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Posted in News Roundup at 1:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
As you probably know already, System76 decided a few months ago that it’s time to create its own Linux desktop environment that’s not based on an existing desktop environment. System76’s in-house distribution Pop!_OS Linux currently features a graphical desktop environment derived from GNOME, called COSMIC.
Future versions of the COSMIC desktop won’t be based on GNOME, but written from scratch in Rust. It will have its own Wayland compositor, called Victoria, which is being developed as we speak with better support for features like HiDPI, HDR, and fractional scaling, as well as tiling and a smooth experience for NVIDIA GPU users.
Research Unix Version 6 in the Open SIMH PDP-11 Emulator, The Hot Tub Time Machine is Your ZFS Turn-Back-Time Method, NFS on NetBSD: server and client side, HardenedBSD October 2022 Status Report, Nushell : Introduction, and more
Bitcoin Core is open-source software that connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully validate blocks and transactions. It also includes a wallet and graphical user interface. It ensures every block and transaction it accepts is valid. This wallet is a full node that validates and relays transactions on the Bitcoin network. This means no trust in a third party is required when verifying payments. Here we learn how to install BitCoin core on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish.
The bash shell provides a superb functionality when it comes to writing scripts. This includes many ways to loop through a pile of data so that you can get a lot done with one running of a script. Whether you’re looping through a large group of numeric values, days of the week, usernames, words, files, or something else entirely, bash has an option that can make it easy for you.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Akaunting on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Akaunting is a free, open-source, and online accounting software for small businesses and freelancers. It is used for creating and managing invoices, quotes, and finances. Any user who wants to use the Akaunting for small and medium business or personal usage can access it locally or remotely with the help of the internet and browser, once installed.
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 Akaunting 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.
Flatpak is the new way of distributing apps across the Linux universe, irrespective of the distribution. This cross-distro application distribution and deployment framework enable developers to Flatpak setup for apps for all major distributions.
The major hurdles in any Linux app distribution are dependencies, and Flatpak covers that. Flatpak builds bundles the dependencies for the respective apps, and end-users need not worry about it.
This quick beginner’s guide will help you to install Notepad++ in Ubuntu and Fedora.
Notepad++ is a very popular free developer-friendly text editor and is primarily popular in Windows systems. However, you can easily install this in Linux systems thanks to snap.
Flask is a microframework written in Python for developing modern web applications and API (Application Programming Interface).
Nessus is an open-source network vulnerability scanner for vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and ethical hacking.
React.js is a free and open-source JavaScript framework developed by Facebook in 2011.
OpenLiteSpeed is an open-source HTTP server with a similar feature set to Apache but builds on more recent technologies.
OpenLiteSpeed is powered by the extremely fast LiteSpeed Web Server, which excels in both performance and stability – it’s up to 20 times faster than Apache when serving static files.
It also has built-in caching for dynamic content, load balancing, compression, and security features not found in most other web servers.
The LiteMage Cache & Accelerator Module supports cache digests (HTTP conditional GET/POST requests), bytecode caching, PHP accelerators, and SCGI cache support to further improve responsiveness for end-users.
Java is one of the most popular programming languages. Java is portable, which means you can make your code run on different types of computers without having to rewrite it. It’s also object-oriented, which means that it enables programmers to write reusable software components.
When it comes to graphics drivers for NVIDIA video cards, there are two main options: the proprietary/open-source NVIDIA drivers or the open-source Nouveau drivers. Most importantly, the Nouveau drivers are perfectly acceptable; however, if you use your Linux system for activities requiring high-performance graphics, you may want to consider using the official NVIDIA drivers. The Nouveau drivers are community-created and -supported drivers that are available free of charge; however, they may not offer the same level of performance as the NVIDIA drivers. Ultimately, deciding which driver to use depends on your needs and preferences.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install the NVIDIA drivers on CentOS 9 or 8 Stream using the command line terminal using the Nvidia CUDA repository so you have the latest version of Nvidia Drivers installed on your system.
Check connectivity to hosts you’re managing with your AAP controller and get a spreadsheet-based summary of any exceptions.
If you click on the boot-partition of the usb-stick, it will mount and will show in the file manager, as expected; however, it has mounted as the title says, as an msdos filesystem instead of vfat.
Way back in the early days of the FAT filesystem, all files were “8.3″, that is, maximum eight-character name and maximum three-character extension. Microsoft introduced an extension to allow longer filenames, and also to store upper-case and lower-case characters — though FAT remained case-insensitive.
The old 8.3 is what we call the “msdos” filesystem, and the extension is “vfat”. The problem that has mysteriously appeared is that when click on the boot-partition, it mounts as msdos.
It’s official, after the announcement on twitter yesterday, it seems like Valve and Komodo have finally got their act together to ship some units to Japan, planning to meet their plans of “delivering all units by the end of the year” at the last minute of the last hour. Now the question is whether Santa or Komodo will be first to deliver presents.
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The email basically invites you to go and pay within 3 days to validate your order, just like in other geographies. Note that the shipment will happen actually later, on the 17th of December and not before. As the Japan delivery services tend to be super quick, I would not be surprised if the first people get it on the 17th or on the 18th at the earliest.
In the past, Linux was not a viable option for gamers seeking stability and performance. However, now there are hundreds of different Linux distributions that can be used for various purposes–including gaming! Although it is not as popularized, there are some great Linux gaming distributions that provide excellent performance, stability, and flexibility. These best Linux gaming distros come equipped with features such as innovative drivers, software, emulators, and much more to ensure a smooth gaming experience. The following gaming Linux distributions have been designed to enable a user to install and play games easily.
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We have compiled a list of the best Linux gaming distros that come pre-optimized for gaming. These distros have all been handpicked and tested by our team to ensure the highest quality possible. So without further ado, here is the list of the Best Linux Gaming Distros.
