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Posted in News Roundup at 6:34 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
With the application font-manager-git you can easily select fonts. Search for Awesome font (installed by default) and copy/paste the code over your polybar.
One of the key components to creating a stunning desktop is picking the right color scheme for your terminal emulators and text editors.
If any Linux YouTuber is going to talk about that person is going to be me and today we’re looking a simple shell script to help you stream anime directly from the terminal.
Looking for a new way to install Linux and now just using “ANOTHER” Linux Distribution.
While for many years we have been accustomed to seeing Intel land their new hardware feature enablement work in the Linux kernel and related components well ahead of products shipping, occasionally there are lapses due to various internal and external timings. The launch of Sapphire Rapids is quickly approaching and one of the major additions is Advanced Matrix Extensions with its Linux support still being in the works.
Going back to June of 2020 Intel has been posting patches around AMX for the Linux kernel, the open-source toolchains, and related components. On the Linux kernel side that heavy-lifting is still ongoing with no released Linux kernel yet having the support in place for AMX.
This multi-LRC / parallel submission code for their GuC engine and exposed as a new user-space API is ready to go for Linux 5.16. This is part of their long ongoing effort around GuC submission handling and improving their user-space API as they integrate the DRM scheduler and make other fundamental improvements. This new uAPI is being worked on since their existing bonding uAPI is considered “broken” when using GuC submission. For those interested in all of the fine technical details on their parallel submission uAPI design and motivation for doing so can see this kernel documentation.
Recently I wrote about Vortex86 processors seeing detection work under Linux for improving the state of these aging x86 32-bit SoCs. That work is now slated to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 5.16 cycle for those running these aging SoCs/processors.
As outlined in the prior article, the motivation for finally having proper Linux kernel detection around Vortex86 processors stems from these in-order processors not being vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown. However, with current versions of the Linux kernel the Spectre/Meltdown mitigations are applied to these x86 32-bit SoCs for the kernel not knowing that they aren’t vulnerable.
Patches queued this week into the platform-drivers-x86 “for-next” branch ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window will provide some useful improvements to System76 laptop owners.
Several improvements to the System76 ACPI driver were queued up into this area of the kernel that holds various x86 laptop drivers and more.
30 years of Linux: The winners of the B1 Systems OSS competition have been announcedThe open source system house B1 Systems is donating 30,000 euros on the occasion of the 30th birthday of the Linux kernel: Half of this is distributed over a number of Linux and open source projects. With just under 1900 euros, the association behind the Windows-like, open-source ReactOS operating system gets most of the cake. The other places are followed by the mobile Ubuntu UBPorts (1410 euros), the Perl-based server program FHEM (1364 euros) and the Internet platform Ask the State (1207 euros).
The rest of the prize money, another 15,000 euros, will go to the Nepalese NGOs Association for IDEA Nepal and New SADLE, which work for the health of leprosy sufferers and people in need.
You may have migrated over from Windows or Mac OS X to the wonderful world of Linux. You’ve selected a Linux distro (after a bit of fruitful distro hopping), chosen a desktop environment, and studied the basic Linux commands. Or you’ve been using Linux for decades, know the operating system like the back of your hand. Whatever your level of experience, you want some really useful free utilities. Software that enriches your workflow, offers new opportunities, and allows you to tap into new innovations.
Renaming files or folders can be very cumbersome, especially if you want to rename a high number of files. But it is not necessary to click on every single file individually, make some changes just to take the same procedure at the next file. Instead what you need is a batch renamer.
XClicker is an auto clicker software for Linux that automates mouse clicks and helps you automate repetitive tasks. It’s a great way to boost your productivity.
Mouse auto clickers are incredibly useful in scenarios that require you to repeat mouse movements and clicks. If you are tired of clicking the mouse a thousand times while carrying out routine and laborious tasks, auto clicker tools help you solve that problem. In short, the software tool makes automatic clicks.
