● 12.21.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 21/12/2021: GIMP 2.10.30 and Qubes OS 4.1 RC3

Posted in News Roundup at 5:26 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Trading become a popular way to invest especially after COVID. However, if you are a Trader who is switching to Linux and thinking about which Linux distro you should use for stocks or Forex day trading, then here are options to consider.

• Well, trading can be done on any operating system even on Android or iOS; the thing which creates the problem is the availability of the Trading software for Linux OS by the brokers. Well, there are only a few brokers who offer Linux clients otherwise only for Windows.

• Therefore, the only solution left is either use a web-based trading platform or use Wine on Linux to install your Trafing software meant for Windows. For example, if you are a Forex trader then it is possible to easily install MT4 or MT5 on a Linux system. Hence, here is a list of Linux distributions that are popular and easy to use.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Today we are looking at MakuluLinux Shift Gen 2 Ubuntu. It is based on Ubuntu 21.10, Linux Kernel 5.11, and uses about 1.6GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!

Kernel Space

• AMD’s Yellow Carp enablement has been going back to early summer for this next-generation APU that is better known as Rembrandt for the Ryzen 6000 mobile series. While there has already been the graphics support to land, sensor support, and various other functionality, only coming now with the next kernel cycle will be Ethernet support.

• Coming seemingly late compared to the other Rembrandt / Yellow Carp feature code introduced prior cycles is now having Ethernet support, especially with wired network connectivity still rather important to many users. This Yellow Carp Ethernet support doesn’t require some shiny new driver either but is being added onto the existing and-xgbe driver. As well, Yellow Carp uses an existing PCI ID (0x14b5) but requires a few changes for properly supporting.

• An Alibaba engineer is proposing a standalone SM3 crypto library within the Linux kernel and with optimizations for x86_64 AVX usage nets up to a 38% performance improvement for this crypto algorithm.

• SM3 is another Chinese hashing function standard for digital signatures and other use-cases similar to SHA256 and part of the Chinese Commercial Cryptography suite. There has been SM3 hashing code in the Linux kernel since 2017 as well as support within Arm’s TrustZone CryptoCell “CCREE” driver.

• It was just over one week ago the systemd 250 release candidate was issued (along with a brown paper bag 250-rc2 fix-up release). Systemd 250 has a ton of changes for this init system and more while today systemd 250-rc3 was released with yet more changes in tow.

• Besides fixes and other maintenance items in systemd 250-rc3, more minor feature work has continued to land during the release candidate phase.

Graphics Stack

• For the Valve-funded Xrdesktop has allowed GNOME and KDE desktops to be VR-aware, Collabora has been developing WXRD as a standalone Wayland compositor for XR/VR use-cases.

• WXRD is a standalone Wayland compositor for the xrdesktop to offer better integration than what can be achieved using the existing patches around KDE KWin and GNOME Shell integration. WXRD is built atop the wl-roots Wayland support library as well as WXRC as a Wayland XR compositor for VR headsets. WXRC hasn’t seen too much activity lately while now Collabora is pushing ahead with WXRD as the new XR/VR Wayland compositor.

• Last week I wrote about the interesting HIPSPV back-end for LLVM to take AMD HIP code — which generally starts off as NVIDIA CUDA code to begin with before the HIP-ification — and to be able to output that from the LLVM compiler stack as the SPIR-V intermediate representation used across OpenCL and Vulkan drivers. The goal with this is to be able to take AMD HIP code and ultimately be able to run it on Intel graphics processors but potentially other vendors/drivers too given the vendor-neutral SPIR-V. More of that HIPSPV work is now hitting mainline LLVM.

• The open-source Broadcom “V3DV” Vulkan driver within Mesa that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi can now run on Android.

• For those making use of Google’s Android on the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer as an alternative to conventional Linux distributions, V3DV can now work there too for providing Vulkan API support. This support now upstream in Mesa was based on earlier work by Android-RPi and Lineage-RPi developers. Some of this Android-specific support code was based as well on the open-source Intel “ANV” and Qualcomm “TURNIP” Mesa Vulkan drivers too.

• Vulkan 1.2.203 is out with many fixes/updates to the specification documentation to end out the year as well as introducing three new extensions.

• For being just another two-week update to the Vulkan API, Vulkan 1.2.203 does come with a large number of fixes/clarifications — 11 changes stemming from internal issues and another five public GitHub issues.

Applications

• Improve your writing and craft better content with these free and open-source writing apps for Linux.

• Writers are always looking for some exciting tools to compile their written pieces. Despite the various options in the market, there is always an ongoing need to look for open-source options, which won’t burn a hole in the pocket.

