● 12.20.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/12/2021: helloSystem 0.7, Steam Deck as a Console, and Much More

Posted in News Roundup at 12:17 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

• As the year 2021 comes to an end, it’s time to take a look at some of biggest stories that impacted Linux and Linux users.

• This has been a great week with some cool releases, starting with System76’s Pop!_OS Linux 21.10, which now also runs on the Raspberry Pi 4, and continuing with new EndeavourOS and Debian GNU/Linux 11 point releases to keep you up-to-date with the latest security and bug fixes.

• On top of that, we got a new Steam Client update, a new major release of the powerful GCompris educational software suite, as well as new major releases of the GNU nano text editor and digiKam professional photo management software.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has confirmed that version 5.16 of the Linux kernel will take a little longer to develop than usual, thanks to Christmas.

• “Things are calming down, and rc6 is fairly small,” he wrote in his weekly State of the Kernel post. “That’s normal for this time in the release schedule, but it’s also normal for this time of year.”

• Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.16 for testing this Christmas week.

• Linus wrote in the 5.16-rc6 announcement, “Things are calming down, and rc6 is fairly small. That’s normal for this time in the release schedule, but it’s also normal for this time of year. And I expect that the next two weeks will be very quiet, and smaller still. But maybe people are bored, maybe people are staying in due to covid picking up again, we’ll just see.”

• As a reminder, the Linux 5.16 cycle will be extended due to the holidays and to avoid opening the Linux 5.17 kernel merge window around the New Year festivities. Thus Linux 5.16 will release in early January (should be 9 January) followed by the 5.17 merge window opening.

• The 5.16-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

Applications

• Copr is a build system for anyone in the Fedora community. It hosts thousands of projects for various purposes and audiences. Some of them should never be installed by anyone, some are already being transitioned to the official Fedora Linux repositories, and the rest is somewhere in between. Copr gives you the opportunity to install third party software that is not available in Fedora Linux repositories, try nightly versions of your dependencies, use patched builds of your favorite tools to support some non-standard use cases, and just experiment freely.

• If you don’t know how to enable a repository or if you are concerned about whether is it safe to use Copr, please consult the project documentation.

• Messages is an instant messaging software application.

• It offers features like conversation pinning, the ability to mention individuals, message searching, and tools to send messages such as Memoji.

• Messages is proprietary freeware that’s not available for Linux. What are the best free and open source alternatives?

• We have plenty of information on the history of AppImage and its making. If you are new to Linux, you should also check out our guide on using AppImage.

• AppImage makes it easy for applications to work across various distributions without needing to install dependencies or anything.

• However, unlike Flathub for Flatpaks, you may not find a portal to browse applications available as AppImages.

• NX Software Center in Nitrux OS does the same job, but it is not available to easily install on other distributions. So, AppImage Pool comes to the rescue as an app store for AppImage applications that you can install in any Linux distribution.

Instructionals/Technical

• We definitely built a single OmniOS machine to be the initial NFS frontend. I’m not sure we ever built an iSCSI backend for it, because in practice we never went anywhere with actually selling this idea to professors and having them buy disks for it. Instead, a few years later (in 2016), we quietly decommissioned the single OmniOS frontend we’d built. The last lingering relic of this entire cycle of design, build, and decommissioning was a third iSCSI network we noticed recently.

• Growing the disk image depends on your virtualization system and in any case is usually pretty simple and obvious; that took me no time at all. First, you need to change the disk partitioning so that the LVM partition is expanded to cover the new disk space. Unfortunately, fdisk doesn’t seem to directly support doing this. Some directions I found online suggested using fdisk to delete and recreate the partition, but I thought that was too alarming so I tried out GNU parted instead, because parted has a ‘resizepart’ operation. The magic unit to use in resizepart to make it use up all of the new free space is ‘-1s’, which means ‘the last sector of the disk’. It turns out that parted is more dangerous than I expected, because unlike software like fdisk, parted writes your changes to disk immediately. If I ever have to do this to real disks that I cannot take virtual machine snapshots of and roll back to if something goes wrong, I will use a different program.

• The basic idea is to treat the final executable file (an ELF file, say) as a mutable data structure. When the compiler would emit an object file it instead allocates space in that executable file using a shared memory allocator, and writes the object code directly into that space. To make this tractable we’ll assume we aren’t going to generate optimal code in size or space; we’re going to build an executable that runs “pretty fast”, for testing purposes (manual or automated).

• Pterodactyl is another open-source game server management panel. It is based on PHP – Go – React. Also, ithas a really amazing control panel. Moreover, It comes with amazing features, Console Viewer for all servers, Databases management backups and advanced server settings or for each server and it is easy to use. All the servers runs in an Docker Container. It provides support for major Source Dedicated Servers, Minecraft etc. Lets start with the tutorial!

• PGAdmin is a web-based GUI tool used to interact with the Postgres database sessions, both locally and remote servers as well. It is an open-source, powerful, and feature-rich graphical user interface (GUI) administration and management tool for the PostgreSQL database. It provides a powerful user interface that enables you to easily create, manage, maintain and use database objects, by both beginners and experienced Postgres users alike.

• pgAdmin 4 supports PostgreSQL 9.2 or later, and runs on Unix and its variants such as Linux, Mac OS X as well as Windows operating systems.

• In this article, we will learn how to install pgadmin 4 on Ubuntu 20.04 server. This guide assumes that you already have Postgres 9.2 installed and set up. If not checkout How to Install and Configure Postgres 14 Ubuntu 20.04

• Suricata’s popularity is a result of it being an independent and open source threat detection engine, which is a lifesaver for Network administrators that are looking for a seamless and performant way of examining and managing network traffic issues. Some of Suricata’s functional attributes include triggering alerts, generating log events, and managing compromised incoming traffic.

