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Posted in News Roundup at 12:06 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
Juno has introduced its new range of Linux laptops this week with prices starting from $1,150 and rising to $2,250. The entry-level laptop takes the form of the Juno Nyx 15″ AMD V2 powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor supported by AMD Radeon RX Vega 7, 16 GB of RAM and is fitted with a 15.6 inch display offering users a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. Other features include connectivity via Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi 6 as well as connectivity via HDMI, Ethernet, and USB Type-C and Type-A and comes preloaded with the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS operating system.
Linux 5.14.9 has started to land in Debian Backports for Debian 11 “Bullseye”.
Right now, the only kernel image available is “unsigned”, and there are no new device firmware packages yet.
The difference between “signed” and “unsigned” kernels, is that unsigned ones aren’t signed by Microsoft for Security Theater Boot, and so they won’t work if you don’t have it turned on.
Since I don’t have Security Theater Boot turned on, I went ahead and pulled all of the Intel, Free, and Non-Free Linux firmware packages out of Debian Testing (as well as an AMD Graphics firmware bundle since apt complained that one of the others depended on it, even though it won’t do me any good since this is an all-Intel laptop.
The desktop is the first thing that greets the user when they login to their computer. It’s the reference point for all your navigation. Speaking of which, navigation can be made much easier through shortcuts. Most users prefer to put shortcuts to various applications on the desktop to launch applications quickly. This way, they don’t have to go looking for them in their corresponding directories.
On Windows, many application installers prompt the user to add a shortcut to the application on the desktop. If the user didn’t accept the option, the shortcut could be created simply by navigating the application’s .exe file, right-clicking on it, selecting Send To, and then Desktop (create shortcut). However, executing the same thing on Linux is slightly more complicated.
Most of the popular Linux desktop environments like KDE Plasma, XFCE, and Cinnamon also allow users to add their favorite application shortcuts on their desktop. On the other hand, GNOME (Ubuntu’s desktop) does not provide this option by default. Fortunately, Canonical ships an extension with Ubuntu out-of-the-box, which allows the user to add desktop shortcuts.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Synfig Studio on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Synfig Studio is a free and open-source 2D animation software, designed as a powerful industrial-strength solution for creating film-quality animation using vector and bitmap artwork. Synfig Studio is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Synfig Studio open-source 2D animation software on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to upgrade Ubuntu 21.04 to Ubuntu 21.10. For those of you who didn’t know, Ubuntu 21.10 is a non-LTS release, which means it will be supported for 9 months only, until July 2022. If you prefer stability over bleeding edge, then stick with Ubuntu 20.04. But if you want to experience the latest and greatest software, you can follow this tutorial to upgrade.
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 through the step-by-step upgrading from Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) to Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri).
The file systems used in Linux are its primary distinction from other operating system environments. At a glance, we have Ext2 (second extended), Ext3 (third extended), and Ext4 (fourth extended) file systems.
The implementation of the Ext2 file system overcame the limitations posed by Ext; the original Linux file system. Ext2 does not support any journaling feature, has 16GB to 2TB maximum individual file size, and 2TB to 32TB being its overall file system size.
Ext3 file system availability and support are from Linux Kernel 2.4.15 to earlier versions. It accommodates the journaling feature; absent on Ext2. It also has 16GB to 2TB maximum individual file size and 2TB to 32TB overall file system size.
Disk space is used to refer to the computer space amount on the hard drive, floppy, USB, etc, and is usually measured in large units like kilobytes, megabytes. We can also simply say that disk space is the maximum amount of data that a disk is capable of holding and any type of media that can hold some data have disk capacity.
As we save data to a disk, the disk usage increases day by day and it is important to monitor that data so our disk capacity or disk space doesn’t reach its limit. We can monitor data on any device including computers, mobiles, laptops as well as Linux servers. Suppose you have a 200GB hard disk and you are going to install PubG game on your computer which requires at least 30GB of free space on your hard drive. In this case, first, you are going to check the disk space and make sure that 30GB is available to download and install the pubg game.
In this article, all the necessary steps will be taken to teach you how to check disk space in Ubuntu 20.04 with two methods which are graphical user interface (GUI) and also via command line/ terminal.
An operating system user that is still a learner in the OS world can never escape the challenges the current elite users have overcome. The user impact of such challenges depends on the operating system flavor or distribution you are under.
For Linux users, you might think you are facing an impossible challenge only to realize that there are multiple valid solutions for every single OS problem faced.