• If you are a Linux user, you are in luck, for there are plenty of excellent open-source apps that you can use on your machine. A majority of these apps offer premium-grade type features for free.

• If you’re raring to go, then check out these top open-source writing tools enlisted below.

Instructionals/Technical

• From OpenSSH 8.2 release it supports authentication using FIDO/U2F. These tokens are required to implement the ECDSA-P256 “ecdsa-sk” key type, but some (say Yubikey) also supports Ed25519 (ed25519-sk) keys. In this example I am using a Yubikey 5.

• I am going to generate a non-discoverable key on the card itself. Means along with the card, we will also have a key on disk, and one will need both to authenticate. If someone steals you Yubikey, they will not be able to login just via that.

• Arduino is open-source by design, meaning anyone can use this board architecture to design their own custom-made Arduino. It is used to create a device that can interact with the environment using sensors and actuators.

• Millions of boards are sold to big industries and factories every year to automate environment relative tasks. These include checking room temperature, delivering equipment using an IR sensor, etc.

• What version of Linux am I running? Have you ever been staring at a CLI prompt wondering how to check what version of Linux or which Kernel version you are running on your Linux system? If so, read on, as we will go through a bunch of commands to show you how to get this information.

• In this tutorial we’ll explain how to use SSH port forwarding and create a secure tunnel over the network, i.e., SSH Tunneling.

• Have you ever used a VPN (Virtual Private Network)? We use VPN to access regionally restricted contents, secure browsing, and many more.

• VPN allows public internet users to connect to a private network and browse the internet as if they (public users) were on the private network.

• Thus, it is called a “Virtual” Private Network.

• On the other hand, SSH (Secure Shell) is a protocol that uses the client-server communication model to provide a secure channel for operating network services.

• SSH provides encryption and can secure any network services over an unsecured network.

• When we hear about SSH, we generally think of it as being a tool used for remote login and command execution. However, SSH can be used in many ways other than this – transfer files, forward local or remote ports (used as a tunnel), etc.

• Amidst the holidays that perhaps aren’t turning out exactly as hoped, one can take comfort in small tokens of continuity – like the fact that xsnow is still being actively maintained.

• Thanks, everyone, for all the good software. Let’s extract the best from the year to come.

• Telnet has been around since 1969. Telnet is originally an abbreviation for “Telecommunication Network” and describes a protocol from the TCP/IP world with which text-based commands can be executed on remote computers.

• Using it the user can have remote access to the remote computer using Telnet client-server architecture via IP address. A suitable telnet client is available for almost all operating systems. It is still used to configure old hardware, especially industrial and scientific devices to diagnose and resolve technical problems.

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install HPLIP 3.21.12 in Fedora 35, MX Linux 21, and Elementary OS 6.

• HPLIP – HP Linux Image and Printing, developed by HP for Printing, scanning, and faxing with HP inkjet and laser-based printers in Linux platforms.

• The latest version of HPLIP 3.21.12 contains new Distro support only and the hplip installer is available for download from SourceForge.

• Do you want to run minimal Ubuntu 20.04 Cloud Image on VirtualBox? Then here is a simple and quick tutorial to do that…

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is the popular server and desktop Linux operating system, however, the standard image of it is around 1GB or more, which would not be a cup of tea forever body. Especially those who want to run Ubuntu to test some Linux server applications but without investing much hardware resources.

• Earlier there was minimal ISO image available by Ubuntu developers, however not after 18.04. Therefore, we have another option that is a cloud Image, available to use by cloud platforms. But we can use the same on VirtualBox and here are the simple steps to do that.

• In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Fedora 35.

• Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast.

• Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions.

• Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection.

• Amazon CloudWatch Events describe changes in AWS resources. We can match events and route them to one or more target functions. CloudWatch Events come to know about operational changes as they occur, e.g. if a defined resource in the Cloudwatch Rule has been created then the rule would come to know about it and in return it will trigger a target function.

• Before we proceed and create an event rule, let’s understand basics of it.

• Bugzilla is a free and open-source bug tracking system that allows us to track the bugs and collaborate with developers and other teams in our organization. It helps us to keep track of bugs, issues, and other change requests in their products effectively. It was adopted by thousands of organizations across the globe due to its robust features. It is written in Perl and uses MySQL/MariaDB as a database backend.

• In this article, I will explain how to install Bugzilla on Debian 11.