• MySQL is a relational database management system based on SQL (Structured Query Language). It is one of the most widely used database software for several well-known applications. MySQL is used for data warehousing, e-commerce, and logging applications, but its more commonly used feature is a web database storage and management.

• CentOS 8 Stream ships with MySQL in its AppStream. However, as many know, this is not the latest version. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MySQL 8.0 using AppStream or the newest community RPM version from MySQL repositories on CentOS 8 Stream.

• Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused internet browser that sets itself apart from other browsers by automatically blocking online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings.

• Brave claimed that its browser puts less strain on your computer’s performance than Google Chrome. Even with multiple tabs open at once, Brave uses less memory than Google Chrome, up to 66% less.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Brave Browser on CentOS 8 Stream.

• Docker Engine supports a plugin system that lets you add extra functionality to the container runtime. Plugins for new storage drivers, networking stacks, and logging systems are all freely available.

• Modern versions of Docker Engine include everything you need to manage plugins within the CLI. We’re concentrating on this “managed” plugin system in this guide. You must manually install and maintain plugins that use the legacy plugin system.

• In this guide we are going to install and set up PHP and Nginx in OpenSUSE Leap 15.3. We will also set up a virtual host to serve a simple php info page.

• PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It is one of the popular programming languages for the web. Popular tools such as WordPress are coded using php. Big companies like Facebook also uses php heavily.

• Nginx is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. It started out as a web server designed for maximum performance and stability. Nginx has grown in popularity since its release due to its light-weight resource utilization and its ability to scale easily on minimal hardware. Nginx excels at serving static content quickly and is designed to pass dynamic requests off to other software that is better suited for those purposes.

• WhatsApp is a free messaging application used by over a billion people worldwide. WhatsApp provides secure, reliable voice and video calls that can be made locally or internationally with a Wi-Fi or cellular data connection. WhatsApp is available for multiple devices, like computers, tablets, and phones.

• Even though there’s no download link for Linux on the WhatsApp website, it’s still possible to install WhatsApp on Manjaro. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to install WhatsApp from the command line on Manjaro.

• OpenProject is an open-source web tool for enterprise project management. So, OpenProject is aimed at Project Managers, Department Managers, Production Managers, Team Leaders, Analysts, and, in general, any professional user who needs to manage projects or to know their evolution.

• Also, OpenProject can be installed on-premises in your own infrastructure, having full control and 100% data ownership. This makes it a very interesting application and many companies are increasingly using it as a working tool.

• Following the previous article where you’ve installed TeamCity server. In this post, you will learn how to install TeamCity Agent on Linux machine.

• TeamCity is a build management and continuous integration tool which supports a variety of version control systems and build runners. It is a commercial tool and licensed under a proprietary license, Freemium software license up to 100 build configurations and 3 free build agents are available.

• Kubernetes is a ubiquitous name in container management and is not only recommended, but nearly required for success with containers. However, Kubernetes is a hefty program with a vast array of add-ons and features — not all of which are necessarily useful to the average IT pro.

• MicroK8s is a Kubernetes distribution designed to be small and responsive and to include required components only. It is also designed to be fast and efficient to use, with several useful tools IT admins can activate via the command line.

• Because MicroK8s is so small, an installation could require less than 12 GB of RAM, and it can run on a modern Raspberry Pi. Consequently, its small size means that it can be built and run on a single developer workstation, which also eases tear-down and recreation.

• An additional benefit to MicroK8s is that it’s ideal for edge and other devices with modest performance offerings. MicroK8s is also deemed stable for production use by Canonical.

• pfSense is a firewall/router computer software distribution based on FreeBSD. The open source pfSense Community Edition and pfSense Plus is installed on a physical computer or a virtual machine to make a dedicated firewall/router for a network

• This recipe describes a simple three interface HA configuration. The three interfaces are LAN, WAN, and Sync. This is functionally equivalent to a two interface LAN and WAN deployment, with the Sync interface being used to synchronize configuration and firewall states between the primary and secondary firewalls.

• Normally each interface on the pfSense® firewall represents its own broadcast domain with a unique IP subnet. In some circumstances it is desirable or necessary to combine multiple interfaces onto a single broadcast domain, where two ports on the firewall will act as if they are on the same switch, except traffic between the interfaces can be controlled with firewall rules. Typically this is done so multiple interfaces will act as though they are on the same flat network using the same IP subnet and so that clients all share broadcast and multicast traffic.

• Checkout how to automate the ssh login using ssh-add, ssh-agent and sshpass on Linux.

• In my formative years working odd jobs in IT at small startups, I never had enough time off to warrant an out-of-office auto-response on my email. Recently, though, I’ve discovered that some companies promote a healthy work-life balance and not only enable but encourage employees to take a break. As with the all-powerful sudo command, however, with great power comes great responsibility, and a holiday demands an away message.

• In this guide, we are going to set up NextCloud on a OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 server hosted with Nginx, Mariadb and PHP (LEMP stack). We will be using Mariadb 10 and PHP 7.4 for this guide.

• Nextcloud is an Open Source suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. It is a a free self-hosted cloud storage solution similar to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. With Nextcloud, you don’t have to worry about the pricey alternatives and since you will host your own files, you don’t have to worry about privacy or someone collecting your data.