So, auto clickers are usually used to mimic clicks. However, this is mostly used in online games. All you need to do is press the hotkey designed to initiate the clicks and you’re all set.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Chrome Remote Desktop on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Chrome Remote Desktop is a excellent tool to allow you to access your computer’s desktop remotely over the Internet a protocol called Chromoting on Google Chrome browsers.
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 Chrome Remote Desktop 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.
Many users do not like the purple background in GDM login screen. Here’s how to change it to another image or color in Ubuntu 21.10 Impish Indri.
Since GNOME made it hard to hack the GDM login background, some scripts born in Github.com to help users to get rid of the boring purple screen in Ubuntu. And, here’s the one created for Ubuntu 21.10, that support set an image, single color, or gradient color as login background.
Fedora 35 has brought with it many improvements over its predecessor with GNOME 41, Linux Kernel 5.14, and a range of other enhancements front and back end that have made the new release a much quick, fast and powerful release not just on the desktop version but also the server variant as well compared to the more mature Fedora 34.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Fedora 35 on a PC with complete steps, screenshots from creating a USB bootable drive to installing and first time set up.
This quick tutorial explains How to check the SHA1 hash of a file on Linux, FreeBSD, and Unix-like systems using the sha1sum or sha1 command.
We can use the sha1sum or sha1 command to compute and check SHA1 message digest. Often IT vendors provide drivers or BIOS files for your system along with SHA-1 message digest. Hence, we can check the integrity of the downloaded file using the checksums for the file. Often IT vendors provide drivers or BIOS files for your system along with SHA-1 message digest. Hence, we can check the integrity of the downloaded file using the checksums for the file. Let us see how to check the SHA1 of a file using the checksum file and command-line options on Linux, FreeBSD, and Unix-like systems.
JetBrains GoLand is a rich Go programming language editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It supports dozens of plugins that can be used to make it feel more at home for a wide variety of developers. Here’s how to get it working on Linux.
Prusa Slicer is the in-house developed slicer tool built by Prusa for their 3D printers. If you’ve got a Prusa rig and need to slice some 3D files on Linux, you’ll want to install the Prusa Slicer app. Here’s how to do it.
Note: To use the Prusa Slicer application on Linux, you will need 3D print files. To get access to 3D print files, check out Thingiverse.
Trine Enchanted Edition is the updated release for “Trine,” a 2009 side-scrolling platforming video game. Trine takes place in a medieval fantasy setting and was released on Microsoft Windows, PS3, PS4, MacOS, and Linux. Here’s how to play Trine Enchanted Edition on your Linux PC.
Ampere Computing chips run the ARM64 instruction set. My laptop is a Dell running x86_64. In order to edit locally, but build remotely, I make use of servers in our datacenter. These are the steps I am taking.
ssh allows you to run a command on a remote machine. You may want to use a shell variable in a remote command. You have to be aware of when that variable gets evaluated.
This session started with me interactively logged in on a remote system called f34-kernel-test. We’ll call this the server, and the system from which I logged in we’ll call the client. My goal is to type the command on the client, hit enter, and see the hostname of the remote system.
Recently, I was reading Alex Callejas’ excellent article “Build a lab in five minutes with three simple commands,” and it inspired me to document how to automate the process using Ansible.
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I use Ansible to automate this process, making it even more flexible and repeatable. My technique relies on variables to reuse the same automation, allowing me to create different types of VMs with a single command.
Cal is a terminal command used in Linux to print a calendar. Simply type cal to display the current month calendar.
In this tutorial, we learn about cal command in Linux and its options.
A lot of people in the Linux community love Pop!_OS mainly because of its altered GNOME (now COSMIC) desktop environment. One of the best features is Auto-tiling, which makes you focus less on moving your mouse and more on getting work done using keyboard shortcuts.
But there are people who like COSMIC but not Ubuntu (Since Pop!_OS is Ubuntu-based), or some tend to like Arch more because of the package management. One of the beauties of GNU/Linux and open source is the teams of different OSes working together to bring stuff that people like in one or the other distribution. Thanks to the integration of COSMIC with GNOME 40 in Pop!_OS 21.10, COSMIC has also been ported to Manjaro.