• Vivaldi is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It had grown from the downfall of Opera with many disgruntled when it changed from the Presto layout engine to a Chromium-based browser. This platform angered traditional Opera users. Since then, Vivaldi has become one of the most popular alternative Internet Browsers amongst the big three Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

• Vivaldi promotes itself as a leading browser with faster navigation, clever bookmarking, more intelligent browsing, extensive tab management, and a more visual approach.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Vivaldi Browser on Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS.

• Redis is an in-memory key-value store which can save abstract data structures with high performance. The open-source software is typically used for database, messaging, and caching functions.

• Docker is the leading toolkit for packaging applications into containers. It lets you isolate software components into independent environments with their own filesystem.

• In this guide, we’ll use Docker to quickly deploy Redis using the official image on Docker Hub. Compared to bare metal installation, Docker enables a simpler set up procedure and won’t pollute your host with new packages. Make sure you’ve got a functioning Docker installation on your host before you continue.

• A common use case for EC2 On-Demand and Spot Instances is using powerful machines for short-term, one-off tasks. However, if you were to leave these machines running on accident, you may end up with a very large bill. Luckily, AWS has tools to prevent that.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Centreon Monitoring on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Centreon is an open-source tool that can monitor your entire infrastructure including network, system, and application. Centreon drives business performance excellence aligning IT operations with business objectives. Using Centreon you can set notifications depending on thresholds, set email alerts, easily add any system for monitoring.

• 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 Centreon monitoring on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and Rocky Linux distributions.

• Debugging helps you to fix the errors in your program. In this article, we will discuss various methods to debug bash scripts in Linux and Unix operating systems.

Games

• You don’t look in the mouth of a given horse: Epic Games’ strategy of expanding its user base with free games is having an effect even on many die-hard Linux gamers. A good 150 games have already gathered in this way in the author’s Epic Games account.

• In many cases, the collected games can also be played under Linux with the help of Wine, but a Linux version of the Epic Games Launcher is not in sight. Open source tools such as Heroic Games Launcher, Legendary or Lutris fill the gap. With the help of the compatibility layer Wine (or its Fork Proton), the tools pretend Windows games to have a suitable operating system environment.

• Thanks to Valve’s ProtonDB compatibility layer, 80% of Steam’s top 100 games are now playable within Linux operating systems. The new milestone was achieved today and shows how committed Valve is to get as many games as possible to run on Linux from the Steam library. That’s due in no small part to the new Steam Deck running on Valve’s own Linux-based SteamOS.

• But the accolades don’t stop there. If you go to protondb.com you can see that 75% of the top one-thousand most popular Steam games are also playable within Linux. This means there’s a good chance most of your favorite Steam titles are probably playable on Linux already, making Linux adoption even easier than before.

Distributions

New Releases

• elementary unveiled elementary OS 6.1. This is the first point-release in the 6.x series. elementary OS 6.1 is based on Ubuntu 20.04.3 and powered by Linux kernel 5.11. It includes all of the monthly OS updates since the OS 6 release.

• The third release candidate for Qubes 4.1 is here! There are no major changes to report. We’ve just focused on fixing bugs that were discovered and reported in the second release candidate.

• If you’re currently using either any Qubes 4.1 release candidate, a regular update is sufficient to upgrade to the latest one. Otherwise, read on for more about how to get started with testing Qubes 4.1-rc3.

• Elementary announced the availability of Elementary OS 6.1, the first point-release in the 6.x series. Here’s what’s new.

• Elementary OS 6.1 Jolnir has been released. It’s the follow up to Elementary 6 Odin, which released four months ago. In that time period they boasted 240,000 downloads not including torrents.

• Of course Elementary OS 6 users already have all the new features because this distribution is a rolling release. But for newcomers there’s a ton of new stuff to take a look so let’s begin.

• Yes, unfortunately. Linux development is controlled by techies — “breaking things is the new norm”. Yes, true.

• I think that by the time I get to thinking of moving to Wayland, I’ll be pushing up daisies.

• ChromeOS, yes, watching that. Apparently there are still issues with running Linux apps. Don’t recall, think it runs Debian in a container, so the whole techie-driven ecosystem is still there.

• Oops, the “update” script was broken. I had created a folder at ibiblio.org, amd64/releases/dunfell/2022, thinking that in future will group the releases by year. However, that upsets the update. Have removed that folder, until I fix the script.

• I did an “erase session” to get rid of a lot of junk from development work, then clicked on “update” on the desktop — that’s when I discovered the problem. Now fixed, and did an update from 3.1.15 to 3.1.17.

BSD

• I wish I had BastilleBSD twenty years ago. I had a part-time sysadmin job – running web servers. PHP started to become popular by the turn of the century. Using jails on FreeBSD seemed to be a safe environment to run PHP-enabled web servers. However, there were no tools yet to work with jails. I had to write many scripts to build and update jails.