• NextCloud can be installed on a private home server or a virtual private server in the cloud. Files can then be uploaded and then synced to a local desktop, laptop or even a smartphone. This way you have full control of your data.

• MariaDB is an open-source one of the most popular relational database management system (RDBMS) that is a highly compatible drop-in replacement of MySQL. It is built upon the values of performance, stability, and openness, and MariaDB Foundation ensures contributions will be accepted on technical merit.

• MariaDB was developed as a software fork of MySQL in 2009 in response to Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. MariaDB intends to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. It is part of most cloud offerings and the default in most Linux distributions.

• In this guide we will learn how to install and configure MariaDB in OpenSUSE Leap 15.3.

• Nothing seems as excellent as having flexible software to aid in the conversion of images and your other stuff to your preferred version, like, in this case, converting PDF files to images. This review will, in detail, enlighten how to carry out this process (convert) the pages of a PDF document to image files (PNG, JPEG, and a lot of other formats).

• Here is a compiled list of software and command-line methods to help you accomplish this. Of course, and for many reasons, you can always find an online software converter site that easily converts PDF to images; however, there is no guarantee that your file will always be secure. Hence, we recommend converting PDF on your Linux system, which we will show you. Besides the graphical user interface format, we will also cover the command line convertion, and pdftoppm methods give you various options.

• Pop!_OS 21.10 was released and saw the introduction of GNOME 40, Linux kernel 5.15. One of the latest features introduced by the Pop!_OS team is the Refresh install option which will keep user accounts and files but reset the system and apps to a mostly refreshed boot.

• This version also saw the inclusion of a New App Library, and a more excellent search window replaced the full-screen app menu. In the following tutorial, you will learn to upgrade your existing Pop!_OS 21.04 system to the latest version 21.10.

• Data replication is the process of copying your data across multiple servers to improve data availability and enhance the reliability and performance of an application. In MySQL replication, data is copied from a database from the master server to other nodes in real-time to ensure consistency of data and also to provide backup and redundancy.

• In this guide, we demonstrate how you can set up MySQL (Master-Slave) replication in RHEL-based distributions such as CentOS, Fedora, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux.

• I’ve set up a second cluster, and the Ironic nodes are not PXE booting. Specifically, if I watch the nodes boot via an IPMI serial-on-lan console, I see that they send out a DHCP request and never get a response back.

• This is a problem I am familiar with from my days at Penguin. Time to dig in and understand the networking setup on the controller to see why it is not getting the packet. Or, possibly, why it is getting it and the response is getting dropped.

• I have another cluster that is working properly, and I am going to look at the setup there to try and contrast it with the broken set up, and figure out my problem.

• What is a functioning network setup looking like in this cluster? Lets start with the IP address of a functioning server on a baremetal node.

• Proxychains is a UNIX/LINUX program that can redirect all your connection through a secure tunnel. Supported protocols used by proxychains are SOCKS4, SOCKS5, HTTP, and HTTPS.

• Hey Guys, Today we will talk about an important article which is about that you can export or move the content of optical discs such as CD or DVD into an image file for archival purposes. The file typically uses .iso or .img extension and is of ISO 9660 filesystem format.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Siege on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Siege is an HTTP load tester and benchmarking utility. Its a powerful tool for measuring system reliability during high loading and can be used by web developers to test their code when the site is under duress

• 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 Siege benchmark utility on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

• The best practice is to make a backup after each minor change, and both before and after each major change or series of changes. Typically, an initial backup is taken in case the change being made has undesirable effects. An after-the-fact backup is taken after evaluating the change and ensuring it had the intended outcome. Periodic backups are also helpful, regardless of changes.

• pfSense software makes an internal backup upon each change, and the best practice is to download a manual backup as well. The automatic backups made on each change are useful for reverting to prior configurations after changes have proven detrimental, but are not good for disaster recovery as they are on the system itself and not kept externally. As it is a fairly simple and painless process, administrators should make a habit of downloading a backup now and then and keeping it in a safe place. Backups may be handled easily and automatically using the free AutoConfigBackup service.

• We will show how to create ASCII text banners from plain text, command-line utility called FIGlet

• FIGlet is a simple command-line utility for creating ASCII text banners or large letters out of ordinary text.

• Begin by navigating to Zopiers download page and downloading the relevant installer for your system. In this article, we will be installing the soft-phone onto a Windows machine (Linux, Mac, Android, and IOS are also supported). If you need a VOIP server to connect to, I recommend following the article I write on installing Asterisk VOIP Server. Find said article here.

Games

• You want a rant, I give you a rant. The Steam Deck is a PC. But it’s also a console. And it’s MORE of a console than a PC. That’s a good thing, in my opinion. But their marketing has been terrible and they need to not only embrace the Deck’s true console identity, but they need to market the Deck TO CONSOLE gamers.

• Indoorlands is a pretty unique game when it comes to building up a theme park and the developer just put up the biggest and most interesting Early Access update yet.

• “The indoor park management simulator where you can create your rides from scratch, control them and freely design your halls. Manage, expand and develop your own park to inspire your visitors. Satisfy your visitors’ needs by unlocking and researching new buildings, rides, transportation and more!”

• With the latest update, they’ve enabled a new ride editor that had previously been in public experimental testing. This editor allows you to actually build you own ride from parts. This even came with Steam Workshop integration to upload and download creations.

• Built with the awesome power of GZDoom, the upcoming shooter Selaco is really looking to be something quite special and I absolutely need to play this.