Sometimes, due to the high utilization of resources, system applications get slow or unresponsive. All the programs must share the finite resources of the CPU, and some processes use more of it than others.
In this case, the rest of the pending requests must wait until the CPU is free or available for processing.
As a Linux system administrator, you can find out how much CPU is consumed by each process.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Django on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Django is a free and open-source full-featured Python web framework used to develop dynamic frameworks and applications. Django’s primary goals are simplicity, re-usability, rapid development, and scalability.
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 installation of the Django web framework on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
Whether you’re coding in C or building a Linux program from the source, you’ll have to install a C compiler. The two major ones on Linux are the venerable GCC and the newer Clang.
lighttpd (lighty) is a web server that requires far fewer resources than Apache, for example, and is therefore particularly suitable for very large loads or very weak systems. It was developed by Jan Kneschke and can be expanded with modules. FastCGI, for example, enables PHP code to be executed. SCGI supplements lighty with Ruby or Python.
lighttpd (lighty) is a web server that requires far fewer resources than Apache, for example, and is therefore particularly suitable for very large loads or very weak systems. It was developed by Jan Kneschke and can be expanded with modules. FastCGI, for example, enables PHP code to be executed. SCGI supplements lighty with Ruby or Python.
Vim is one of the most powerful command-line text editors for Linux and other Unix-based operating systems. It has grown largely in terms of popularity, to an extent that a lot of Linux distributions ship it as the default terminal-based text editor.
As powerful as it may be, Vim is also infamous for not being the easiest or the most intuitive text editor for a beginner to come across. Vimtutor is a command-line application that will help you master the ins and outs of this editor in an interactive fashion.
The computer games industry grosses more than the film, music and sports industries, often in combination. It’s the premier sector for innovation in computing, with dedicated teams squeezing out the best performance from today’s and tomorrow’s hardware and software. Put simply, there’s so much money at stake, games developers have to innovate and create literally awesome products to create a return on the substantial investments required to produce an AAA game.
The announcement a few months ago that Valve, the company behind Steam, was producing a next-generation handheld gaming platform has started a series of events that will irrevocably change the choice of the operating system for the future’s daily driver desktop. Since time immemorial, Microsoft’s Windows has been the prevailing choice not just for gaming, but for any number of industry given the OS’ pervasive penetration.
Ready for more games to keep you warm this coming Winter? Check out the Paradox StrataGems Bundle and there’s also a nice Humble Store Halloween sale now live.
For the bundle it’s a mixture of native Linux games and a few that work well with Steam Play Proton too.
Daniel Wheels ( by Daniel Kolesa ) from the company Igalia , participated in the development of projects Void Linux, WebKit and Enlightenment, developing new distribution Chimera the Linux . The project uses the Linux kernel, but instead of the GNU toolkit, it forms the user environment based on the core FreeBSD system, and uses LLVM for building. The distribution kit is initially developed as a cross-platform and supports x86_64, ppc64le, aarch64, riscv64 and ppc64 architectures.
The goal of the project is the desire to provide a Linux distribution with alternative tools and take into account the experience of Void Linux development when creating a new distribution. In the opinion of the author of the project, the custom components of FreeBSD are less complex and more suitable for lightweight and compact systems. Delivery under the BSD Permit License also had an impact. Chimera Linux’s own work is also distributed under the BSD license.
In addition to the FreeBSD user environment, the distribution also includes the GNU Make, util-linux, udev, and pam packages. The init system is built on top of the portable dinit system manager available for Linux and BSD systems. Instead of glibc, the standard C library musl is used .
With OpenBSD 7.0, the developers around Theo de Raadt have released the 51st version of their open source operating system, which is concerned with security and correct code. As always, more than half of the new features and improvements concern the area of network and routing as well as the OpenBSD projects OpenSMTPD (now 7.0.0), OpenSSH (8.8) and LibreSSL (3.4.1).