Ubuntu comes with ufw (uncomplicated firewall) installed by default. This is a frontend for iptables/nftables, the built-in Linux firewall, and is meant to make firewall management a bit easier.
Linux Malware Detect (LMD), also known as Maldet, is a malware scanner for Linux released under the GNU GPLv2 license. Maldet is quite popular amongst sysadmins and website devs due to its focus on the detection of PHP backdoors, dark mailers, and many other malicious files that can be uploaded on a compromised website using threat data from network edge intrusion detection systems to extract malware that is actively being used in attacks and generates signatures for detection.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install and use Maldet on AlmaLinux 8.
Asterisk is a popular open-source PBX framework for VoIP gateway development. It is an online telephone solution used by individuals, small and large businesses, enterprises, and various governments.
Asterisk uses a VoIP protocol to make calls over the internet using the TCP/IP instead of the traditional land telephone line. Its features include voicemail, music on hold, conference calling, call queuing, call recording, interactive voice response, SMS messaging, automatic call distribution, and more. Asterisk can be installed on multiple operating systems, including Linux, NetBSD, macOS, and Solaris, among others.
GNOME 40 introduces many changes from visual changes, new apps and overhaul back-end changes to improve performance. Overall, it is vastly different from what previous Gnome versions have looked before.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the new GNOME 40 on your Ubuntu desktop.
It is every developer’s desire to deploy secure web applications which are safe from threats. On most occasions, this is effortless said than done. The frequency of websites being hacked keeps rising as hackers continue to exploit all attack vectors at their disposal.
WebApp security can be a huge challenge especially with the prevalence of malicious tools such as rootkits, scanners, bots, and other malware. Although getting breached may seem a matter of when if not if, it is prudent to implement some decent security measures to safeguard your web applications.
Ever since Mozilla dumped Rust, it has gained even more prominence and popularity. Don’t just take my words for it. Rust is going to be included in the Linux kernel, only the second programming language after C.
By default, Fedora does not come with Snap or Snap Store installed as this is a feature that was built by developed by Canonical as a faster and easier way to get the latest versions of software installed on Ubuntu systems, and Snap packages are installed from a central SNAP server operated by Canonical.
Snap can be installed and, for the most part, work with most packages on Fedora-based systems that are currently actively supported. There are a few conflicts with specific packages. The issue with Snaps VS DNF package manager is that Snaps are self-contained, which results in an increased .snap due to having all its dependencies included along with various degrees of slight performance degradation compared to a natively installed application. In contrast, DNF is much lighter than its snap counterpart because it doesn’t need to bundle dependencies.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Snapcraft and have the ability to use this feature going forward in Fedora 35.
Telegram is a popular free cross-platform, cloud-based instant messaging system. Telegram is famous for providing end-to-end encrypted video calling, VoIP, file sharing, amongst many other features. One of the main attractions of Telegram, it is unique in having no ties or shared interests with the big social media giants such as Facebook or Twitter. The application is also cross-platform, with app versions available for most operating systems for desktops and mobile/tablet devices.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the Telegram client on Debian 11 Bullseye.
First, there is no fsck command for ZFS, which Linux and Unix use for file system repair. However, ZFS comes with a scrub option. This subcommand is a root-initiated dynamic consistency check. It runs in the background on a mounted live filesystem. Hence, we use the zpool scrub command for ZFS storage and test file system integrity. Let us see how to check ZFS File system storage pool on Linux, FreeBSD or Unix-like systems using the command-line option.
I am using /sbin/iptables -L -v -n | more command. However, I am unable to list NAT rules. How do I use the iptables command to view or list NAT rules stored in NAT tables? How do I see all the rules in NAT tables under CentOS / RHEL / Debian / Ubuntu Linux based server?
/sbin/iptables command for IPv4 packet filtering and NAT. Network address translation (NAT) imodifyies IP address information in IP packet headers while in transit across a routing device.
YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener) is an open source URL shortening and data analytics application.
We will cover the process of installing YOURLS on a CentOS 8 server.
In this guide we are going to learn how to install docker on Debian 11 (Bullseye).
Docker is an open source containerization platform. It enables developers to package applications into containers—standardized executable components combining application source code with the operating system (OS) libraries and dependencies required to run that code in any environment.
Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.
Pip is a package-management system written in Python used to install and manage software packages. It is a package management system that simplifies installation and management of software packages written in Python such as those found in the Python Package Index (PyPI). Pip is not installed by default on Debian 11.
