● 03.22.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/3/2022: Samba 4.16.0 and EPO Strike Day

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• A Quick overview of MassOS GNU/Linux 2022.02.2

• I use flameshot for my screenshots which has built in annotation tools but if you want a stand alone solution that’s much simpler than GIMP, look no further than annotator

• We discuss whether computing become less interesting as performance and abstraction have increased over the years. Plus our discoveries including two way radios, synths, HTML from colourful terminal output, and a personal wiki for Vim.

• It was a while since I last spoke Swedish on a podcast. I joined the friendly hosts of the Trevlig Mjukvara (translates to something like “Nice Software”) podcast and we talked software development, open source, curl, Mozilla and a few other topics for an hour. I had a great time.

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to be talking with Emma Marshall from System76. Then we’re going to check out a new RISC V offering in the market. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.

• Who is WordPress actually made for? Join our host, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy, as she explores this controversial question and three things that can help find the answer.

• Encryption is a great benefit to take advantage of, especially when it comes to hosting web sites. But how exactly do TLS certificates work? In this episode, Jay and Joao discuss foundational concepts surrounding certificates, as well as some advice and recommended practices.

Kernel Space

• Asahi Linux is the first distribution to fully support Apple Silicon and is now available for testing.

• For anyone looking to install Linux on Apple Silicon, that task has been next to impossible…until Ashahi Linux came into being. The announcement of the project came some time ago, but only recently have the developers finally announced the release of the alpha version of the OS.

• This first release will contain bugs and doesn’t include all features that will be found in the final release. Some of the features that do not yet work include DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, HDMI, Bluetooth, GPU acceleration, video codec acceleration, neural engine, CPU deep idle, sleep mode, camera, and the touchbar. Rest assured, however, that common features (such as Wi-Fi, USB, NVMe, and the keyboard) function as expected. As well, some apps (such as Chromium and emacs) do not yet function properly.

• There is finally a Linux distro designed exclusively for Apple M1 hardware.

• “We’re really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone,” the development team of Asahi Linux said in a blog post, adding that “things will move even more quickly going forward.”

• This is an Alpha version, meaning it’s limited to a handful of features and designed, first and foremost, built with developers and power users in mind, rather than businesses. To get it up and running, users need an M1, M1 Pro, or M1 Max device, with MacOS 12.3 or later, and at least 53GB of disk space. An active internet connection is also a requirement, given that the installer will download anywhere between 700MB and 4GB of data, depending on the OS selected.

• The latest version of the Linux kernel, 5.17, has been released with bug fixes to reassure users worried about Spectre attacks and improve hardware support, despite a short delay. The security changes and hardware support are welcome, but apart from that, there’s not much to get excited by with this release.

Applications

•  The workflow is not often seamless for users who dabble with multiple applications for accessing different files and open links using various browsers.

• You probably get used to it, but it may not be the fastest way to get things done.

• Meet Junction, an application switcher that helps you quickly open files/links with your favorite applications.

• I’ve been using irssi for a long time with no complaints. Well that’s not true. I complain about a lot of things. But at least with irssi I was able to centralize all of my chat systems in to one client running in a terminal window. I can connect to multiple IRC networks, which is necessary for my job. I can also use bitlbee to make instant messenger systems like Google Chat and Facebook Chat appear in my IRC client. This has a huge impact on my daily workflow and makes communication easier for me.

• In recent times, more and more teams and projects at work are using systems other than IRC to chat. That’s fine, except that a lot of these are proprietary and do not offer a client-independent way to connect to them. Most notably the latest Google Hangouts iteration is the worst offender. I’m not adding another chat client to my workflow and I still need the networks I use in irssi.

• Work has now set up a Matrix server to bridge IRC and Google Hangouts chat and I started looking at this. There is a plugin for bitlbee, but it is largely unfinished and not really usable (based on what I read…I did not actually try it). But I also found there’s a Matrix plugin for weechat. I have thought about giving weechat a try for a while, so this was a reasonable excuse.

• First up, get weechat installed and work through the quick start guide. Default keybindings are easy enough and configuration is simple. I made a list of the things I rely on in irssi and networks I connect to and began the migration. First up was bitlbee.

• This is the first stable release of the Samba 4.16 release series. Please read the release notes carefully before upgrading.

Instructionals/Technical

• Compressing files and directories is one of the most basic functionalities of an operating system. On Linux, the standard format for creating a compressed file is Tape Archive or tarball, or simply TAR.

• You can also apply further compression using gzip and bzip2 to create TAR.GZ and TAR.BZ2 files, respectively. tar alone is a raw archiving utility for Linux-based systems.

• Before we look at how to make a TAR directory, let’s make sure you have tar installed on your Linux system.

• While BIOS-based machines are the standard for VirtualBox, in the real hardware world, almost all new PCs use EFI firmware. It’s easy to use the new standard to set up Linux virtual machines, even if it is officially experimental.

• Here’s how you can easily set up an EFI-based Linux virtual machine on VirtualBox. But first, let’s find out what EFI really is.

• If you administer Linux servers, you know that malicious code and vulnerabilities can find their way onto the system. This could be from an attack, from a user saving an infected file, from a malicious payload in a vulnerable package or a misconfigured service. Although finding out how the malicious code made it onto your system is important, the immediate issue is detecting and mitigating it.

• Testing EasyOS 3.4.3, forum member BologneChe reported that the Xorg synaptics driver has not loaded.

• Node.js is a free and open-source JavaScript runtime environment designed for non-blocking, event-driven servers and a popular choice for building scalable network applications, web applications, development of APIs, and so on. NVM is a Node Version Manager which provides an easy installation and easy switching between versions while retaining globally installed packages.