Computers are basically fancy file cabinets, full of folders and files waiting to be referenced, cross-referenced, edited, updated, saved, copied, moved, renamed, and organized. Of course, the files and folders are only virtual, and so software developers came up with the modern “desktop” user interface. Your screen is the top of your “desk,” which you can use as a surface for taking out files from their folders so you can review and work on them. The analogy seems almost quaint these days because computers are so much more than just a filing cabinet. And yet the model remains, for many of us, as the primary way we interact with data on our personal computers, which makes humble file manager software some of the most important applications you use.
The KDE Plasma Desktop provides Dolphin as its file manager. At first glance, it’s a simple and almost minimal application. Don’t let that fool you, though. There’s a lot of potential in how you interact with the files on your computer, and Dolphin recognizes that. Here are five of my favorite Dolphin features.
Metagedit is a powerful Python-based plugin for the Gedit text editor that adds a flurry of additional features to the famed FOSS tool.
Although Gedit was replaced by the (GNOME) Text Editor app in Ubuntu 22.10 it remains available to install from the Ubuntu repos, and is still the default text editor in earlier versions, including Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
And while Gedit is not everyone’s text editor of choice it has a solid feature set, is a native Linux app, and integrates perfectly with the GNOME desktop. For basic to intermediate needs like mine (I mainly edit .css, .js, and .php files) Gedit is everything I need.
Zorin OS is an excellent Linux distro aimed at new users, although it offers a little something for everyone.
Although I briefly played with Linux Mandrake and Caldera Linux a couple of decades ago, Zorin OS was my first introduction to Linux when I decided to switch from the Mac in early 2022. Since I am a former Mac user, where UI design plays a major part in the Apple experience, I was attracted to the professional design of Zorin OS and its desktop-centric focus.
Coming six months after NixOS 22.05 “Quokka”, NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon” is here with new and updated packages, as well as new features like support for more secure algorithms for software and system login passwords through the implementation of the libxcrypt library, nsncd as a replacement of nscd for resolving hostnames, users, etc., as well as support for enabling the use of NVIDIA’s open-source kernel driver.
The NixOS 22.11 release also comes with OpenSSL 3, OpenSSH 9.1, PHP 8.1, Perl 5.36, and Python 3.10 by default, support for Linode cloud images, native compilation support for the emacs package, markdown generated NixOS documentation, Nix 2.11.0 package management system, and support for the latest GNOME 43 and KDE Plasma 5.26 desktop environment series.
The NixOS release team is happy to announce a new version of NixOS 22.11. NixOS is both a Linux distribution, and a set of packages usable on other Linux systems and macOS.
This release is supported until the end of June 2023, handing over to NixOS 23.05.
Hey everyone, we are Martin Weinelt and Janne Heß, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”.
This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2023-06-30).
MANY NEW DESKTOPS HAVE ARRIVED
New desktop CHADWM – TWM
We have also added the desktop Chadwm to the list in the ArcoLinux Tweak Tool.
With version 22.11, we pursued two new exploratory topics as we envisioned on the project’s road map for this year, namely the use of the framework for hardware-software co-design work, and principally enabling suspend/resume functionality on PCs.
A decade ago, we explored the combination of Genode with FPGA technology for the first time. Our interest in this direction got reignited two years ago when we started enabling Genode on a board based on the Xilinx Zynq, which combines an ARMv7 SoC with FPGA fabric. This line of work eventually culminated in new development work flows for creating hardware IP cores and Genode components in tandem. Section Hardware-software co-design with Genode on Xilinx Zynq covers the results of this line of work.
The second largely exploratory topic is the practical use of sleep states on PC hardware, which – until this point – remained rather mysterious to us. Section Low-level mechanism for suspend/resume on PC platforms reports on our findings and the forthcoming integration of this feature into Genode.
Besides the exploration work, the profound enhancement of our Intel GPU multiplexer stands out. As detailed in Section Hardware-accelerated graphics with Intel GEN12+ GPUs, the new version supports up-to-date GEN12+ GPUs, comes with numerous robustness and performance improvements, and got adapted to Genode’s new uniform driver infrastructure.
The latter point brings us to the most elaborate development under the hood of the framework, which is the great unification of the device-driver interfaces across all supported architectures. Section Uniform use of new platform-driver interface wraps up this intensive line of work, which left no PC-related driver unturned.
A recurring theme throughout this year is the use of Genode on the PinePhone. The current release is no exception. Sections Emerging Sculpt OS variant for the PinePhone and PinePhone drivers for audio, camera, and power control report on the progress at the user-facing side as well as the driver-related achievements digging deep into the realms of power management, audio, and the camera.
Among the many further topics of the current release are virtualization on PC and ARM (Sections ARM virtual machine monitor and Seoul VMM), plenty of device-driver improvements, and enhanced tooling that makes the framework ever more enjoyable to use (Section Build system and tools).
A steady pace of openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots arrived to users this week and there were tons of conversation on the openSUSE Factory mailing list regarding plans to advance the rolling release’s microarchitecture and discussions about the mitigation plan/call for help.
The changes to x86-64-v2 are expected to take place in the first quarter of the 2023 new year and forthcoming changes will be communicated on both the mailing list and blog.
A single package arrived in snapshot 20221128. The Skype plugin for chat client Pidgin, skype4pidgin, updated to version 1.7. The plugin fixed the loss of admin rights when joining a room, problems with file transfers through the client and issues where people were not appearing as being online.