In this guide we will learn how to install Python Pip on Debian 11 using the apt package manager.
As a new Linux user, you may always face confusion regarding the difference between su command and su – command.
This article will help you to understand the difference between “su” and “su -“ in Linux.
Jenkins uses plugins extensively. Most Jenkins features are all implemented as plugins. Jenkins plugins provide features to support building, deploying, and automating any project. Believe it or not, but there are over 1800+ community-contributed Jenkins plugins available. This guide will show you how to manage Jenkins plugins.
Jenkins plugins are Java Archive (JAR) files with either an .hpi or .jpi extension. The jpi plugin gets precedence over the hpi plugin in case both are present.
To manage all network activities you should have detailed knowledge about how to check network load, bandwidth usage, active connections, connections sockets, and how much bandwidth is used by processes on your Linux system.
In this article, we will discuss 19 useful commands that help monitor your network activity on Linux. The commands are executed on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. We will also show how to install these command-line tools or utilities in Ubuntu / Debian systems.
This article explains how to transition a typical container setup from Raspberry Pi OS to Fedora Linux at the example of the Traefik reverse-proxy. We start with an already setup Fedora Linux to keep this one to the point, which is getting to know fundamental differences and options when first touching down on Fedora Linux and podman.
Want to know where Docker images, containers and volumes are located?
In a typical Linux environment, you can find the Docker image and container data in:
/var/lib/docker/ If your server is running out of space, you should definitely take a look into this directory.
Primarily, all Docker related entities are located at /var/lib/docker. But let us look into it more specifically, with the Alpine image and container as a hands-on example.
Note: Please note that this information is for educational purpose only. Manipulating with host system Docker directories/files are never actually recommended. The docker and docker-compose commands should be the preferred method always. Physically located Docker directories/files should be accessed or manipulated only as a last resort during emergency situations.
Valve has put up a Beta for Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two as they prepare more of their own games ready for the Steam Deck.
We don’t know yet all the exact details, as this update hasn’t even been announced by Valve yet but the Betas are up and you can try them out right now. However, we do know for sure they now have DXVK Native which is the port of DXVK to Linux which allows it to be used natively without Wine. This changes the game to use Vulkan, instead of OpenGL, if you launch it with “-vulkan” in the launch options.
Linux distributions have been gaining massive popularity over the years, becoming more and more suited for daily tasks. Improvements in design and GUI and embedded compatibility with a wide variety of apps have made Linux suitable for casual users.
Aside from daily work-related tasks, Linux distributions are now optimized for gaming, offering support for many popular gaming titles available on Steam. One of the most popular gaming titles on Steam is Counter-Strike (CS), a collection of multiplayer first-person shooters.
The gameplay follows standard Search-and-Destroy rules. The Terrorists are tasked with perpetrating acts of terror such as bombing and taking hostages(depending on game mode), whereas the Counterterrorist try to stop the terrorists, either by defusing the bomb, rescuing hostages or by eliminating all terrorists.
The first game from indie developers Aruma Studios, a husband and wife duo from Spain that follows the protagonist Sarah trying to figure out her past.
The story takes place in the present day, when Sarah is found lying in the road leading to the town of Antiquonia. After recovering, she is diagnosed with amnesia and must stay in the town to learn about her past. She will soon discover that the internet is not welcome in this town, a detail that will prove difficult as she begins to unravel the mystery of her past.
Code Three Fifty One are currently working on Project Haven, an impressive looking turn-based tactics game where you command the Steel Dragons, a mercenary outfit fighting for survival in the harsh, urban near-future that is Haven City. Seems to be one we missed during Gamescom this year as we had no idea they planned Linux support at the time.
Proton Experimental continues to see rapid development to give us more great fixes to run Windows games under Linux. If you wish to know more about Steam Play and Proton do check out our dedicated section.
Valve updated it once again on October 18 to bring more improvements. Hot on the heels of VKD3D-Proton version 2.5 releasing, which came with plenty of DirectX Raytracing upgrades, this version is now included in Proton Experimental making it real easy to test it out.
Other improvements in this release include fixing the Atomic Shop and random crashes in Fallout 76, multiplayer is fixed for RaceRoom, flickering in the Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord launcher was fixed and the Windows version of Game Dev Tycoon is noted as being playable (it has a Linux version too).
As the launch window of the Steam Deck approaches, Valve has finally decided to touch upon the hot topic of compatibility with the Steam Deck Verified initiative. Basically, they will show in the new SteamOS interface whether or not titles work as expected on the Steam Deck, using a rating system.