Arch Family

• Here I’ve created a list of the 3 best Arch-based user-friendly Linux distributions that you should try out.

• Arch Linux is a rolling release, bleeding edge operating system used mostly by advanced Linux users. From installing to managing, Arch Linux lets you handle everything, giving you all the power and control you’ll ever need.

• This is probably one of the reasons why Arch has a cult following in the Linux community.

• Unfortunately, Arch comes with its drawbacks in the form of the complicated installation procedure, for example. You will need also to use command line more than any other distribution.

• So you really want to use Arch Linux, but you are a little bit scared about its complexity? Well, then give Arch a try from a different angle. While Arch Linux itself isn’t a good pick for beginners, a lot of the distributions based on it are definitely very user-friendly.

• Here is a list of the 3 best Arch-based distributions to check out.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• At Nest, I delivered a talk called “Exploring Our Bugs“. But a single snapshot isn’t very useful. Building on the work there, let’s make this a regular thing. With the recent Fedora Linux 33 end-of-life, I’ve added F33 bugs to the bug exploration notebook. Here’s a few of my key findings.

• The next major release from CentOS Stream is here, this successor of CentOS 8 will give us a glimpse of what lies ahead in RHEL 9 for users. Here are the links to download the CentOS 9 Stream ISO Images.

• CentOS Stream is designed as a continuous delivery distribution to provide every single stable version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is because to make the Red Hat better and bug-free the company decided to repurpose CentOS as an upstream for its enterprise distribution. Which earlier was a downstream stable replica of RHEL and was popular among the server users because of the stability.

• However, as per the announcement, the packages before including in the CentOS stream will go through several series of automated and manual tests and checks to ensure that the strict standards for inclusion in RHEL are met.

• Also, the updates in the unreleased minor version of RHEL will be the same as the ones published in the Stream, in short, the main key of having CentOS stream by the company is to make RedHat more stable and robust.

• Well, this rolling release system is based on Fedora 34 and forms the basis of the upcoming RHEL 9 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). The latter has been in beta since the beginning of November.

Debian Family

• I’ve created new ISO images for FAI. Now, they install Debian 11 using kernel 5.10. The ISOs are available from

• https://fai-project.org/fai-cd

• There’s also a Ubuntu version of the FAI CD which installs Ubuntu LTS 20.04 in two variants. A desktop and a server installation is available.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• A new minor version of Elementary OS, a rather modernist and minimalist Ubuntu derivative, fixes a lot of small details. The Register took it for a quick spin.

• Fans of American Gods might recognise that Odin, the Allfather of the Norse gods, has many names – and “Jólnir” is one of them. Elementary OS 6.1 makes quite substantial changes for a point release, but if you were already running 6.0 and you update regularly, you probably already have it.

Devices/Embedded

• The thing you didn’t even know you wanted is here: SimulaVR have been working hard on bringing Linux to the VR world and the result is the SimulaVR One and, well, it actually looks pretty cool.

• Now, you might be thinking, do we need Linux in a VR headset? It’s a good question and the answer, in our view, is why not. The year of Linux has been coming for a while and SimulaVR might have just found the missing piece.

• The SimulaVR Simula One probably isn’t going to wind up on our gaming-focused list of the best VR headsets, but it’s certainly unique. Its goal is to function as a VR workstation, by replacing your physical monitors with a virtual environment to get work done. The Simula One runs a Linux operating system on a small intel NUC attached to the headset itself.

• Since the headset isn’t aimed at gamers, high graphics horsepower is not required. So the team behind SimulaVR opted to use an Intel NUC 11 compute element equipped with a Core i7-1165G7 processor. It’s a quad-core hyperthreaded CPU with a peak boost of 4.7GHz and Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics.

OpenStreetMap

• Facebook uses OSM world wide. They do a lot of quality-assurance (QA) work on OSM data as they were burned by a malicious user changing the name of New York City to Jewtroplis. As part of their work they now release a dataset called Daylight. Daylight is basically OSM data (+ other Open Data, like the Bing buildings) delayed with QA tests. They employ nobody in the OSM community.

• Amazon do a lot of work globally to help their delivery drivers, mainly by mapping new residential roads and driveways. They employ nobody in the OSM community.

• Ordnance Survey, the National mapping agency in Great Britain (GB), now uses OSM for all data outside of GB, and some data inside. Comically, some of the OSM data they use inside GB is because they couldn’t agree on a licensing agreement with themselves. They employ nobody in the OSM community.