An update of gawk 5.2.1 arrived in snapshot 20221127. The utility fixed issues with the debugger, dropped a few patches and addressed some subtle issues with untyped array elements being passed to functions. The general purpose cryptographic library package libgcrypt, which is based on code from GnuPG, updated to version 1.10.1 and fixed minor memory leaks. The package was updated to improve support for PowerPC architectures and it added the hardware optimizations configuration file hwf.deny to the /etc/gcrypt/ directory. There was also a git+ update of kdump, an update of heaptrack 1.4.0, iputils 20221126 and libeconf 0.4.9, which added new Application Programming Interface calls and fixed some compiling issues.
One of the biggest misconceptions about tech executives is that we are born self-assured and confident, have all the credentials, and are motivated to climb the ranks. But early on, I walked a winding path through many disciplines, including account management, business management, photography, and design. Because I don’t have a college degree, I felt I had to prove myself – even as my work responsibilities grew.
It took me years to realize the truth: I struggled with imposter syndrome for most of my professional life – that nagging voice that tells you you’re not going to make it past a certain level in the industry. In many ways, I held myself back more than anyone else did.
As we approach the last month of Q4, all eyes are set on planning for 2023.
From budget to headcount to the product roadmap, there are a variety of subjects on every organization’s agenda. For IT teams, these agendas get more specified and granular, as they are responsible for the tools and investments that will keep the infrastructure running and secure for the next year.
With that in mind, what should be on your IT department’s agenda between now and the end of the year? What is important and time-sensitive enough to ideate on in the next month?
In short, the answer is security. There are various reasons that security should be on every IT department’s end-of-year IT agenda. Read on for the top three.
As we head towards the end of 2022, Red Hat Developer is taking a look back at the most intriguing and popular content for the technologies that matter most to our readers. We’ll start off with a roundup of the best Red Hat Enterprise Linux content of 2022, highlighting some of the most popular stories about Red Hat’s flagship Linux distribution.
The second Open Source MANO (OSM) release with Long Term Support (LTS) has landed. Open Source MANO Release TWELVE offers two years of support with security patches. The release has outstanding features to offer to both VNF vendors and system integrators residing in the MANO (Management and Network Orchestration) ecosystem. ETSI OSM (Open Source MANO) can be integrated with multiple cloud platforms and virtual infrastructure managers (VIM). Service providers and operators leverage the OSM platform to run services either on virtual machines (VMs) or containerised frameworks, i.e Kubernetes. This release offers the much-awaited features of auto-scaling and auto-healing for telco networks.
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Seamless upgrades to running CNF instances give better flexibility to apply Day-2 primitives without having to stop them first. It enables operators to apply new changes. The release TWELVE webinar demonstrated a similar feature by deploying a CNF on the Kubernetes cluster. Day-2 primitives were performed on a running CNF.
[...]
OSM Release TWELVE brings valuable features to OSM by targeting practical use cases. VNF vendors and service providers can leverage new LTS releases and benefit from multi-cloud platforms and live upgrade compatibility. OSM is at the heart of the NFV domain delivering compelling features for innovators to focus on cost optimisation, network automation and enhancements as technology evolves. Release TWELVE delivers features like auto-scaling and auto-healing to telcos for their mission critical and production grade networks. It enables flexibility and agility for networks so VNF/CNF vendors can focus on delivering quality services.
Electrical engineer Charles Lohr has built a 32-bit RISC-V emulator with a difference: it exists as a single C header file, of around 400 lines of code — yet is capable of running Linux, despite a lack of memory management unit (MMU).
“I’ve been working really hard over the last few weeks on this little tiny RISC-V emulator. The really tiny part about is is that it doesn’t have an MMU which is something that virtually all desktop modern processors have,” Lohr explains. “The reason I wanted to do this was I wanted to see if I could run Linux on it. Something that was close to but not as simple as an ESP32-C3. And well the answer was. Yes. In fact I was able to write a really tiny RISC-V emulator. The actual emulator part all exists in this one function in this header file and it was only around 350, 400 lines of code. And it’s able to run Linux and I’m able to have executables and whatever on it.”
The InkPlate 2 is mostly designed to be programmed in the Arduino IDE using the Inkplate library itself based on the Adafruit GFX library, and with several code samples albeit none of which are specifically designed for the 2.13-inch wireless display at this time. There are two other ways to control the display either with MicroPython or using the board as a peripheral receiving UART commands from a host microcontroller to update the display.
This year, 768 teams made up of 3086 young people from 23 countries sent us their ideas for experiments to run on board the International Space Station (ISS) for Astro Pi Mission Space Lab.
[Giovanni Aggiustatutto] creates a DIY weather station to measure rain fall, wind direction, humidity and temperature. [Giovanni] has been working on various parts of the weather station, including the rain gauge and anemometer, with the weather station build incorporating all these past projects and adding a few extra features for measurement and access.
In terms of intangible gifts you give others, find fun small projects where you’re exploring something that nobody in the world has ever done before. Before the pandemic, I decided to upload an 8K digital storytelling video to YouTube, created using LibreOffice Draw. Of the 8 billion people living on planet Earth, there’s (roughly speaking) one person using LibreOffice Draw to create 8K videos on YouTube. That would be me. And, in the process of doing so, I teach others how they can do so, too.
Let me leave you with one last thought. Open source is not only a software creation method, it is an approach to living one’s life. I find it an enriching way to live one’s life—and this enrichment can be given to others.
Tania is a free and open source farm management software. You can manage your farm areas, farm reservoirs, farm tasks, inventories, and the crop growing progress. It is designed for any type of farms.
Tania is written in the Go programming language, which means it runs directly as a binary software without the need for software like MAMP, XAMPP, or WAMPP. However, you may need MySQL if you decide to use it instead of SQLite.
With doors open again to The Land of the Rising Sun, automotive and open source aficiandos alike are making their way to the Automotive Linux Summit 2022 held in Yokohama and virtually. Taking place from from December 5 to 6, this event is held in conjunction with Open Source Summit Japan.