With the introduction of Steam Deck, the future of gaming in Linux is more promising than ever.
The presence of Steam Deck has already made it possible to bring in anti-cheat engine support to Linux. If you did not know, Steam Deck is powered by the upcoming new SteamOS (based on Arch Linux).
And, now, to make things better, Valve has announced to introduce new compatibility badges to showcase games on Steam that should work with Steam Deck powered by SteamOS.
Volcanoids is such a fantastic idea for a survival game. You build a base inside a big moving drill, that you continually upgrade and extend and now you can enhance it in many new ways with Steam Workshop support.
Not played it before? Volcanoids sets you up on an island that sees frequent volcanic eruptions, which are being triggered by strange mechanical bots. It’s up to you to build, defend and explore while keeping an eye on the volcano for when you need to quickly dive deep underground in your big drillship.
Paradox continues to tweak their space sci-fi strategy game Stellaris with another free upgrade coming. Update 3.2 continues the work of their newer Custodian Team. This is the team that focuses entirely on free content, with other teams working on DLC.
For the 3.2 update (that has no date yet) there’s going to be new content and features, some of which was cut from the 3.1 update. While there’s no date, they are aiming for around three months between free updates now.
After your next futuristic point and click adventure? Check out The Sundew which is out now along with native Linux support.
Last week on October 14th, the KDE Project celebrated its 25th anniversary with the launch of the KDE Plasma 5.23 desktop environment series, a major update that introduced numerous new features and improvements.
Now, the first point release is already here, addressing several issues with the Plasma Wayland session like a crash that occurred immediately after login when using the Right Alt never chooses 3rd level advanced keyboard setting.
However, the benefits of Red Hat Training and Certification also apply to individuals. Many IT professionals seek automation training on their own and find that it enhances their value to their company and their personal marketability. Take, for example, Christian Sandrini, an IT professional who was named the 2021 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year. He has earned nearly a dozen Red Hat certifications, including the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Best Practices and the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation Platform.
To deploy enterprise Java applications with Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) servers to Red Hat OpenShift, developers have usually needed to learn how to use OpenShift templates or Operators to specify Kubernetes and OpenShift resources such as build config, deployment, volume, environment variables, and application image. This article, the first of a two-part series, explains a simpler way to deploy an enterprise Java application to OpenShift using Helm charts, and how to connect the application to a PostgreSQL database.
Deep into the digital transformation age, IT leaders recognize that change is the one constant. As a result, their hiring needs have shifted from seeking out those employees who are highly skilled in a single area to pursuing professionals who are capable of acquiring new aptitudes on an ongoing basis. Continuous learning is the name of the game.
“The pace of digital innovation across industries was already rapid, but COVID accelerated change,” says Charley Betzig, managing director, IT executive recruiting firm Heller Search Associates. “It is more important than ever to have continuous learners in positions of leadership. Companies need IT leaders who not only are on top of the most modern technology but are curious and creative around how those technologies can influence current business models or even create new ones.”
Despite the uncertainty around COVID-19, the shift to remote work was, for many employees, a welcome departure from the in-office routine. However, as weeks turned into months, and months into a year, the downsides of remote work became clear for some people.
One example is the difficulty of delineating work from home life. With 24/7 connectivity and no commute, it can be challenging to separate the two. Many people find themselves working late into the evening and on weekends. Add in reduced staff and increased workloads, and burnout quickly becomes a reality: A Deloitte survey found that 77 percent of workers have experienced burnout.
MontaVista® Software, LLC, a leader in commercial Embedded Linux® products and services, today announced the immediate availability of MVShield support services for Rocky Linux. The Rocky Linux project was founded in late 2020, gathering immediate momentum since its inception with continued robust adoption during 2021.
Based on its analyses, Esperanto claims that the ET-SoC-1 ML inference engine achieves 123X better performance per watt on the MLPerf Deep Learning Recommendation Model benchmark compared to an Intel Xeon Platinum 8380H processor and 25.7X better performance per watt on the ResNet 50 benchmark compared to an Intel Xeon Platinum 9282.
After successfully getting Mesa’s software-based Lavapipe Vulkan implementation building on Haiku last month along with related Mesa code for headless support, a developer independent of AMD has started work on porting the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” to Haiku.