• [...]

• I’ve been working on a Places dataset by scraping Linked Data and Microdata from first party websites. But due to issues with the source data going off spec means I basically have to write some code for each site anyway. Plus, I don’t have the resources to do a large scale web crawl to find independent shop websites.

• And even then, this data is probably covered by Database rights in the UK and European Union so it can’t be used in OSM without the data owners permission. It’s surprisingly hard to get companies to give you permission to copy data from there website, it’s basically free advertising for them, but they are still reluctant.

• In the UK we’ve reached a mid-point, we use the dataset for QA, and to identify areas that need an independent survey to collect missing data. Depending on the interpretation of Database rights, even that may be infringing.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

FSF

GNU Projects

• GIMP 2.10.30 is once again mostly a bugfix release, with many fixes and incremental improvements, not so much on the “new feature” side.

• GIMP 3.0 still isn’t ready for release and won’t be in 2021 but the GIMP 2.10.30 release is out today in time for working on your Christmas photos or holiday cards.

• GIMP 2.10.30 is primarily a maintenance/bug-fix release but does carry some improvements worth noting. GIMP 2.10.30 includes changes such as…

• GIMP 2.10.30 ships with many fixes and incremental improvements, but not so much on the new feature side.

• For years now, GIMP has been one of the best free alternatives for commercial image editing suites like Photoshop. It is a bitmap/pixel-based image manipulation program for photo editing and retouching and creating images and animations.

• There’s still some time to go before seeing the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release for this open source image manipulation program but at least out today is GIMP 2.10.30 for bettering the current stable series. Let’s see what’s new!

• GIMP image editor got a new bug-fix release for the current 2.10 stable series today. Here’s what’s new and how to install it in Ubuntu 20.04 & Ubuntu 21.10.

• GIMP 2.10.30 improved several file format supports. PSD support received various types of improvements allowing it to load more sub-cases of PSD. And, AVIF export now favors AOM encoder.

• Color picking from Colors dockable can now use the Freedesktop API when available. The screenshot plugin for GNOME 41 has been dropped due to restricted API. And, in KDE it uses in priority the Freedesktop API.

Programming/Development

• A new maintenance RcppSMC release 0.2.6 arrived at CRAN yesterday. It chiefly updates the code to comply with g++-11 which default to C++17 – which brings us std::data(). And if one is not careful, as we weren’t in three files, this can clash with other uses of data as I tweeted a good week ago. Otherwise some JSS URLs now sport the preferred shorter doi form.

• RcppSMC provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his JSS article. Sequential Monte Carlo is also referred to as Particle Filter in some contexts. The package features the Google Summer of Code work by Leah South in 2017, and by Ilya Zarubin in 2021.

• Version 1.3.0 of the KDE Heaptrack project was just released by KDAB’s Milian Wolff.

• Heaptrack is a heap memory profiler on Linux-based operating systems. It can help you find hotspots that need to be optimized for reducing memory usage, memory leaks, allocation hotspots, and temporary allocations.

• Included in this release is a special new feature that NetworkRADIUS.com hired KDAB to develop: support for custom suppression files, including support for per-application embedded default suppression lists. This can be done by the same API that is already used by LSAN: __lsan_default_suppressions. KDAB is always more than happy to make improvements to products for their customers. And this change even made it into the very next release! Thanks to NetworkRADIUS.com for bringing this forward.

• This release also brings you filtering by time ranges. All you have to do to filter by time range is select a range of time and right click. The ability to see the difference between the two time points that results from this action is a very helpful new feature in the workflow of the heap memory analysis.

• When 802.11.ah WiFi operating in the 900 MHz frequency range for low-power long-range communication was announced in 2014, then named WiFi HaLow in 2016, I naively assumed it would soon compete against other LPWAN standards like LoRaWAN or Sigfox.

• However, over the next few years, we did not see much interest in the wireless standard. But it may be picking up now, as Gateworks recently announced a Newracom NRC7292 based 802.11ah WiFi HaLow Mini PCIe module for their Arm Linux SBC’s, and a company called Teledatics is about to launch Halo TD-XPAH 802.11ah Hallow development board featuring an AzureWave AW-HM482 module.

• I’ve been using Vim as my main text editor for 18 years, but for most of that time I’ve been using something very close to the default configuration: my vimrc contained not much more than preferences for indentation and how to visually indicate white space characters like tabs. Last but not least, I’ve used a single colour scheme for most of that time: Zenburn.

• Mold 1.0 is a production-ready, high-speed linker alternative to GNU’s Gold or LLVM’s LLD that currently is supported on Linux systems and written by the original LLD author.

