’m experimenting with adding back links. Now that I’m exposing the titles I should probably go back and put those titles in the individual pages…
Anyone following me on Mastodon or the wider fediverse has probably already gotten an earful about this, but I've been trying my best to keep up with Advent of Code this month. Even though it wasn't my intention when I started out, I've been using Advent of Code's daily challenges to teach myself Go.
I've been a bit curious about Go ever since I found out about it a while back and figured this was a good a chance as any to dive into it. I started by rewriting some of my already completed Python solutions in Go. This was a great decision because I didn't have to think about a working implementation plus a new language at the same time, and this was early enough in the month where solutions were pretty small.
My original build chain fed a set of input markdown files through some very coarse `sed` expressions to extract tags, which were dumped into a file, and then passed through a unique sort. Tags were tallied by `grep -c` for each line of the unique file, and this generated my tags page with counts. Then each input file was grepped for those tags, despite the tag content being in a YAML header which meant the tags could span multiple lines and result in missing tags.
This generated a tag index and the individual tag pages that linked to deeper notes.
So imagine you've been assigned with some work and someone decided to make it so that you're going to develop with some not well designed popular infrastructure, and this is exactly what I did for the previous school assignment that I had. The only component that isn't required is flask, but since I'm still unfamiliar with GUI programming, I've decided to use flask because I had some experience with it. Anyways, the point of this is to say that I didn't have a good experience developing with these tools for various reasons.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.