OpenBSD’s own security functions have also been improved, such as KARL (Kernel Address Randomized Link), in which the kernel is relinked with every restart, and unveil (2), with the help of which applications receive a view of the file system that is limited to the absolute minimum . In many places, an old OpenBSD vulnerability, SMP operation, has been further optimized.
OpenSUSE has received the latest set of updates and fixes. Douglas DeMaio from OpenSUSE project has announced the new Tumbleweed snapshots.
Two snapshots were released this week for OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. As you know, the Tumbleweed distro is a pure rolling release version of openSUSE containing the latest stable versions of all software instead of relying on rigid periodic release cycles.
For those that may enjoy the rolling-release nature of openSUSE Tumbleweed but want to be a bit more conservative with the updates, Tumbleweed supports the concept of snapshots.
In the era of cloud-based applications that divide tasks among multiple dedicated microservices, it is crucial to be able to dispatch events and messaging to multiple clients. This article presents an efficient architecture for broadcasting from a service using a Kubernetes headless service.
Davie Street Enterprises, our fictional Red Hat customer that is working its way through real-world digital transformation problems, is automating DevSecOps tooling across their hybrid cloud infrastructure using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.
Ok, let’s see it for real.
Last we saw Zachary L. Tureaud, he was in the early days of his promotion by Monique Wallace to lead Davie Street Enterprises’ (DSE’s) shift towards DevSecOps. Tureaud laid out a comprehensive DevSecOps solution that includes Red Hat and its security partner ecosystem and is designed to shift security left in the DevOps life cycle. His goal is to not let security slow DSE’s application delivery down.
Wallace was impressed with Tureaud’s solution, but was concerned about the complexities of deployment. She asked Tureaud to test his vision on a new development project, code name “J.A.R.V.I.S”, for the DSE Smart Widget. The project allows the DSE Smart Widget’s speech capabilities to be customized to sound like the voices of superheroes. Wallace knew this project’s characteristics presented low security risk to the company, so it was a great opportunity for Tureaud to test these new security controls.
A radio access network (RAN) is responsible for enabling and connecting devices such as smartphones or internet of things (IoT) devices to a mobile network. For communications service providers (CSPs), RAN is a significant network technology and monetary investment, needing to perform intensive and complex processing, and facing rapidly increasing demand from emerging edge and 5G use cases.
CSPs are modernizing their mobile network with container-based and cloud-native implementations of RAN. One study indicates deployment of virtual RAN (vRAN)/Open RAN (oRAN) solutions realize network TCO savings of up to 44% compared to traditional distributed/centralized RAN configurations. In this post, we describe the application of cloud-native technologies in architecting a blueprint for an open source RAN solution.
These release notes relate to Dynatrace Managed specific changes. To learn about general Dynatrace changes included in this Dynatrace Managed release, see…
OneAgent core dump capture logic has been adjusted for compatibility with Red Hat Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT).
According to Weil and Red Hat, Ceph users don’t have to worry – and for several reasons. On the one hand, Red Hat has meanwhile transferred a large part of the responsibility of Ceph to the associated Foundation, which is a bulge of the Linux Foundation. On the other hand, the technical supervision of the storage solution was previously with Sage Weil, but according to his own statement, Sage Weil has it long before his official announcement the handover of all relevant responsibilities has already been initiated. The innermost Ceph circle around him should have known about the change much earlier than the public now, the handover is already underway.
With “Chimaera” the developers, who call themselves Veteran Unix Administrators (VUA), have completed the fourth version of the Debian GNU / Linux-based Devuan distribution. As an init system, Devuan does not use the extensive systemd framework from Lennart Poettering, but offers the user the free choice between the classic and minimal SysVinit, the init and supervisor system OpenRC based on it, or the runit, which is optimized for compact code and speed. During the installation the user can choose between these three init systems.