This conference connects the developer community with automotive vendors and users, thereby aiming to enlighten the application of open source code and embedded device use within this industry. Two talks hosted by Collabora’s Marius Vlad and Daniel Stone will seek to shed light on this in the realms of the AGL compositor and graphics upstream solutions.
Here’s another batch of talks from the recent LibreOffice Conference 2022!
Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Beta 109 (109.0.5414.23) for Android. It’s now available on Google Play.
You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.
I’m proud to announce that we have acquired Pulse, an incredible team that has developed some truly novel machine learning approaches to help streamline the digital workplace. The products that Raj, Jag, Rolf, and team have built are a great demonstration of their creativity and skill, and we’re incredibly excited to bring their expertise into our organization. They will spearhead our efforts in applied ethical machine learning, as we invest to make Mozilla products more personal, starting with Pocket.
Machine learning (ML) has become a powerful driver of product experience. At its best, it helps all of us to have better, richer experiences across the web. Building ML models to drive these experiences requires data on people’s preferences, behaviors, and actions online, and that’s why Mozilla has taken a very cautious approach in applying ML in our own product experiences. It is possible to build machine learning models that act in service of the people on the internet, transparently, respectful of privacy, and built from the start with a focus on equity and inclusion. In short, Mozilla will continue its tradition of DOING: building products that serve as examples of a better way forward for the industry, a way forward that puts people first.
This reference page contains all the links to Firefox browser downloads, including stable, beta, and developer editions.
Firefox is the world’s leading free and open-source web browser available for all platforms. You can download and install it for Linux, Windows, macOS, and mobile phones. Developed by Mozilla Corporation, it is a modern web browser that supports all the modern web tech and formats, powered by the Gecko engine.
Happy to share that I started a new job this week as Head of Community at Percona! I know it’s traditional to talk about how excited you are for a new job, but it’s true, I’m really psyched about the opportunity, the team I’ll be working with and Percona as a company.
Percona’s philosophy and mission align really nicely with my personal values. Percona is committed to open source and helping its customers succeed with open source databases. Not open core, open source.
The commitment to open source is massively important to me. I consider myself to be fairly pragmatic about open source, but I do believe that being genuinely committed to open source is best for the company, its customers and the larger ecosystem. Done right, everybody wins. Finding that balance is hard, no doubt, but the work is worthwhile and I’m here for it.
The LibreOffice Documentation Team announces the immediate availability of the Impress Guide 7.4 and Getting Started Guide 7.4
The Impress Guide 7.4 was coordinated by Peter Schofield and revised by Kees Kriek. The guide is available in PDF as well as in ODF formats. An online version is available in the bookshelf website.
Over the last nine years I have written 300,000 words for this blog on the topics which are important to me. I am not certain that I have much left to say.
I can keep revisiting these topics for years, each time adding a couple more years of wisdom and improvements to my writing skills to present my arguments more effectively. However, I am starting to feel diminishing returns from my writing. It does not seem like my words are connecting with readers anymore. And, though the returns on my work seem to be diminishing, the costs are not. Each new article spurs less discussion than the last, but provides an unwavering supply of spiteful responses.
Agile Toolkit is a Low Code framework written in PHP. Agile UI implement server side rendering engine and over 50 UI generic components for interacting with your Data Model.
With JavaScript’s 27th anniversary approaching in just a few days, we at Opensource.com are reflecting on how it has evolved into one of the most commonly-used programming language in the world. Why is it so popular? JavaScript is a universal language beloved by developers of all levels from beginners to advanced users. It can run anywhere from your phone to your server. And of course, there are the frameworks. From ReactJS to AureliaJS, there’s a framework for nearly every use case. Best of all, JavaScript is supported by a thriving open source community.
To celebrate JavaScript’s milestone, we’ve put together a collection of JavaScript tutorials to help you continue your development journey. Authors Mandy Kendall, Seth Kenlon, Jessica Cherry, Sachin Samal, Ajay Pratap, and Ramakrishna Pattnaik contributed to this downloadable eBook. With it, you’ll have a chance to practice your JavaScript code by writing a guessing game. Then get familiar with React and even build your own app. This JavaScript guide gives you quick access to more than 165 terms you need to know to level up your skills.
A while back. I got a pull request from Gabor Szabo adding a GitHub action to one of my distributions. I have been working with this, but have not (so far) blogged about it because, quite frankly, I am still not sure I know what I am doing.
With billions of computers talking to each other daily, how do they decide anything? Even in a database or server deployment, how do the different computers that make up the database decide what values have been committed? How do they agree on what time it is? How do they come to a consensus?
Like the Commodore 64 and other keyboard computers of yore, the [Elevated Systems]’s CJ64 fits all of its processing and I/O into a single keyboard-shaped package.
The Heartland Institute, a self-described free-market think tank notorious for its climate science denial efforts, is at it again. This time, Heartland is frantically spinning the results of a survey it commissioned in its latest attempt to dispute the robust scientific consensus on climate change.
To be clear, climate experts overwhelmingly agree that climate change is happening and that humans are primarily responsible. And there’s plenty of evidence about that consensus.
When we think about greening up the planet, solar panels and electric cars are often at the forefront of our mind. However, there’s a whole bunch of other things out there that are spewing out carbon dioxide that also need to be cleaned up. That includes leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and yes – big equipment for construction and agricultural work!
In 2021, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, in agreement with Brazil’s neo-fascist President Jair Bolsonaro, signed a law allowing college students to record professors to detect any ideological bias. As long as it wasn’t the true ideology—his.
Despite outcry from parents, teachers, and students, newly elected right-wing school board members in Sarasota County, Florida on Tuesday became the latest allies of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to oust a school superintendent over the district’s adherence to public health guidance during the coronavirus pandemic.