• Rui Ueyama who previously spearheaded LLD as the LLVM linker has been recently designing Mold. Mold 1.0 marks the project’s first stable and production-ready release. Mold 1.0 doesn’t add any shiny new linker features over LLD or Gold, but that it’s much faster. Currently Linux systems are supported while plans are underway to extend the linker to macOS followed by Windows.

• Zstandard 1.5.1 is now available as the latest release of this widely-used data compression algorithm backed by Facebook that delivers on great performance. With the new release, performance is even better.

• In this article, we have discussed difference between REST API and SOAP API. Comparing REST vs SOAP API, REST works with plain text, JSON, XML and HTML whereas SOAP work only with XML formats. Moreover, SOAP API needs more bandwidth for its usage whereas REST API doesn’t need much bandwidth.

• Welcome to our monthly recap of all the articles published in December 2021! This month’s highlights include two quick guides for developers looking to integrate their favorite tools with Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, an elegant process for performance testing microservices on Kubernetes, a Quarkus developer’s guide to Java 17 language features, and more.

• C has influenced the shape of almost every programming language developed since the 1980s, says Richard Jensen.

• In this article, Jensen offers a brief look at the language’s history, which begins in England with a colleague of Alan Turing and a program that played checkers.

Qt

• In Qt, the vast majority of strings are held in QString objects, and most functions take strings by const QString& and return by QString. This works fine in practice, because QString is so readily created from string literals that for the most part, you don’t need to pay attention. The compiler will helpfully convert string literals to QString when calling such functions. It doesn’t convert std::string, nor even std::u16string, but who cares about those?

• A new major update of Qt for MCUs is now available. Download version 2.0 to benefit from the many improvements we have made based on your feedback in the last two years. Qt for MCUs 2.0 also includes new features such as text rendering in any language, new APIs for management and optimizations of graphical resources, and more.

Leftovers

• One of the countless, unexpected effects of the COVID lockdowns was and still is, says Wired a great increase of the amounts of highly sensitive data found in old, even really old computers. Like the case of a collector of vintage hardware buying this year a computer only sold in 1995 and 1996, and discovering it was still full of “all sorts of personal files, like tax records and letters to mom”.

• For both funny and worrying details do read the full piece. Here, I only need to motivate you with a quote from a security , but the gist is all in this declaration from a security consultant they interviewed:

• “If you don’t properly dispose of your old hardware, you effectively pass the buck to someone else to protect your data. And once that happens, it’s done. It’s a problem you can’t retrospectively fix.

Hardware

• The concept of vending machines in hackerspaces is nothing new, but [iooner] took it a step further – as hackers ought to. Putting HDDs into the rotating spring of a repurposed vending machine, right where you’d expect to see a Granola bar, isn’t revolutionary – but we don’t remember anybody doing it before this. And, with how heavy a typical HDD is, you are guaranteed to never encounter the “it just won’t fall down” issue that’s omnipresent with the snack-loaded machines.

• Nothing could illustrate the premise of this concept better than [iooner]’s video does, and hackerspaces acquiring and having fun with consumer-facing equipment is always fun to watch. A stereotypical hackerspace vending machine sells resistor packs and Arduino boards, but you wouldn’t see it venture into the realm of data storage and distribution. Given how cheap HDDs are nowadays, this concept could benefit us in a variety of applications – selling new HDDs to members for regular data storage use, or distributing hacking magazine archives and Wikipedia dumps, even exclusive release things like recordings of hackerspace lectures.

• For those who love travelling around the world, life hasn’t been great for the past two years. World-wide lockdowns and travel restrictions have kept many people stuck inside their own homes when they would rather be jetting off to distant cities. If you’re one of those bothered by Wanderlust, [Alex Shakespeare] might have a solution for you: a window that shows a live image from another location around the world.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

• The Joint Parliamentary Committee Report on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (PDP Bill) is here. The report, however, fails to tackle head-on one of the most pressing issues facing the country presently: surveillance reform. This leaves out any regulation or oversight over projects such as the National Intelligence Grid (NatGrid) or the CCTNS (Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System) which has databases on lakhs of Indians.

• Why should surveillance be regulated?

• Surveillance refers to the continuous or intermittent monitoring of a person or a group of people, usually without their knowledge, for the purpose of gathering information about their activities. There are two forms of surveillance, first targeted surveillance (Example: spyware such as Pegasus) and second, mass surveillance (Example: NatGrid, CCTNS, CMS & AFRS).