This release is Based on Debian Bullseye (11.1) with Linux kernel 5.10, according to the announcement, and lets you choose your init system : sysvinit, runit, and OpenRC.
Another feature it’s touting: Improved desktop support. “Virtually all desktop environments available in Debian are now part of Devuan, systemd-free.”
Ubuntu developer Steve Langasek was the one to announce earlier this week that the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system is officially open for development, with Python 3.10 supported by default.
And now, early adopters and application developers interested in test driving the upcoming release can now download the daily builds for Jammy Jellyfish, which you can grab from Ubuntu’s main download servers.
Khadas is prepping a “Khadas Vim4” SBC that runs Linux on a new, octa-core -A73 and -A53 Amlogic A311D2 SoC with support for 16GB RAM. The Vim4 offers 8GB RAM, 802.11ax, dual CSI links, and a micro-HDMI 2.1 input.
Shenzhen Wesion’s Khadas project has announced an upgrade of its open-spec Khadas Vim3 SBC with Amlogic’s new octa-core A311D2 in place of the Vim3’s hexa-core A311D. The Khadas Vim4 has the same footprint and much the same layout and feature set, but it boosts the RAM support to 8GB and adds Wi-Fi 6 and several new media interfaces.
We’ve just written about the Amlogic A311D2 processor with some pretty interesting features, and Khadas VIM4 will be one of the first single board computers equipped with the latest octa-core processor, succeeding the company’s earlier Khadas VIM3 board powered by an Amlogic A311D hexa-core processor.
Khadas VIM4 makes good use of the extra memory allowance with faster 8GB LPDDR4 RAM, and also offers 32GB eMMC flash, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6, 4Kp60 HDMI input and output, independent USB 3.0, and PCIe (via M.2 socket) interfaces, and more.
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That means Ubuntu 20.04 server and desktop with Linux 4.9 is officially supported, and third-party images include LibreELEC, CoreELEC, Armbian, and Manjaro ARM. For some reason, Android is not listed in the Wiki, but images are still released in the forums.
Using a Pi to process sensor readings and manage motors has been a thing since the inception of the computer, and users (including ourselves) have long made use of the General Purpose Input / Output (GPIO) pins that have been a feature of the hardware for all manner of projects.
However, not all users are entirely happy with breadboards and jumpers. Lego, familiar to many a builder thanks to lines such as its Mindstorms range, recently introduced the Education SPIKE Prime set, aimed at the classroom.
The set contains a wide variety of components, including motors and sensors, controllable via a rechargeable hub and tablet application. It is the latter elements that a Build HAT-equipped Pi can replace: simply plug those motor and sensor components into the Pi hardware instead.
Halloween is right around the corner and just about every Halloween project needs some kind of motion sensor. Historically, we’ve used IR and ultrasonic sensors but [Makers Mashup] decided to use an ESP32-Cam as a motion sensor in his latest animatronic creation. You can see a video of the device and how it works below.
The project is a skull that follows you around with a few degrees of motion on a stepper motor. There’s a 3D-printed enclosure to make the hardware assembly easy. The base software was borrowed from [Eloquent Arduino].
PipeWire 0.3.39 continues improving compatibility with JACK applications, offers better Bluetooth device compatibility with more devices now working, its libcamera plug-in has been improved upon, an LD_PRELOAD V4L2 emulation library for running some existing V4L2 targeted applications on top of PipeWire, and the media-session has been moved into a separate module to further its deprecation in favoring it be replaced by WirePlumber.
This is the 95th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.
InfoWorld’s 2021 Bossie Awards recognize the year’s best open source software for software development, devops, data analytics, and machine learning.
It doesn’t seem like it’s giving much to talk about the promising Brave seeker, and yet it is one of the most interesting initiatives that are being taken in favor of an open Internet apart from large corporations, in particular Google, but also others. Are you a Brave user? Get ready then, because Brave search begins to occupy its position in the browser as the default search engine.