• “Selaco is a brand new original shooter running on GZDoom, featuring thrilling action set pieces, destructibility, smart AI and a fleshed out story taking place within an immersive game world. It draws inspiration heavily from F.E.A.R. in terms of action set pieces, while mixing traditional retro-FPS elements from QUAKE and DOOM, along with some more modern features. Together with professional artists who work in the industry, several having worked on successful throwback FPS games in the past, Selaco is a fully fleshed out world full of character, action, and mystery.”

• Sandwalkers is a roguelike turn-based exploration game from Goblinz Studio, who’ve developed and published a number of games now like Legend of Keepers, Sigma Theory, As Far As The Eye, Neurodeck and more.

• Not long at all after putting up a special Beta for testing, The Indie Stone have now set the massive Build 41 overhaul for the Zombie survival game Project Zomboid up as the official new version.

• The absolute biggest upgrade the game has ever seen and it’s quite magnificent.

• Project Zomboid has come such a long way. I remember back in 2011 where the developer had an unfortunate incident where their development hardware (along with the source code) was stolen that resulted in some big delays and lots of stress. It’s taken a long time to get to this stage but it was firmly worth it and Build 41 is very impressive.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• We give you all the important GNOME 42 feature highlights and release information in this article. Read on.

Distributions

Reviews

• A thought which kept coming to mind while using the PinePhone with its default operating system was that the experience feels really rough, like an early beta. Which, upon reflection, is appropriate since that’s exactly what it is. I was running what’s essentially a beta platform with young software on it and the mixed experience is to be expected. These are still early days for the PinePhone and for mobile branches of distributions such as Manjaro. Plasma Mobile has only been running on the PinePhone for about a year and I was running a version which, since I was unable to install updates, was out of date.

• With all of this in mind I’d like to say that I don’t think Manjaro and Plasma Mobile running on the PinePhone is a good experience yet – it’s not something I’d use on a daily basis like I have /e/ OS or UBports. But the pieces are all there. Plasma Mobile on Manjaro has a phone, text messaging, an app store with most of the same software we can run on desktop distributions, a minimal yet functional settings panel, and similar key features. At the moment this combination (Plasma Mobile and the PinePhone) is probably only going to appeal to Linux enthusiasts who want to tinker, who want to push the limits of the hardware, who want to set up hobbyist projects to see if they can run a web server on the device, or who want to help polish open source solutions.

• This is all fine and good. This is an early offering and a modest one and it’s paving the way for more polished and more advanced options down the road. As I said, right now it isn’t ready to replace my existing phone, but all the right pieces are present and, with slightly better performance and a little more RAM, I could see the next generation of PinePhones running Plasma Mobile being suitable as a daily device.

• I’d also like to acknowledge there are other Linux distributions which can run on the PinePhone. The PINE64 wiki lists over 20 flavours of Linux which can run on this device and I’m eager to try out the alternatives.

New Releases

• The release of three new products based on the tenth ALT platform (p10 Aronia): “Alt Workstation 10” , “Alt Server 10” , “Alt Education 10” . The products are supplied under the License Agreement , which provides the opportunity for free use by individuals, but legal entities are only allowed to test, and for use it is required to purchase a commercial license or conclude a license agreement in writing.

• The tenth platform provides users and developers with the opportunity to use Russian systems Baikal-M, Elbrus with official support for systems based on Elbrus-8SV (e2kv5), Elvis and compatible, as well as a wide range of equipment from world manufacturers, including POWER8 / 9 servers from IBM / Yadro, ARMv8 from Huawei, and a variety of ARMv7 and ARMv8 single board systems including Raspberry Pi 2/3/4 boards. For each architecture, the assembly is carried out natively, without using cross-compilation.

• Particular attention is paid to free solutions that allow corporate users to migrate from a proprietary infrastructure, ensure the continuity of a unified directory service for enterprises and organizations, and provide remote work with modern means.

BSD

• For those with extra time around the end-of-year holidays, helloSystem 0.7 is now available as the newest update to this leading BSD-based desktop operating system that is inspired by Apple macOS but powered by FreeBSD.

• The helloSystem distribution splashed onto the scene at the beginning of this year in wanting to be the “macOS of BSDs”, including its own desktop UI modeled after Apple’s operating system. The helloSystem project has been making good progress towards its goals while to end out 2021 is the v0.7 release.

• With helloSystem 0.7 they have shifted to being based on FreeBSD 13-RELEASE rather than FreeBSD 12. That alone is a big improvement for better hardware support and functionality for this desktop platform.

Debian Family

• Debian 11.2 bullseye Update Download, The second corrective update for the Debian 11 distribution has been published , which includes the accumulated package updates and fixed bugs in the installer. This release includes 64 updates that address stability issues and 30 updates that address vulnerabilities.

• Changes in Debian 11.2 include an update to the latest stable versions of the containerd, golang (1.15) and python-django packages. Libseccomp adds support for syscalls for newer Linux kernel releases, up to 5.15. Added the rustc-mozilla package , which is required to build from sources newer versions of firefox-esr and thunderbird. The wget utility resolves the problem with loading files larger than 2GB on 32-bit systems.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Pip-Boy is a (virtual) personal information processor found in Fallout post-apocalyptic role-playing video games. But John Edgar Park decided to bring the wrist computer to (real) life combining an Adafruit Feather RP2040 board, a round IPS TFT color display, directional buttons, a joystick, and a battery.