Dozens of community members gathered at a school board meeting in Sarasota County on Tuesday evening to support Brennan Asplen, the superintendent of schools since 2020, whose contract was the subject of the meeting.
They trace the conduct of the student and the educator in theory and practice and conclude that Ubuntu is indispensable in the education process because it gives the same authenticity.
Hawaiian state and U.S. Naval officials confirmed Tuesday that firefighting foam containing “forever chemicals” leaked at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in Honolulu, requiring cleanup efforts and increased monitoring of soil and water.
Commonly called forever chemicals because they persist in the human body and environment for long periods, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been tied to a variety of health problems. They are used in not only some firefighting foams but also cookware, food packaging, and water-resistant clothing and furniture—though there are growing calls to ban them.
Rights groups are sharply condemning New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ Tuesday directive requiring local law enforcement and emergency medical workers to respond to the intertwined mental health and homelessness crises with involuntary hospitalizations.
“This ‘compassionate’ approach neglects the demands of the vulnerable communities he’s claiming to help.”
Twelve Belarusian citizens, who worked at a warehouse in the Moscow region’s Istra district, were hospitalized with suspected meningitis, as reported by the Belarusian embassy in Moscow. The diagnosis was confirmed in 10 of those cases. One of them is in critical condition. Another person from that group may have died at the hospital, but this information has not yet been officially confirmed.
On Tuesday, gas company Coterra Energy pleaded no contest to environmental crimes related to contaminated water supplies from fracking operations more than a decade ago. The plea is the culmination of a long saga that has left residents of a small Pennsylvania town without clean drinking water for 14 years, and it resulted in some semblance of accountability for a company that has long denied any wrongdoing.
“We are here today because fundamentally Pennsylvanians have a right to clean air and pure water. And for too long, the good people of Dimock have waited to have the clean water that our constitution promises restored to them in their homes and throughout our community,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said at a press conference on November 29. “More than a decade of waiting for a permanent plan for clean drinking water is far too long.”
The last time this happened was in 2019, when Office 365 was banned from schools in the German state of Hesse.
If you’re curious: Office 365 package offers a polished set of proprietary tools used by many professionals worldwide, which is why it is popular.
However, it poses quite a few privacy concerns, as noted by German authorities, which have not been addressed yet.
Hence, the decision was taken by the German Data Protection Conference (DSK or Datenschutzkonferenz) to ban the use of Microsoft Office 365 in schools across the country.
The ClamAV command-line virus scanner used on many Linux boxes has attained an important-looking milestone release: version 1.0.0.
It’s not really the first finished version, of course. Open source version numbering is something of a work of fiction, up there with “Of course I love you” and “The check’s in the post,” but even so, this particular milestone has been a while in coming. ClamAV, which describes itself as “the open-source standard for mail gateway-scanning software”, has finally emitted an official one-point-zero version, only six months after its 20th birthday – and what’s more, it’s a long-term support release, too.
Original developer Tomasz Kojm released the first version, 0.10, on May 8, 2002. As it’s open source, since then, it’s been ported to almost anything you’re likely to find connected to the internet. It’s included in the repos of most Linux distros, as well as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. It’s also part of Apple’s optional extra macOS Server package. Indeed it runs on most things, from OpenVMS to OS/2.
The project was acquired by SourceFire in 2007, which itself was subsequently bought by Cisco in 2013, and which still sponsors development.
This week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a warning about tech support scams that are conning people into giving away access to their financial accounts through remote desktop software. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the report is the bureau’s admission that the numbers are probably higher than what they reported.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (device-mapper-multipath, firefox, hsqldb, krb5, thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server), Debian (libraw), Fedora (freerdp and grub2), SUSE (bcel, emacs, glib2, glibc, grub2, nodejs10, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (linux-azure-fde and snapd).
Newly revealed research shows that a number of major car brands, including Honda, Nissan, Infiniti, and Acura, were affected by a previously undisclosed security bug that would have allowed a savvy hacker to hijack vehicles and steal user data. According to researchers, the bug was in the car’s Sirius XM telematics infrastructure and would have allowed a hacker to remotely locate a vehicle, unlock and start it, flash the lights, honk the horn, pop the trunk, and access sensitive customer info like the owner’s name, phone number, address, and vehicle details.
Cars are just computers with four wheels and an engine. It’s no surprise that the software is vulnerable, and that everything is connected.
DNA collection at the time of arrest may make sense in certain cases. If it’s a violent crime — rape, murder, home invasion, etc. — it probably is smart to take some sort of a sample which may help place the suspect at the scene of the crime.
↺ FBI Director Gets Back On His Anti-Encryption Bullshit In Statement To Homeland Security Committee
We’ll get to Chris Wray in a moment, but first let’s do a throwback to May 29, 2018 — the date the FBI first promised to correct its miscount (estimated to be off by as much as 4,000 devices) of uncrackable devices in its possession. Multiple statements utilizing the FBI’s bad stats were edited, with the erroneous number replaced with footnotes like this:
A lawsuit filed against spyware industry leader NSO Group on Wednesday represents the first of its kind from a U.S. citizen and the first by journalists in U.S. courts.
It’s the latest salvo in a multi-front battle against foreign commercial spyware. That battle has been pursued in the executive branch, Congress, the courts and the tech industry. In fact, the lawsuit came the same day that Google called out a Spanish firm it says is a spyware vendor.
Wednesday’s lawsuit accuses NSO Group of violating the main federal anti-hacking law, as well as a computer access and fraud law in California, the location of the federal court where the plaintiffs filed their complaint. The plaintiffs are reporters and others who work for El Faro, a Salvadoran news organization, who allege they were targets of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware.