As we told you at the time, at the beginning of summer it was announced the new Brave seeker, a “feature” not intended for the browser of the co-founder and former CEO of Mozilla that, fortunately, is not only available to Brave users, but to anyone who wants to use an alternative search engine, but powerful and very well designed. All in all, the Brave search engine began its journey – and continues to do so – in beta.
Brave announced today that it is switching the default search of the company’s Brave Browser from Google Search to Brave Search in five regions for new users. The company launched a public version of Brave Search in June 2021. Brave Search is an independent search engine that does not rely on the indexes of large companies such as Google or Microsoft.
That time of the month has come when the children of Chromium begin to release their monthly updates to the world, and if we speak of children of Chromium, Chrome is number one and Chrome 95 its new version. And since you most likely use Chrome, surely you are interested in what it brings.
That said, Chrome 95 is a concise version in terms of news, but nothing to do with what happened a year ago, and that is that the competition is more alive than ever in the field of web browsers, badly than everything relevant comes from Chromium … with the notable, but small exception that represents Firefox, needless to add.
The Chromium team has finally done it – File Transfer Protocol (FTP) support is not just deprecated, but stripped from the codebase in the latest stable build of the Chrome browser, version 95.
It has been a while coming. A lack of support for encrypted connections in Chrome’s FTP implementation, coupled with a general disinterest from the majority of the browser’s users, and more capable third-party alternatives being available has meant that the code has moved from deprecated to gone entirely.
[...]
As for why FTP has attracted such ire – well, the protocol is over 50 years old and comes from more innocent times, when authentication was not what it is today. More secure options now exist (such as FTPS and SFTP) and, frankly, Google and pals would rather users opted for a dedicated transfer app than bother maintaining the code in the browser.
There remain a good few FTP sites out there (such as the US Census Bureau), although many now have alternatives for file transfer. The final ejection of the code from Chrome, which lays claim to a huge userbase, means it really is time to move on. ®
Richard Stallman tells us to “think of ‘free speech,’ not ‘free beer’” when discussing the free software movement. The marriage of legacy social media platforms to government censorship reverses that proposition. Use of the services is “free” (actually, you pay with your data and attention), but you only get to say what the politicians tell those platforms to allow you to say.
A Florida man has been accused of breaking the copyleft license of Mastodon by running an online instance of the software without providing its source code as required.
And not only that, the real-estate baron and wannabe tech tycoon has been told he has a month to fall in line with the fine print or put himself potentially at risk further action.
Mastodon is a Twitter-like microblogging service that you host yourself. Servers running this software can form a larger, decentralized social network.
The code is made available under version three of the Affero GPL. That means if someone modifies the software and runs it as a network-accessible service, such as a website, their users need to be offered a way to get hold of that customized source.
Vizio Inc. should be required to share source code underlying its televisions so consumers can adjust, improve, share and reinstall modified versions of the software, a nonprofit says, accusing the company of “repeated failures to fulfill even the basic requirements of the general public license.”
Software Freedom Conservancy hit the California-based manufacturer with a “right-to-repair” suit in Orange County Superior Court, claiming Vizio’s products contain software that it appropriated from developers who intended for consumers to have the right to modify, improve, share and reinstall modified versions of the software. The general public license ensures end users have those rights, according to…
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit which supports and defends free software, has taken legal action against Californian TV manufacturer Vizio Inc, claiming “repeated failures to fulfill even the basic requirements of the General Public License (GPL).”
Member projects of the SFC include the Debian Copyright Aggregation Project, BusyBox, Git, GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers, Homebrew, Mercurial, OpenWrt, phpMyAdmin, QEMU, Samba, Selenium, Wine, and many more.
The GPL Compliance Project is described as “comprised of copyright holders in the kernel, Linux, who have contributed to Linux under its license, the GPLv2. These copyright holders have formally asked Conservancy to engage in compliance efforts for their copyrights in the Linux kernel.”