Haiku developer “X512″ has been spending the past number of weeks so far trying to get the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver stack working on this BeOS-inspired platform. This would be the first major Vulkan driver working for Haiku though there is also interest in getting the open-source Intel Vulkan driver working there too.
This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on bringing more student developers into free and open source software development. Seven projects were finished successfully. Students and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 7.3 in early February 2022!
Version 1.22 is available for download. This version includes several bugfixes and improves the documentation.
Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and non-linear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It is drop-in compatible with many Matlab scripts. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language.
Octave has extensive tools for solving common numerical linear algebra problems, finding the roots of nonlinear equations, integrating ordinary functions, manipulating polynomials, and integrating ordinary differential and differential-algebraic equations. It is easily extensible and customizable via user-defined functions written in Octave’s own language, or using dynamically loaded modules written in C++, C, Fortran, or other languages.
The basic Git commands are good enough for the usual clone, add, commit push.
But if you are working on a large project with multiple contributors, you may need to visualize things. A GUI tool gives a better view on the diff, stash and blame.
But then, if you are a terminal dweller, who wants the comfort of GUI with Git, I have got a good tool for you.
It is called GitUI and it provides user experience and comfort similar to a git GUI but right in your terminal. It is portable, fast, free and open source.
The upcoming Godot 3.4 release will provide a number of new features which have been backported from the 4.0 development branch (see our release policy for details on the various Godot versions). With this first Release Candidate, we completely freezes feature development, and comes after a long series of beta builds to fix a number of bugs reported against previous builds (as well as against previous stable branches).
If you already reviewed the changelog for beta 6, you can skip right to the differences between beta 6 and RC 1. Notable changes are in-editor class reference translations (so far Chinese (Simplified), Spanish, and some French), some new rendering features (high quality glow mode, 3D point light attenuation option), and a number of C# marshalling fixes.
The release of the programming language Crystal 1.2 has been published , the developers of which are trying to combine the convenience of development in the Ruby language with the high application performance inherent in the C language. Crystal syntax is close to Ruby, but not fully compatible with it, despite the fact that some Ruby programs are executed without modification. The compiler code is written in Crystal and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
The language uses static type checking, implemented without the need to explicitly specify the types of variables and method arguments in the code. Crystal programs are compiled into executable files, with macro evaluation and code generation at compile time. In programs in the Crystal language, it is allowed to connect bindings written in the C language. Parallelization of code execution is carried out using the “spawn” keyword, which allows you to start a background task asynchronously without blocking the main thread, in the form of lightweight threads called fibers (Fiber).
I got introduced to the markdown format a few years ago when I began to explore Jupyter Notebooks. Many of the other writers at Opensource.com knew markdown, but it was a skill that was unfamiliar to me.
Markdown is a standard way of writing text, in which you use minimal notation to markup how you want the text styled. For instance, instead of clicking a button to make a word bold, you surround the word with two asterisks (**word**).
The code is written in C / C ++ and will be published under the Apache 2.0 license. Linux, Windows and macOS platforms are supported. The work on the opening of all the source codes associated with the project is planned to be completed in 2022, after which MuJoCo will switch to an open development model, which implies the possibility of participation in the development of community representatives.
Syntax::Keyword::Match is a module to enable match syntax in the current Perl by Paul Evans who is one of the current Perl Steering Councils. See perlgov about the Perl Steering Council.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare has recently signed 4 more Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) agreements regarding the Agristack with Cisco, Ninjakart, ITC Limited, and Jio. In this post, we analyse these MoUs, and explain the issues that arise as a result.
[...]
As with all the previous MoUs, the DACFW will share all the data sets with CISCO, Ninjakart, ITC, and Jio, while retaining ownership and responsibility for security of the data. Absolutely no clarity has been provided in any of the MoUs regarding how the data sets are to be kept secure, beyond the role allocation of data security being given to the Ministry of Agriculture. Further, the Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) in the appendices of the MoUs are vague on the subject of whether farmers’ data shared under the respective MoUs is considered “confidential information”, and thus subject to protection under the NDA. Another concern is that the State departments have not been made parties to these MoUs, even though agriculture is a state subject under the Constitution of India.
A GRAIN report titled ‘Digital fences: the financial enclosure of farmlands in South America’ has already brought to attention how digitalisation has enabled the land grabs by large scale agribusinesses in Latin America, while the requirement of digital land records for access to public schemes for agriculture has resulted in large scale exclusion. Thus, here, the Agristack may be a double-edged sword: in case such cases are rushed over and dealt with in a perfunctory manner, the resultant injustice in the form of dispossession would be locked in, whereas if land disputes are adequately addressed and resolved, India’s farmers could rest assured that their land holdings have been digitally enshrined. Thus, there is an urgent need to address all such land disputes before creating such a database, especially since compensation-based dispute settlements have generally led to highly inadequate compensation for farmers and lengthy delays in payment.