• The Raspberry Pi RP2040 based Pip-Boy is programmed with CircuitPython and the demo code is a slide-show with navigation controls, but you could obviously adapt the code to your needs.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• When a team of designers works together on a project, one of the most important goals is consistency. Whether you need a consistent look because of a corporate identity or just for visual cohesion, the look and layout of pages and screens must be reasonably similar within any given project. It’s hard enough to do this as a solo artist, and it gets more complex with added contributors. It becomes a monumental task when several mock-ups from a design team must be approved by a client, signed off by an accessibility expert, and then translated by a team of programmers. It’s difficult but manageable with the right tool, and the open source tool for the job is Penpot.

• Penpot is an online design workspace where designers can create or import graphical elements, create mock-ups, and share those mock-ups with clients and collaborators. It is open source and relies on open formats like SVG, which means your contributors have lots of choices in what tools they use to contribute assets. To try Penpot, go to Penpot.app and create an account.

• The terminal is as old as the computer and largely hasn’t changed. It’s where developers send commands to their machine (or remote machines) – you might hear it called the command line. But the terminal is text-only: no images, no rich text, no functionality that hooks into modern development workflows.

• I can’t believe I have to spell this out, but: free/libre/open-source software developers and open web activists selflessly running independent services online are people too.

• It seems this idea is especially difficult to grasp for researchers (including, apparently, whoever reviews and green-lights their studies). The latest kerfuffle with the Princeton-Radboud Study on Privacy Law Implementation shows this well.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• You can always download and use what we have at any time. As discussed in our blog post YottaDB Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery, thanks to our CI pipeline, the master branches of our source code repositories have the latest code that passes all tests, and is production grade. The exception is the core YottaDB software, releases of which involve multiple cycles of an extensive test suite across a network of machines, testing which cannot yet be made into a CI pipeline. The ydbinstall.sh script has options to download and install YottaDB as well as plugins. Each language wrapper is installed the way that developers of that language expect packages to be installed (e.g., the Go wrapper is installed the way that Go developers expect Go packages to be installed).

FSF

Licensing/Legal

• There’s a lot of ways in which companies discourage your ability to fix things you buy, and at long last the Federal Trade Commission has pledged to push back against them.

• A policy statement released Wednesday by the FTC announced that its members have “unanimously voted to ramp up law enforcement against repair restrictions that prevent small businesses, workers, consumers and even government entities from fixing their own products.”

• This comes only a few days after President Joe Biden signed an executive order calling upon the commission to take the issue more seriously. And while most of the focus in the media appears to be centered on the company that makes your smartphone, this carries huge implications for the automotive industry as well — especially as software becomes increasingly unavoidable in all vehicles, and EVs become more accessible.

• One of our themes on Decoder is that basically everything is a computer now, and farming equipment like tractors and combines are no different. My guest this week is Jahmy Hindman, chief technology officer at John Deere, the world’s biggest manufacturer of farming machinery. And I think our conversation will surprise you.

• So far, I haven’t heard of any good solutions to this free rider problem. Asking companies to act altruistically and donate to projects doesn’t work.

• On this milestone episode of CC’s Open Minds podcast, join us as we celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Creative Commons’ founding on December 19, 2021. We take you back to Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig’s keynote from the 2021 CC Global Summit (watch the recording here), originally held in September 2021.

• The real reason was that the band was pushing the boundaries of concert productions: elaborate stages, highly technical setups for the equipment, and truckloads of gear. Any errors could have serious consequences: damaged gear, technical issues during the show, or even physical danger to the band members.

• They needed a way to quickly check the sophistication of the crew at the venue, so they just looked for the bowl of M&M’s on the table. Any brown M&M’s and they knew that they needed to double check everything. A canary of sorts.

Programming/Development

• Why code review? Even though I don’t find many bugs, it is still worthwhile. First of all, it is similar to proof reading text. It can be hard to spot your own mistakes. Therefore it is good with a second pair of eyes to check the code. Even if there aren’t any bugs, there can still be issues that should be corrected: unclear code, poor naming, missing tests etc. And once in a while there actually is a bug. Code reviews also help to spread the knowledge of how the code works.

• Advances in robotic capabilities allow us to tackle bigger problems with autonomous systems. While extra degrees of freedom in large robots like rail systems or mobile bases empower cutting edge work, they can cause challenges in process planning; the creation of the “useful” motion of a robotic system that is constrained by the application at hand. The ROS Industrial Consortium has addressed this problem by developing new process planners that can quickly plan process for robots with large degrees of freedom.

Perl/Raku

• Perl was a breakthrough that is difficult to understand in retrospect because it achieved so much in establishing the legitimacy of scripting languages as a separate, distinct class of programming languages. It also violated a lot of common CS dogmas, and still managed to achieve a tremendous success, which actually discredited orthodox views on computer language design. May be that’s why it create so much animosity at CS departments, why they pushed first Java and then Python as the first language for students to rehabilitate themselves. The animosity which reminds me jeremiads against PL/1 another, albeit older, revolutionary language what was a precursor of C.

• With all due respect for PHP, Python, Ruby and other scripting languages, it was Perl which served as an icebreaker that navigated previously unknown and dangerous Arctic path. Those who followed it later faced mostly clean water (may be due to global warming — much better hardware, which also legitimized overhead inherent in interpretive languages and typical for Python and Ruby ;-).

• Perl also introduced several innovation is lexical structure of languages. One is a wide use of “tagged literals” (q, qq, qr, qx) which much later (in 2019) is found its way into Python as f-strings. Still the idea of “dynamic delimiters for literals remains the unique Perl feature. Other language designers were simply too afraid to replicate it, as it is a clear kick in chin to the adherents of language design orthodoxy.

• Another interesting innovation of Perl is the statement that allow you to define a namespace (package statement). Perl was that first major language that allow explicit manipulation with the namespace of a program.