The plaintiffs want a judge to declare that NSO Group has violated U.S. law. They also want a judge to order the company to disclose the client who spied on them, Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute, told me.
Can a predominantly white state legislature overturn the votes of a predominantly Black city? Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney, was elected in 2017 on a reform agenda and has faced a GOP backlash ever since. This October, on the last day of business before the 2022 midterms, Martina White, a Republican state representative, filed articles for impeachment. If the initiative wins a majority in the GOP-dominated state House, Krasner will have to stand trial in the Senate. How has the GOP weaponized the issue of violence to smear criminal justice reform and the Democrats pushing for change? And what is being done about the disregard being shown to Black voters who voted heavily for the DA and largely continue to support Krasner’s work? Charles D. Ellison, executive producer and host of Reality Check on WURD, and Sara Lomax-Reese, cofounder of URL Media, joined me for this conversation.
Odesa City Council has voted to remove two monuments related to the Russian imperial presence in Odesa from the city streets, and to move them to the Odesa Fine Arts Museum.
Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of imprisoned politician Alexey Navalny, posted a letter from her husband on Instagram.
Russia’s Federation Council voted to approve the early dismissal of Alexey Kudrin from his post as Audit Chamber chairman, according to Interfax. Kudrin’s dismissal was requested earlier by Vladimir Putin.
The three Palestinians killed overnight were identified as Jawad Rimawi, 22, Thafer Rimawi, 21, and Mufid Ikhlayel, 44. A fourth Palestinian was killed later on Tuesday morning after carrying out a car-ramming that left one Israeli wounded.
Plainclothes officers in Moscow arrested 23-year-old artist and war critic Daniil Shershnev, his girlfriend Ekaterina told the independent media outlet Holod.
The Russian nuclear power company Rosenergoatom announced that a new director has been appointed for the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which has been under the Russian military’s control since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine.
An employee of the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid sustained minor injuries after an explosion. Reuters, citing Spanish police, reports that the victim is in the hospital.
When speaking before the Defense Ministry collegium, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said that Russia’s defense purchasing will increase by almost 50 percent in 2023, “factoring in the additional budgetary means being allocated.”
Russia’s Culture Ministry has published a list of “priority topics” for filmmakers planning to apply for government grants next year. The ministry’s official website encourages directors and cinematographers seeking state funding to “consider” working on one of the 17 topics deemed valuable to Russian propaganda. Below, Meduza republishes the ministry’s full list of topics that we can all look forward to seeing addressed in future Russian films. How many masterpieces do you expect with these cinematic priorities?
The New York Times has found another neo-Nazi militia to fawn over in Ukraine. The Bratstvo battalion “gave access to the New York Times to report on two recent riverine operations,” which culminated in a piece (11/21/22) headlined “On the River at Night, Ambushing Russians.”
In this video I discuss the new policy passed that allows San Fransisco Police Department use deadly robots against suspects in certain circumstances.
Environmental justice advocates celebrated Tuesday when a fracking company accepted responsibility for poisoning drinking water supplies in Dimock, Pennsylvania.
“Dimock residents have known for 14 years that Cabot Oil & Gas is guilty of contaminating our water.”
The collapse of FTX, a crypto currency exchange that went from a valuation of $32 billion to bankruptcy, is sending shock waves not just through the economy but also politics. FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was the second-biggest donor to the Democratic party in 2022. He has many complex ties with Democratic politicians, policy-makers, and pundits. In a recent column, I wrote about how Democrats have a crypto problem.
After three congressional Democrats on Tuesday unveiled the Corporate Crime Database Act, which would direct the U.S. Department of Justice to make information about corporate wrongdoing and efforts to curb it publicly available, dozens of progressive organizations and individuals implored federal lawmakers to pass the legislation as quickly as possible.
“The runaway consequences of rogue corporations are nothing short of catastrophic.”
Economic justice advocates on Wednesday responded to new U.S. government figures showing nonfinancial corporate profits soared to record levels during the third quarter of 2022 by urging congressional lawmakers—most of whom receive substantial corporate campaign contributions—to take action against the capitalist greed that progressive experts say is the main driver of inflation.
“Instead of raising interest rates and slowing the economy toward a recession, Congress and Biden should be taking aim at corporate price gouging.”
The economic partnership between Brazil and China, which has advanced greatly in the last two decades, may be one of the keys to reversing the crisis that Brazil faces. But some challenges will need to be faced with diplomacy and strategic planning.
By Marjorie Cohn / Truthout More than 40 million lower-income people burdened with student loans are still waiting for clarity about how much they will owe and when their next payments will be due, as the Supreme Court decides if it will rule on whether to allow President Joe Biden’s student debt relief program to […]
Progressives on Wednesday warned that time is running out for Democratic leaders to take Republicans at their word regarding slashes to social safety net programs, as U.S. Sen. John Thune indicated the GOP will use a potential fight over the debt ceiling next year as leverage to push cuts—unless the Democrats act now to raise the debt limit while they still control the Senate and House.
Thune (R-S.D.), who is the number-two Republican in the Senate as the chamber’s minority whip, told Bloomberg Tuesday that the party has a “long list” of policy priorities for the next Congress, which will commence on January 3. The party plans to put forward budget reforms including to federal programs which they have long claimed, erroneously, are unsustainable.
As Twitter implodes under Musk’s rule, a lawsuit argues Tesla is vastly overpaying the world’s richest man.
Without much notice, the American scene now boasts an array of professional scam artists meeting a richly deserved comeuppance. The tangle-haired crypto titan Sam Bankman-Fried has presided over an epic meltdown at his FTX empire; the trading platform had yielded him an estimated net worth of $15.6 billion, and that number now stands at a nice round zero, with Bankman-Fried facing a host of legal smackdowns in the offing. Elon Musk, lauded far and wide as the genius tech disrupter of the age, has run his latest acquisition, Twitter, straight into the ground, displaying rank ignorance, insatiable bro-hubris, and rudderless right-wing conspiracy-mongering in equal parts. Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the phony blood-testing app, Theranos, is bound for prison for more than 11 years on fraud charges.