• Regulation of the surveillance by government authorities is an oft-debated topic. While one constituency argues for national security, the other places individual privacy as a more important priority. However, these interests can be reconciled by specific legislative choices which have been ignored by the Joint Parliamentary Committee in the proposed Data Protection Bill, 2021 (read our explainer here). Surveillance regulation when well crafted does not harm national security, but enhances our fundamental rights along with institutional processes that ensure such capabilities are not used for political purposes. This principle of accountability and oversight in surveillance practices has been recognised by many liberal democracies.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation is sharing a report on enterprise use of data and storage as they relate to cloud services and workloads.

• The Linux Foundation released the 2021 “Data and Storage Trends” report “in the era” of cloud-native, edge computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and 5G solutions, according to the foundation last month.

Security

• Earlier this year, Ubiquiti allegedly suffered a breach, which seemed to reinforce the hesitation some customers have with using the UniFi platform, given that it has a cloud-connected controller. Now, months later, an unexpected bombshell was dropped – it looks like the company wasn’t compromised by an outside attacker after all, recent developments seem to point to the whole fiasco being an inside job!

• The Log4Shell vulnerability is making its rounds all over security news sites, and with good reason – it’s quite easy to execute. In this episode, Jay and Joao discuss the vulnerability that exists within log4j, as well as some ways to keep your server safe.

• TheLog4Shell vulnerability is taking the Internet by storm, and it’s already being used for real-world attacks. In this video, Jay discusses the details around Log4Shell vulnerability in Log4j, and also CrowdSec’s community-based response to the situation.

• Security updates have been issued by Mageia (log4j), openSUSE (chromium, log4j, netdata, and nextcloud), Oracle (kernel and kernel-container), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, log4j, openssl, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), Slackware (httpd), SUSE (xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (firefox).

Misinformation/Disinformation

• What is disinformation? Disinformation is false or misleading information, created to influence people. It can take many different forms and existed well before the internet. Every country struggles with the spread of disinformation online, whether you live in a functioning democracy or under an authoritarian regime. It often surrounds divisive political subjects, such as migration, vaccination, or policies on gender, sexuality, race, religion, and more.

• As communications moved online, so did disinformation. The advertising business models of large online platforms, which exploit our personal data in order to profit from it, have contributed to the rapid spread of disinformation. During the global pandemic, we have witnessed how disinformation, often manufactured and spread by politicians and other public figures, can incite violence and discrimination against marginalised groups. Disinformation has been linked to low vaccination rates, the silencing of marginalised voices, and the undermining of the public’s trust in journalism. As UN Special Rapporteur Irene Khan writes, “Essentially, disinformation is a modern way in the digital era of making money by purposefully spreading lies.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• It seems that the labels attached as fact-checking classifications to articles shared on Facebook are, said Facebook lawyers, nothing but protected opinions.

• Personally, I know nothing about the lawsuit in which Facebook’s (sorry, Meta’s) lawyers made such a statement. I just agree with the author of the email where I discovered this story that it is“an interesting line of defense. I don’t know if, as the article linked above puts it, such a position could possibly become “a looming legal disaster for Facebook”. But…

Civil Rights/Policing

• Below is an excerpt of the joint submission between the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) and the Citizen Lab to the Toronto Police Services Board. You can find the full letter here.

• Citizen Lab has conducted in-depth analysis of the human rights impacts of emerging technologies in the areas of predictive policing and algorithmic surveillance. Its findings and law reform recommendations are found in a report that was released in 2020 by the Citizen Lab and the International Human Rights Program, titled To Surveil and Predict: A Human Rights Analysis of Algorithmic Policing in Canada. Read the full report and our explanatory guide that provides a summary of research findings as well as questions and answers from the research team. We also provide a fact sheet of our key investigative findings here.

Monopolies

• In the wake of Brexit, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been flexing its muscles as the world’s “mega-watchdog” competition enforcer. The CMA has lately been extremely active, widening its territorial jurisdiction, with a renewed focus on merger control in digital markets.

• In the words of the CMA’s Chief Executive, Dr Andrea Coscelli, the UK is “in a very strong position to lead” global competition enforcement, “because the upside [of leaving the EU] is that you take back control – genuinely – of the decisions.” Given the CMA’s global ambitions, Brexit provides the opportunity: the CMA now has jurisdiction over merger cases that were previously reserved to the European Commission.

• Extended Jurisdictional Scope

• The CMA’s global ambitions have resulted in a series of cases stretching the boundaries of its jurisdictional thresholds. The UK’s “share of supply” test is inherently flexible, looking for only an “increment” in a “share of supply” where one party has an existing presence of significance. It is designed to allow intervention where revenue-based thresholds may fall short. That being said, the CMA can now be said to routinely investigate cases even where one of the merging parties has no UK sales of relevance.