Java

• Logging stuff is in the news this week. Specifically, people with Java and log4j somewhere in their lives are having a miserable time. I figured I’d re-tell a story about terrible things done by way of a bunch of feature-rich libraries and dubious interconnections. I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but this time I’ve tried to be much more specific about how it works.

• This is a tale that’s happened at multiple distinct companies, and I have to imagine it’s happening (or *is happening*) at several more. Note that while I’m picking on the G* stuff here since it’s open source and thereby more likely to resonate with readers, reimplementations of these libraries under other names have also introduced the same problems to those companies.

Leftovers

• As the Post-Gazette’s book review editor since 2012, I assign far more reviews than I ever have to write. The biggest perk of the job is that I get to read without worrying about the deadline for writing reviews I impose on the army of colleagues and talented freelancers who do most of the heavy lifting.

• Takeover was screened in November as part of the “Meet The Press Film Festival at AFI Fest.” Los Angeles’ largest annual film festival, AFI Fest returned to Hollywood in 2021 for live, in-person screenings (with a virtual component) of documentary, short, indie, studio, and foreign productions at the TCL Chinese Theatres. According to AFI’s website: “In partnership with NBC’s Meet the Press, these short documentaries spotlight compelling stories about pressing issues facing our society with conversations moderated by NBC News journalists.” Meet the Press, of course, is the long running TV news program.

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• Below is a list of my blog posts in the Advent of Bloggers (Series) category.

• The disruption has gotten so bad that some US politicians want the government to take on a bigger role in regulating shipping. Last week, a bipartisan group of House members passed legislation that would allow the Federal Maritime Commission, the US’s international ocean transportation agency, to pressure shipping companies to prioritize empty containers for American manufacturers and farmers.

• We weren’t always so dependent on these big metal boxes, though. The first commercial container ship voyage set sail in 1956, and it was only in the 1980s that this form of ocean freight really took off. As global trade proliferated, businesses realized that containers could make shipping cheaper and easier to manage at scale. Because these containers were standardized — they’re typically 20 feet or 40 feet long — thousands could be loaded onto a single cargo ship at once.

• Two weeks, two deals. And now four digital media companies are turning into two. Get ready for more of that.

• That’s the takeaway from Monday’s news that Vox Media — my employer — is close to acquiring Group Nine, the publisher behind outlets like The Dodo and NowThis. That deal announcement, first reported in the Wall Street Journal and then confirmed via a companywide email shortly after, comes days after BuzzFeed finished up buying Complex Networks, the publisher aimed at dudes who like hip-hop and sneakers.

Science

• The James Webb Space Telescope will not be in orbit around the Earth, like the Hubble Space Telescope is – it will actually orbit the Sun, 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from the Earth at what is called the second Lagrange point or L2. What is special about this orbit is that it lets the telescope stay in line with the Earth as it moves around the Sun. This allows the satellite’s large sunshield to protect the telescope from the light and heat of the Sun and Earth (and Moon).

• For now that 21-foot-wide eye is closed, the telescope folded like a clamshell. Gleaming in shades of gold, silver, and crinkled lavender, the $10-billion instrument is too big to fit inside one of the world’s biggest rockets, the Ariane 5, without being folded up.

• NASA is footing the bulk of the mission’s bill, but the European Space Agency, which contributed to two of the four on-board science instruments, is responsible for launching the telescope. That’s why, as soon as December 24, JWST is slated to take flight from ESA’s tropical spaceport in French Guiana—its final Earthly port of call before sailing beyond the reach of human hands.

• Following launch, the telescope will require about a month to travel to L2, the second Lagrangian point, a point located at some four times the moon’s distance.

• Webb is the result of over 20 years of planning and development. Several elements make the space observatory unique and help ensure it will meet its objectives: [...]

Education

• In case you actually do want to make a GDPR/CCPA request, here is the process and the rough steps I will take: [...]

• Kenyon Wilson is the associate head of performing arts at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and decided to put an Easter egg in the syllabus for his music seminar class this past semester.

• The hint read: “Thus (free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five), students may be ineligible to make up classes and …”

• This would have led students to a locker that contained a $50 bill, free to the first student to claim it. But at the end of the semester, when he went to check the locker, the bill was still there.

• Harvard University announced Saturday that it will return to remote learning for the first few weeks of 2022 as infection concerns grow in the face of a new coronavirus variant.

• The Ivy League institution told students and staff that it would spend the first three weeks of January returning to online courses as coronavirus infections increase locally and worldwide. Only students who were authorized to remain on campus or are given permission to return to campus should plan on coming back from winter break in that time.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• In a seismic victory for justice and accountability that re-opens the deeply flawed recent September, 2020 settlement of the Purdue pharma bankruptcy case, the Sackler family will be forced to confront the pain and devastation they have allegedly caused. Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, ruled, Dec.16, 2021,that the settlement, part of a restructuring plan for Purdue approved in September by a bankruptcy judge, Robert Drain, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, White Plains, N.Y., should not go forward because it releases the company’s owners, members of the billionaire Sackler family, from liability in civil opioid-related cases.

• Kyoko Kimura has reportedly claimed that staff on the show encouraged her daughter to heighten the drama.

• This year, the Tokyo District Court ordered Fuji TV and the production company to submit scripts, pre-edited footage and other materials after a request from Kyoko’s lawyers, according to Japanese media reports.

• Speaking to journalists in New York, Antonio Guterres also asked Member States to be “far more ambitious” in their efforts to reach 70 per cent of people in all countries by the middle of 2022, a goal established by the World Health Organization (WHO).