The Democratic-controlled U.S. House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday received six years of former President Donald Trump’s federal tax returns, ending a three-year battle in which the 2024 Republican presidential candidate fought fiercely against sharing documents that every one of his predecessors since Richard Nixon have disclosed.
“Donald Trump has finally run out of places to hide,” wrote Jason Easley and Sarah Jones at PoliticusUSA’s The Daily. “For years the speculation about what is in the tax returns that Trump had refused to release ran rampant. Was he really broke? Did he take money from foreign governments? Did he commit crimes? There were so many questions, and now the answers could finally be arriving.”
Before the Supreme Court’s landmark reversal of Roe v. Wade, there was debate on whether abortion would drive Democrats to cast their ballots in the 2022 midterm elections. “In polls, the people who report caring most about abortion relative to other issues are young, progressive, educated, concentrated in cities, and of higher income,” wrote Natalie Shure in The New Republic, “already one of the Democratic Party’s strongest bases.”
Clarence Lusane questions whether we’re in a prelude to a new all-American version of authoritarianism, or worse.
If there is anything certain in today’s political world it is that the Republican Party represents an existential threat to the survival of democracy. And it would be a mistake to take too much comfort from the recent midterm election results. The better than expected showing by the Democrats bought some time, but American democracy will remain at risk for as long as the GOP remains the party it is today. In two years there will be another election, then another, and another after that. To preserve a functioning democracy, the Democrats have to win every time in a closely divided country. To tear it down, the GOP need win only once. Just one election where they win control of both houses of congress and the presidency at the same time, and it’s over (they already control the Supreme Court). And given the inevitable cycles of American politics, we know that day must eventually come. And when it does, America’s 250-plus year experiment in self-government will effectively end.
Amber Heard and her legal team recently filed an opening brief seeking to overturn the defamation verdict that Heard’s ex-husband, Johnny Depp, won this summer in his lawsuit challenging Heard’s written characterization of their relationship in a piece for The Washington Post. And as Heard’s appeal gets under way, a group of experts signed an open letter objecting to her unprecedented vilification in the press and on social media. The letter also draws attention to how the case has spawned intensive victim-blaming misogyny—and the spread of unfounded defamation suits modeled on Depp’s case, which seek to silence and harm women seeking legal protection from abuse.
This election year has added a new season to our country’s calendar: The silly season.
While claiming to have bought the social media giant in order to make it “an inclusive arena for free speech,” multibillionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk is apparently overseeing what critics claim is a purge of anti-fascist voices, The Intercept reported Tuesday.
“No one should’ve honestly believed Elon Musk would use his ownership of Twitter to champion free speech.”
Some people just don’t understand social media. Or the Constitution. Or moderation efforts.
In a long and detailed Twitter thread, Scott Hechinger dives into the malpractices of the New York Times when it comes to reporting on certain criminal justice elements.
John Young, the founder of the Cryptome website, has asked the U.S. Justice Department to also indict him as he published un-redacted State Dept. files before WikiLeaks did, reports Joe Lauria.
A free, independent, and diverse press is essential for holding democracies to account. As public watchdogs, the media’s ability to provide accurate, independent, and reliable information is vital for allowing the public to scrutinise political leaders, make informed political choices, and exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms. But around the world, media freedom is increasingly restricted or subject to state interference.
To address this worrying trend, the European Commission proposed the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) in September 2022. This FAQ dives into why such a proposal is needed, how it would strengthen media independence and safeguard media pluralism, and what happens next.
[...]
A: The EMFA promises to reverse the trend of deteriorating media freedom in the EU. European co-legislators will start negotiating the details of the proposal next year, which is likely to be challenging given the varied interests of Member States, media service providers, and media freedom advocates.
As the legislative process unfolds, Access Now will continue to defend fundamental rights online, by scrutinising the relationship between online platforms and media service providers, and opposing any use of spyware against journalists or other members of the media.
We keep seeing it show up in a variety of places: laws to “protect the children” that, fundamentally begin with age verification to figure out who is a child (and then layering in a ton of often questionable requirements for how to deal with those identified as children). We have the Online Safety Bill in the UK. We have California’s Age Appropriate Design Code, which a bunch of states are rushing to emulate in their own legislatures. In Congress, there is the Kids Online Safety Act.
President Joe Biden wants Congress to block a railroad strike after members of four key unions rejected a contract proposal that failed to address their demands for paid sick leave, regularly scheduled weekends, and other quality-of-life concerns for workers in a highly stressful industry. And top Democrats in the House and Senate are jumping on board for federal intervention, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) telling reporters, “I don’t like going against the ability of unions to strike, but weighing the equities, we must avoid a strike.”
Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives voted Wednesday by a margin of 221-207 to pass a concurrent resolution adding seven days of paid sick leave to a White House-brokered contract that was rejected by over half of the nation’s unionized rail workforce but that President Joe Biden urged Congress to force through to prevent a nationwide rail strike next month.
“Railroad workers have made a simple, dignified request for the basic protections of paid leave.”
First of all—solidarity from our union shop to the rail workers who intend (if they can) to strike next week, whose demand for four days of paid sick leave per year is one that should not have to be begged for, much less go unmet. History will not look kindly on President Jon Biden and congressional leaders forcing a contract on rail workers that includes no sick leave during the pandemic that Biden irresponsibly declared is over, which continues to kill hundreds of Americans a day, to avoid a shutdown of supply chains before the holidays.