• In each of Sabre/Farelogix (2020) and Roche/Spark (2020), the acquired company had no UK revenues. In the former case, the acquired company had no direct UK customers (and the parties ultimately took the CMA to court over the issue, though ultimately losing). In the latter, the CMA established the threshold “share of supply” based on the share of specialist researchers employed by the parties in the UK. More recently, in Facebook/GIPHY (2021), not only did the target have no UK revenue, it was not even a horizontal competitor to the acquirer (and in fact was a long-standing and contractually bound supplier). The CMA is clearly willing (and able) to find the “share of supply” test met by looking up and down the value chain in the relevant industry to find an overlap and an “increment”.

• In May 2020, Facebook completed its acquisition of GIPHY, unaware that this seemingly harmless transaction would trigger ‘the nuclear option’. In June 2020, as a result of investigations, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) served its initial enforcement order, mandating that Facebook keep its business and GIPHY’s businesses separate from one another until the conclusion of the CMA’s investigation. Nearly a year and a half later, on 30 November 2021, the CMA issued its final decision, ordering Facebook (now Meta) to divest GIPHY. This divestment order represents more than just a ‘break-up’, it puts Meta in an impossible catch-22, and reveals the inherent contradictions and unrealistic expectations of the current ‘tech-lash’.

• [...]

• GIPHY “relied on regular rounds of external funding” (para. 6.10) and its “monetisation model was flawed because advertisers on digital media wanted to monitor return on investment closely” (para. 7.58). The GIFs company “lacked a meaningful user base of its own” (para. 7.51) and, according to Facebook’s submission it was unable to provide the recognizable constituent elements of a robust digital advertising business (para. 5.11). According to an objective reading of the facts of the CMA’s investigation, it does not appear that GIPHY was the attractive emerging business that the CMA depicted it to be, but rather a company struggling to generate revenue or interest from investors. GIPHY’s acquisition, to put it into the words of the tech industry analyst Benedict Evans, rather “represent[s] the recycling of talent and capital from ideas that didn’t go all the way into new ideas that might.”

• I appeared on Patrick Smith’s Disenthrall channel (Disenthrall Youtube channel) to discuss and rebut—to fisk, really—an article by one “Strangerous Thoughts” from 2010 criticizing my IP abolitionism—or my “intellectual communism,” as he called it.

Patents

• A randomly selected group of applicants for European patents are being surveyed this winter on the novelty requirement under the European Patent Convention (EPC) and the lack of a so-called “grace period” in the European patent system. The survey, which will explore the impact of the strict novelty requirement on the filing and business practices of EPO applicants, will be complemented by a consultation of user and stakeholder associations. The resulting feedback, which will be analysed by the EPO and published in a study in the spring of 2022, will provide important input for evidence-based discussions.

Software Patents

• Hisense has now taken a licence from MPEG LA’s AVC/H.264 patent pool. The Chinese smartphone, tablet and TV manufacturer joins telecom giants Huawei, ZTE and TCL and becomes one of over 6,000 licensees that MPEG LA has signed up since the 1990s.

• The patents in this program, and indeed many of the pool’s programs, are standard essential. The litigation strategy pursued by the team around patent attorney Gottfried Schüll from Cohausz & Florack and Krieger Mes lawyer Axel Verhauwen has helped shape the case law around FRAND in recent years.

• This strategy differs in at least two key aspects from the typical, not to say clichéd, approach of many other NPEs. Firstly, MPEG LA stands out with its comparatively transparent handling of licensing agreements. The publication of licensing conditions contributes to the pool’s respectability. At the same time, this also seems to increase the successful conclusion of licences.

• Secondly, the pool often files its lawsuits in batches. This approach initially causes less of a stir than the impressive number of lawsuits filed by Intellectual Ventures, for example. However, it has also meant that setbacks in the past have been less severe. The EPO recently revoked one of Intellectual Ventures’ core patents, which is the subject of numerous lawsuits in France and Germany. This was a troubling outcome for Intellectual Ventures, whose ongoing series of lawsuits are already plagued by setbacks due to invalid patents.

• On December 17, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 6,236,983, owned by Callstat Solutions LLC, an NPE and an entity of Jeffrey M. Gross. The ‘983 patent relates to collecting information about a computer system and applying rules to the collected information. It has been asserted against cybersecurity and client management software, including software sold by BMC Software, McAfee, and Check Point Software.

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