• Just days from the deadline, 98 countries have not been able to meet that end-of-year target, and 40 nations have not yet even been able to vaccinate 10 per cent of their population. In lower-income countries, less than 4 per cent of the population is immunized.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• The Conseil des écoles publiques de l’Est de l’Ontario issued a press release November 30 announcing it had been attacked, and that after resecuring the network it was discovered that some files stored at its board office had been stolen and held for ransom.

• The board said it had paid the attackers and the data that had been stolen [sic] was deleted.

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

• ConsenSys Health, a company creating decentralized patient-centric healthcare networks, and Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH), which builds, secures and sustains open source software for public health authorities, have commenced a collaboration focused on the uniquely complex healthcare needs of United States veterans and their families.

• The collaboration includes the creation of an LFPH-hosted Veterans Affairs Steering Committee focusing initially on current and contemplated open source software components to power VICI. Under the leadership of ConsenSys Health and the non-profit Dixon Center for Military and Veterans Services, the VICI (Veterans Incentivized Coordination and Integration) initiative is convening a consortium of enterprise and public sector stakeholders to focus on the healthcare needs of veterans, their families and caregivers.

Security

• Josh and Kurt talk about the same topic everyone is talking about, Log4j. This episode was recorded on the Wednesday after the first Log4j issue. We point out all the gaps and difficulties for the defenders. The situation has gotten worse since then.

• Due to the extraordinary widespread use of the open-source Apache Log4j library, the saga of the Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) vulnerability is nowhere near finished.

• As Dr. Johannes Ullrich, Dean of Research at the SANS Technology Institute, recently noted, “Log4Shell will continue to haunt us for years to come.”

• His advice? “Dealing with Log4Shell will be a marathon. Treat it as such.” So let’s see what’s the latest news that can impact your mitigation and remediation efforts.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Palantir Technologies Inc (PLTR.N) said on Friday it plans to shift its entire UK data processing out of the United States, at a time when data privacy regulations are tightening across the globe.

• While Palantir already hosts all UK customer data within the country, handling of metadata is currently done in the United States.

• The company handles sensitive data for its clients in the UK including the National Health Service (NHS).

Defence/Aggression

• Here in Red Sox Nation, baseball fans are given to wearing T-shirts that read “Yankees Suck!” Another local sentiment, perhaps even more widespread, goes like this: “Congress Sucks!”

• As we shall see, Marx later revised this idea, coming to embrace the relevance of the communal past for the socialist future. However, this backward-looking shift in Marx is not well-known, and it has not kept the bulk of the socialist movement from being oblivious to the importance of communitarian pasts. Latin America may be an exception to this general theoretical trend, for the simple reason that that continent’s past weighs heavily on the present and many political movements appeal to it. In Venezuela, anthropologists Iraida Vargas and Mario Sanoja have forcefully argued for the pertinence of the region’s communal past – and the relics of communitarian practices that survive today – to the project of socialist construction. They claim that both Venezuela’s history and its long-standing cultural traditions could be the basis of the Bolivarian Process’s development of communal socialism, having uncovered some surprising links between the future that the revolution aspires to and its roots in a society whose practices of solidarity and deep-seated conceptions of equality are often shaped by Indigenous and African traditions.

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• BREAKING: Gabriel Boric defeats José Antonio Kast - 56% to 44%.

• The Associated Press is reporting:

• British journalist Claude Cockburn once claimed that he won a contest among the sub-editors on the London Times to write the dullest headline and actually get it published in the paper. His winning headline was ‘Small Earthquake in Chile, Not Many Hurt’.

• “I promise you. I am ISIS, I was with ISIS, I will continue with ISIS, ISIS is best, ISIS is best, ISIS is best,” the man shouts as he is arrested.

• The election Sunday is Hong Kong’s first since a dramatic overhaul of its electoral system, which critics say is aimed at tightening Beijing’s grip on the legislature, known as the Legislative Council, and further silencing opposition figures. Many of the territory’s democratic politicians are in prison or awaiting trial; others have been barred from running, resigned from politics or gone into self-exile overseas after a crackdown on dissent that included a sweeping national security law Beijing imposed last year.

• The drastic shift has tamped down public enthusiasm for the election, with fewer than half of voters saying they plan to participate, compared to a record 71 percent turnout in the district council election in 2019.

• Khan seemed to offer Taliban a pass on their limits on education for girls, urging the world to understand “cultural sensitivities” and saying human rights and women’s rights meant different things in different countries. Still other speakers, including the OIC chairman Hussain Ibrahim Taha, emphasized the need for the protection of human rights, particularly those of women and girls.

Environment

• This article is part of “The Fifth Crime,” a series on ecocide published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news outlet that covers climate, energy and the environment, and Undark Magazine, a nonprofit, editorially independent digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society.

Energy

• Russia’s central bank ratcheted up its campaign against private cryptocurrencies on Friday, a day after Reuters reported it wants to ban investments in them.

• Valeriy Lyakh, head of its department for countering market misconduct, said in a video that investment in cryptocurrencies was an “out-and-out swindle” and a “financial pyramid”.

• All four have amassed multi-billion-dollar fortunes, and huge influence, in just a few years. In conventional finance, where money is commonly borrowed, spent or saved, the most powerful intermediaries are bankers, payment firms and asset managers. But private currencies today are mostly used to speculate, which makes exchange bosses, who provide punters with the tools and venues to trade, the kings of a world whose raison d’être, paradoxically, is to do away with mighty middlemen.