Sen. Bernie Sanders said late Tuesday night that it was time to “put up or shut up” for any U.S. lawmaker who claims to fight for the working class as he and other progressives in Congress vowed to insert paid sick leave into a labor agreement between railway workers and the nation’s rail companies.
“If you are a supporter of the working class how are you going to vote against the proposal which provides guaranteed paid sick leave to workers who have none right now?”
Before the sun rose, I biked to work. There were few cars on the road and it was early enough most days that the stoplights still blinked yellow. Alternating between the sidewalks and streets, the world felt like mine. It’s that way in a small town, where everything feels attainable for a moment because there’s no one else around to claim it. The stillness, the cornfields, the wind blowing through overgrown grass. But it wasn’t the solitude that made me choose the early shift; it was shame.
When Matthew Northrup was a child in the 1980s, his dad would drive him around the area near their home in Fond du Lac—a neighborhood in Duluth, Minn., named for the Northrups’ tribe, the Fond du Lac Band of Superior Chippewa—pointing out sites that their people considered historically important. On one such drive, he motioned toward a grassy hill just past Highway 23 along the St. Louis River, which flows into the southern tip of Lake Superior. “Son, all of your ancestors are buried up there,” he said.
Everyone’s family history is complicated. Nearly everyone has an estranged sibling, a drunken uncle, a contentious aunt, or a well-kept secret trauma. With DNA testing and genealogy websites, everyone is almost guaranteed to find a cousin, a half-sibling, or even a parent previously unknown to them. During American slavery, the bloodlines of slaveholding families were particularly fraught. Without technology, “Mama’s baby and Papa’s maybe,” as the saying goes, could be kept hidden. When an enslaved child had red hair, freckles, and the same dimple or gait as their biological father, everyone noticed, but they never discussed these relationships. Behind the family portraits, genetics told everything. The irony among slaveholders and their enslaved descendants was that light skin meant little. Slavery did not discriminate: The children of white masters could be bought, sold, beaten, or sexually assaulted. Interracial relationships did not bring people together in an era of slavery; rather, they kept them apart.
United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently came out against a ban on rainbow armbands at the World Cup tournament in Qatar, which various European team captains had intended to sport in support of LGBTQ rights and against discrimination. Blinken flagged the ban as “concerning” and a restriction on “freedom of expression”.
We have prepared our legislative brief on digital rights for the Winter Session 2022 of the Indian Parliament. In our brief, we highlight some of the focus areas within the larger issues of digital rights, surveillance, platform governance and free speech, data protection, and other concerns that call for extensive deliberation in the Houses of Parliament.
The good news: there’s more than $50 billion in broadband subsidies coming down the road courtesy of COVID relief and infrastructure legislation.
For decades, we’ve discussed how U.S. broadband is generally spotty, expensive, and slower than many countries due to regional monopolization. And, for just as long, we’ve highlighted how U.S. policymakers in both parties comically go out of their way to not even acknowledge that monopolies are a problem, often instead employing vague, causation-free rhetoric about a mysterious digital divide.
The architect and historian Anthony Acciavatti uses a real (but mostly forgotten) patent to conjure a world that could have been.
The legal landscape is already strongly tilted in favour of copyright holders. But that doesn’t stop the copyright maximalists from demanding more ways to enforce their intellectual monopolies. The latest expansion of enforcement powers is doubly concerning. First, because its explicit purpose is to make it even easier to bring cases against alleged copyright infringement. And secondly, because so few people know about it yet.
This latest expansion is the result of a new US law, called the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act. A post on the Educause Review site explains that CASE creates something called the Copyright Claims Board (CCB), with greatly simplified procedures for bringing legal actions. For example, they do not need to be filed in a federal court, which is typically very expensive. Legal representation is not required, and filing fees start at just $100. In addition, statutory damages would be available for an infringement even if it occurred before registration with the US Copyright Office.
Those may be useful features for independent artists who lack legal teams but wish to pursue their claims of copyright infringement. But they will be an even greater boon to copyright trolls, who will be able to fire off illegitimate claims for very little upfront cost. Faced with what look like serious legal threats, many people will choose to pay off the trolls, rather than face the prospect of navigating a new legal system they have probably never heard of.
Minions in 4E are like normal creatures but have only one HP. They attack player characters just like normal.
Mobs in 5e, this is kind of a forgotten rule because it’s one of those weirdo DMG variants, but it’s just an alternate way for a mob of creatures to make their attack rolls by looking at a chart. This saves a ton of time. Like, if you have a bunch of skeletons and they’re fighting enemies of AC 16 or lower, that means for every two skeletons, one hit, so if you have 49 skeletons, 24 of those will hit so you can just dish out 24d6+48 damage to their enemies. (Or, if you’re using the static damage numbers, which for skeletons are 5, you dish out 120.)
Wow, one thing I really disliked in One D&D (getting a first-level feat in your background, a la PF2) was ranked the highest, beloved by 90%:
second attempt at the pillow case for my exped medium pillow. no fabric measurement: the pillow on the fabric, judged where to cut the fabric.
Low numbers are bad, high are good.
It’s not bounded and can go negative (so far things have stayed between -20 to +20).
0 is spending the equivalent amount of time looking at a mono-colored (non-papered or -patterned) wall.
First steps in writing a first-person shooter in PICO-8
I have been playing around with PICO-8 for a few months now. PICO-8 is a fantasy console, emulating a device-that-could-have-existed somewhere around 30-40 years ago. It includes great editors and an API designed for game development. PICO-8 is rather limited in resources, but that is the part of its charm – it makes you think about the efficiency of the code you write and avoids feature creep.
First daughter (my only child) kicked over the TV,
a Panasonic PV-C1332 manufactured in August 2002.
The plastic case is cracked. There’s a purple
splotch in the upper right corner of the display.
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