When the free software movement started to make headway, proprietary software companies like Microsoft went to war against it, describing the licenses at its core (like the GPL) as “viral licenses” to…
Are you writing your code for humans or computers? I wasn’t there, but my guess is that at the dawn of computing, people thought that they were writing for the machines. After all, they were writing in machine language, and whatever bits they flipped into the electronic brain stayed in the electronic brain, unless punched out on paper tape. And the commands made the machine do things, not other people. Code was written strictly for computers.
Modern programming practice, on the other hand, is aimed firmly at people. Variable and function names are chosen to be long and to describe what they contain or do. “Readability” of code is a prized attribute. Indeed, sometimes the fact that it does the right thing at all almost seems to be an afterthought. (I kid!)
Somewhere along this path, there was an important evolutionary step, like the first fish using its flippers to walk on land. Comments were integrated into programming languages, formalizing the notes that coders of old surely wrote by hand in the margins of the paper first-drafts before keying it in. So I went looking for the missing link: the first computer language, and ideally the first program, with comments. I came up empty handed.
The Eclipse Foundation has announced that its development and licensing processes for open source software comply with the international OpenChain ISO 5230 standard. This has existed for almost a year and comes from the OpenChain project.
The project is part of the Linux Foundation and has been defining a standard for an open source compliance program in the form of an OpenChain specification for a long time in order to use open source software in companies in accordance with the license. The specification should be used according to the FAQsTo create trust between companies and to make open source predictable, understandable and usable in internal and external supply chains.
Theranos blood-testing machines, which US prosecutors claim failed over 51 per cent of the time, provided no indication if things went awry during demonstrations for visitors, a court has heard.
Seven weeks into the criminal fraud trial of Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, the feds are trying to show that Holmes, along with her former partner and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani (to be tried next year after denying any wrongdoing), raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors based on misrepresentations about technology that didn’t work.
In court on Tuesday, Daniel Edlin, a former Theranos project manager who used to operate Theranos’ Edison blood-testing machines, testified that device demonstrations, given mainly to VIP visitors, ran a demo app that hid failure messages.
Space-flight researchers are ready to test a prototype drag sail that could one day be used to prevent spacecraft turning into hazardous junk stuck for years in Earth’s orbit.
Here’s the gist: academics at Purdue University in the US have built a device they called Spinnaker3 that will be attached to a rocket developed by startup Firefly Aerospace and launched into space this week. When the upper stage of the rocket is spent, Spinnaker3 will unfurl its 18-square-metre drag sail, which is made out of fluorinated polyimide.
[Noel’s Retro Lab] has looked at retro chip testers before, but in a recent video you can see below he’s looking at the Chip Tester Pro, a preassembled chip tester for vintage chips, especially those used in Commodore computers. The device looks good on the surface with a form factor like a calculator or cell phone, an LCD display, and a 48 pin ZIF socket.
The user interface is pretty simple. A rotary encoder and a big red button are about it. However, there are also some headers where you have to use jumpers to wire signals to the chip. The firmware gives you specific directions, but it is reminiscent of programming old punchcard machines with jumper wires. Luckily, it looks like you only route the power to the device so you don’t have many wires to connect (usually two or three).
The tester is shown detecting a bad DRAM chip. The device can test logic gates, although it failed on some 7438s. We wondered it is because it would not handle open collector outputs, but we don’t know that. A firmware fix, however, allowed the parts to pass. It can test things like 555s and some non-Commodore chips like custom chips for the ZX-81. Test parts that require a non-5V supply won’t work since the tester has only a 5V supply. However, there are some common chips that have other supply voltages that you can test. But those are special cases because they function well enough to test without the additional voltages.
The MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar was a technological marvel in its day. It brought the magic of multi-touch to macOS and, with its stand-alone T1 chipset, it put ARM-based Apple Silicon inside the MacBook when the M1 chip was still just a twinkle in Cupertino’s eye.
There’s no doubt it was a clever piece of engineering, but it proved unpopular with pro users. Many missed the tactile feedback of the traditional Escape key and function keys.