Finance

• “I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation,” Mr. Manchin said on “Fox News Sunday, “I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there. This is a no.”

• The comments from Mr. Manchin dealt a fatal blow to the legislation that is central to President Joe Biden’s agenda.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The religion-science-politics overlap is clear when scripture-quoting antiabortionists who’d be happy about bombing infidels in Afghanistan fly a “Pro-Life is Pro-Science” banner, and claim that the Roe v Wade ruling was “musty” because “science has changed”. There’s rather less science in the “odious little argument”, as Jean and Peter Medawar called it, of the Great Beethoven Fallacy which goes that terminating a pregnancy because the father was syphilitic and the mother tubercular would have meant murdering Beethoven. Actually, neither of Beethoven’s parents had syphilis. But truth’s not the aim. As the Medawars note, unless there’s a causal connection whereby a tubercular mother and syphilitic father produce musical geniuses, abstinence from intercourse would equally as well do the job of depriving the world of a Beethoven. Any celebrity will do. Justin Bieber’s an occasional update. And, since it’s a fatuous discussion, Hitler can be used as a counterargument. Meanwhile, the question of women’s rights is whisked away from the debate, and antiabortionists like Rep. Madison Cawthorn can speak of women as “earthen vessels sanctified by almighty God”.

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• The telecom department will develop an internal task force with the relevant skill sets and capabilities required specifically for the telecom sector. “This sub task force will work in conjunction with the unified national-level cyber security task force that has been envisaged,” the source said, adding that 20 officers have already been identified for getting embedded into the project. “There are also plans to add more officers, with specialised skills sets, to this team as we move forward,” the source said.

• The current cyber threats are handled by the specialised Indian Computer Emergency Response Team or CERT-In, which operates under the Ministry of Electronics and IT. It is the nodal agency to deal with cyber security threats like hacking and phishing, and strengthens security-related defence of the Indian internet domain. However, with the cyberattacks getting more sophisticated, the government has increasingly felt the need to have a specialised unified task force that acts on inputs not only from security and cyber forces from within the country, but also from inputs from ‘like-minded friendly countries’ from across the world.

• Ted Cruz fighting with Big Bird on Twitter was not on our 2021 Bingo card.

• Facebook (FB.O) has paid 17 million roubles ($229,643) in fines owed in Russia for failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal, the Interfax news agency reported on Sunday, but with the threat of a potentially larger fine looming.

• Facebook parent Meta, along with Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), faces a court case next week for suspected repeated violations of Russian legislation on content and could be fined a percentage of its annual revenue in Russia. read more

Misinformation/Disinformation

• After rumors of a school shooting threat on December 17 that spread on TikTok—called “National School Shooting Day” or “National Shoot Up Your School Day”—many schools around the country are closing for the day or beefing up police presence, but law enforcement and the platform say none of the threats appear to be credible.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Vestager’s proposal needs to be ironed out with EU countries and lawmakers next year before it can become law, the first of its kind in the world.

• The verdict of that court sentenced him to four years in prison and 800 lashes but after appeal another judge passed a death sentence on Fayadh three days ago, said Coogle.

• “I have read the trial documents from the lower court verdict in 2014 and another one from 17 November. It is very clear he has been sentenced to death for apostasy,” Coogle said.

Civil Rights/Policing

• My experience with Syncthing quickly sent me down the self-hosting rabbit hole. I looked at what else I could host myself, and found simply everything: photo collections (like Google Photos); recipe managers; chat services that you can connect with the popular tools like Discord; read-it-later services for bookmarking; RSS readers; budgeting tools; and so much more. There’s also the whole world of alternative social media services, like Mastodon and PixelFed, to replace Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, which can be self-hosted as a private network or used to join others around the world.

• Self-hosting is something I’ve found fun to learn about and tinker with, even if it is just for myself. Others, like KmisterK, find new opportunities as well. “Eventually, a career path started with it, and from there, being in the community professionally kept me personally interested as a hobby.” Edward also found a connection with his career in IT infrastructure, but still continues self-hosting. “It is nice to be able to play around in a low risk/impact environment,” he said.

• More than a year passed before Bala, an ex-Muslim and president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, would be charged. Bala is an outspoken atheist in a deeply religious country. His alleged crime: Posting blasphemous statements online.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• On Sunday, YouTube said a monthly subscription had reverted to $64.99, but affected users would receive a one-time $15 discount.

• Disney and YouTube TV have reached a deal today to put more than a dozen Disney-owned channels back on Google’s internet TV streaming service.

• The news follows a previous announcement late Friday that the two had failed to reach an agreement before their contract expired, and users were informed they would no longer have access to the channels, which included ESPN, Disney, FX, and other Disney-owned properties.

Monopolies

• Apple Inc (AAPL.O) has asked India’s antitrust watchdog to throw out a case alleging abuse of market power in the apps market, saying it is too small a player in the South Asian country where Google is dominant, a filing seen by Reuters shows.

• The filing was made after the Competition Commission of India (CCI) started reviewing allegations that Apple hurts competition by forcing app developers to use its proprietary system which can charge commissions of up to 30% on in-app purchases.

• Apple denied the allegations in its filing to the CCI and stressed that its market share in India is an “insignificant” 0-5%, while Google commands 90-100% as its Android operating system powers most other smartphones.

Copyrights

• Fakku is one of the few companies that succesfully transformed a ‘pirate’ operation into a legitimate business. After this transformation, the ‘hentai’ publisher started to crack down on pirate sites. With a recent takedown request, it went too far, flagging TorrentFreak for copyright infringement.

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