There is already a lot of “Land Governance Digitalization” going on, in every corner of the world. Personally, I am sure that this is half unavoidable, half, in the long term, be beneficial. The problem of course is how long it will take to get there, and how much damage will happen along the way, especially in the Global South.
Intel’s EFI evolved into an architecture-neutral variant known as the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, frequently referred to as UEFI. For the most part, UEFI won against Open Firmware: the only vendor still supporting it being IBM, and only as a legacy compatibility option for their POWER machines. Arguably the demise of Open Firmware was more related to industry standardization on x86 instead of the technical quality of UEFI however.
According to a report from CISA last week, there were three ransomware attacks against water treatment plants last year.
IN THE SPRING OF 2019, artificial intelligence datasets started disappearing from the internet. Such collections — typically gigabytes of images, video, audio, or text data — are the foundation for the increasingly ubiquitous and profitable form of AI known as machine learning, which can mimic various kinds of human judgments such as facial recognition.
In April, it was Microsoft’s MS-Celeb-1M, consisting of 10 million images of 100,000 people’s faces — many of them celebrities, as the name suggests, but also many who were not public figures — harvested from internet sites. In June, Duke University researchers withdrew their multi-target, multi-camera dataset (DukeMTMC), which consisted of images taken from videos, mostly of students, recorded at a busy campus intersection over 14 hours on a day in 2014. Around the same time, people reported that they could no longer access Diversity in Faces, a dataset of more than a million facial images collected from the internet, released at the beginning of 2019 by a team of IBM researchers.
All together, about a dozen AI datasets vanished — hastily scrubbed by their creators after researchers, activists, and journalists exposed an array of problems with the data and the ways it was used, from privacy, to race and gender bias, to issues with human rights.
Privacy concerns related to the implications of facial recognition have been raised several times but you may not have thought much about a very different part of your body being scanned.
Sanjiv Gambhir, a Stanford radiologist believes that the future of medicines starts in the bathroom and his lab is leading the way.
Gambhir’s team has developed a ‘smart toilet’ that analyses the users’ urine and faeces using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to monitor for diseases, infections or even certain cancers, such as colorectal or urologic cancers.
Interestingly, to authenticate your waste with you, the smart toilet scans your ‘anal print’.
The EU has been accused of contributing to the development of ‘surveillance’ capacities in third countries without considering fundamental rights and data protection; according to a complaint filed with the European Ombudsman by a coalition of privacy NGOs.
The dossier sent to the EU oversight body includes internal documents and communications relative to projects that provide training, technology and financing to law enforcement authorities in third countries, notably in Africa and the Western Balkans.
The NGOs regret that in all cases, the EU bodies and agencies failed to provide an impact assessment for the potential implications on human rights and privacy despite the grave consequences if the capacities provided were misused. They have labelled it a case of maladministration.
“EU bodies must equally ensure respect for human rights in their external relations, by, for example, assessing the risks that their actions pose to human rights. What our research suggests, however, is that these assessments are lacking when transferring surveillance capabilities outside the EU,” said Ioannis Kouvakas, legal officer and acting general counsel at Privacy International.
[...]
The NGOs dispute that argument, arguing that EU bodies need to ensure human rights law and principles are respected since they are equipping third countries with intrusive equipment and techniques that could enable mass surveillance.
The argument was echoed by German MEP Patrick Breyer. “The Commission showed itself to be completely ignorant when we asked them about impact assessment, which is not acceptable,” Breyer said.
“Without prior human rights impact assessments, such actions could pose serious threats,” stressed Manos Papadakis, co-founder of Homo Digitalis.
A Commission spokesperson was not readily available for comments.
Not that Deutsche Telekom would ever lie (HAH!), but they claimed that they made sure that nobody who signed up for T-Mobile Home Internet would get less than 25 Mbps, and then also claimed that many customers saw more than that.
To be fair, sometimes out of the blue, I’ll speed test at 50-80 Mbps, but then it’ll just go back down to this, or the modem will start crashing again. Today it crashed three times, and then the third time, it wouldn’t even connect to the internet again for 3 hours.
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