Attachments in the phishing emails include Excel spreadsheets and HTML files linking to malware-laden Excel files.
…BlackMatter uses the Windows LDAP networking protocol as well as SMB for gaining access to Windows networks’ Active Directory (AD), enumerating all hosts on the network from there.
Little was joining the UK and the US in that attribution, which included the infamous Hafnium Microsoft Exchange Server vuln exploitation campaign – and also named industrial espionage operation APT31 as a Chinese state theft campaign.
One of the great virtues of open-source software – which is that anyone can contribute – is also one of its greatest weaknesses.
The issue is that supply-chainlike process by which projects involving multiple contributors come together is based to a large degree on faith that no one will introduce malicious code or backdoors that sabotage a project.
As open source has increasingly worked its way into commercial and enterprise applications, however, some people see the reliance on trust as a vulnerability. Kim Lewandowski and Dan Lorenc of Google LLC’s open-source security team recently noted that the process of installing most open-source software today “is equivalent to picking up a random thumb-drive off the sidewalk and plugging it into your machine.”
Samsung customers have likely been prompted by their devices to opt into the Samsung Customization Service (SCS). The prompt doesn’t explain what SCS does beyond linking you to its longwinded privacy policy. I was uncomfortable turning it on without knowing more about it, so I read the privacy policy. Yikes. Samsung collects everything it can gets its corporate paws on.
Bitcoin was created with a very different purpose in mind from Ethereum. Bitcoin represents an international digital financial token. On the other hand, Ethereum was created to operate as a decentralized network to facilitate the building of blockchain-based applications.
Thus, users can use Ethereum to alter how securities trading and mortgage transfers work.
Instead of simply being a digital currency, Ethereum goes one further to enable the deployment of decentralized applications and smart contracts. On the network, all of these can be built without any third-party interference.
Just as well, Ethereum has its own programming language on which its distributed apps are built and run.
Another person who thinks about this a lot is Safiya Noble. She’s an associate professor of gender studies and African American studies at UCLA. She’s also the author of the book “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism” and a 2021 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellow. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Safiya Noble: Well, I started my work really looking closely at very banal, everyday kinds of technologies like search engines, because I noticed that everyone was starting to use search engines as a replacement for other kinds of information resources like libraries, or teachers, or professors, or parents. And so I thought, well, let me look closely and see what is Google doing when it comes to how it represents ideas about vulnerable people. And that’s where I found that for many years when you did Google searches on Black girls, Latina girls, Asian girls, you found pornography, hypersexualized content, really misrepresentative ideas about who girls of color were. And of course, over the years, that’s really become a place where disinformation about everything from political candidates to anti-vax, anti-science, propaganda circulates.
The recent introduction of the Restoring the America Invents Act by Senate IP Subcommittee Chair Senator Patrick Leahy and Senator John Cornyn aims, in part, to remove the uncertainty that the precedential Fintiv orders have caused. Looking at the actual number of denials and frequency of the Board’s use of their discretionary line of cases, though, the consistent takeaway is that Fintiv continues to be used in unpredictable, ever-changing ways to deny otherwise-meritorious, timely challenges.
Despite the slight dip in overall filings (and decisions from last year’s also-down filings) so far in 2021, procedural denials are now used nearly 16% of the time, as compared to just 5% in 2016, before Fintiv and related cases were designated precedential. That is a 220% increase. Even with the uncertainty of Arthex over the first half of the year and the overall dip in filing decisions, the USPTO was still not shy about using procedural denials.
Germany offers an outstanding system for IP protection – its patent and trade mark office (the DPMA) is the largest national IP office in Europe and the fifth largest national patent office in the world. It is however over ten years since the last major reform of industrial property protection through the Act on the Simplification and Modernization of Patent Act of 31th July 2009. The Second Act on the Simplification and Modernization of Patent Act of 10 August 2021 has further simplified and modernised the Patent Act and other laws in the field of industrial property protection.
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