• There are new Node.js major releases every six months, when a new odd version is released the previous even version undergoes a transition to Long Term Support (LTS), which gives that version 18 months of active support from the date it is designated LTS. Luckily nvm offers an easy way to install and switch to different Node.js versions. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install different Node.js versions using nvm.

• In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to upgrade Linux Kernel to 5.17 mainline release on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Linux Kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking Unix-like operating system. It is the main component of a Linux operating system and is the core interface between the computer’s hardware and its processes. It makes communication possible between computer hardware and processes running on it and it manages resources effectively.

• Linux 5.17 mainline was released recently by Linux Torvalds with better new features to try out. The mainline tree is maintained by Linus Torvalds and It is where all new features are added and releases always come from.

• the possibility to step (!) debug requests, as they appear on the server is a neat feature.

• The Snap package manager also called snapd is a modern package manager in Linux that allows you to install Snap packages across a wide range of Linux distributions and versions. Snap packages are self-contained and run in a sandbox environment. You can install Snap packages via command-line or download them from the website as a .snap file. Snap is a universal, cross-distribution, and dependency-free package manager. Snap applications packaged with all their dependencies to run on all major Linux distributions.

• In this tutorial, I will show you how to install and use the Snap Package Manager on Alma Linux 8.

• How do I change or rename a username in Linux? This brief guide will show you how to do it properly by using command-line tools.

• As you know, Linux is a multi-user operating system. A unique username is assigned to each account on the system. This is the name with which the user can log into the system.

• However, sometimes you might have come across a situation where you want to rename a user name in a Linux system, for whatever reason.

• One of the most emblematic open-source applications is Nextcloud. This fabulous tool allows you to deploy a private cloud in a matter of minutes and everything is well documented. By default, it is accessed from a web interface, but what if we want a desktop application? Well, it also exists. Today, you will learn how to install Nextcloud desktop client on Linux.

• Managing groups and projects is so complex that people often do not understand it. To help you a bit with the task today I will explain how to install Leantime on Ubuntu 20.04.

• This simple tutorial shows how to change the default terminal emulator from Gnome Terminal to the one that you prefer in Ubuntu.

• The default Gnome Terminal is great, but there are many good alternatives (e.g., tilix). If you prefer to use another one and want to set it as default, so you may press Ctrl+Alt+T to open it.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Godot 3 on Zorin OS 16.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenCV on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) is an open-source computer vision library and has bindings for C++, Python, and Java. OpenCV was built to provide a common infrastructure for computer vision applications and to accelerate the use of machine perception in commercial products.

• 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 OpenCV on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) is a lightweight desktop environment which is designed to be fast and easy to use. It was a popular choice for Linux systems which are limited in resources, such as older or lower-powered machines.

• It’s important to note that the development team from LXDE has largely moved to LXQt, which is a similar desktop environment based on Qt (instead of GTK+). However LXDE is still maintained.

• LXDE used to be the default desktop environment for Lubuntu, which is a flavor of Ubuntu, however the default desktop environment is LXQt as of writing this tutorial.

• LXDE is based on the GTK+ toolkit and uses the Openbox window manager. It includes a panel, a file manager, and a set of applications. It is designed to be simple and easy to use, and is a good choice for users who are new to Linux.

• In this tutorial we’ll install LXDE desktop and LXDE desktop minimal on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04.

• Today we are looking at how to install Funkin’ at Freddy’s + Afton Full Week on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• Linus Torvalds announced the Linux Kernel 5.17 after a few weeks of development and it is available for general usage. Linux Kernel 5.17 was released with new features and support.

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Linux kernel 5.17 on AlmaLinux 8, Rocky Linux 8, and Fedora 35.

• MATE Desktop is a GNOME desktop environment that provides a modern, intuitive, and attractive desktop for users. GNOME MATE is a fork of GNOME 2 that uses the GTK+ 3 toolkit.

• GNOME 3 caused controversy when it was first released due to its radical change in design from GNOME 2. As a result MATE was forked from GNOME 2 to address some of the design decisions made in GNOME 3 that were not popular with some users, who felt that GNOME 3 was too difficult to use and that it removed too many features that they were used to.

• Apache Tomcat, also known as Tomcat Server, is an open-source web server with the Servlet container to launch Java-based web applications. Tomcat includes JavaServer Pages (JSP), WebSocket, Java Servlet, Java EL, etc., for an entirely Java HTTP web server environment to run the Java code.

• The great community of skilled developers maintains the Tomcat server under the management of the Apache software foundation. Therefore, the Tomcat server provides excellent accessibility to work on the Java-based application efficiently. Cross-platform support means that it’s available for both Windows and Linux. The latest version of Apache Tomcat is 10.0.18, so in this guide, we will explain how to install Apache Tomcat 10 on Ubuntu 20.04.

• phpBB is a fully scalable and customizable open-source forum. The software has a user-friendly interface and simple and straightforward management options. It is based on PHP and MySQL.

• Well, phpBB is a group of international people who enjoy working on open-source software. This software was created in June 2000. There have been some changes in the licenses as well as in the management team of phpBB. The goals of the phpBB creators are still the same. They want to provide free forum software for the Internet.

• Mosquitto is an open-source message broker that uses the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) Protocol. The protocol is designed to provide lightweight communication to the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In this tutorial, you will install Mosquitto and set up the broker to use SSL to protect communications.

• Matrix is a great modern, distributed and secure open source chat platform (I connect through Element), but sometimes you need to connect to IRC networks. Fortunately, for some common networks this is supported through bridges. There is a list of available bridges in the documentation, for example Libera is @appservice:libera.chat and OFTC is @oftc-irc:matrix.org.

• How much effort to recreate your work environment when you switch to a new machine? What would it take to roll back to your previous environment once you’ve noticed a program no longer behaves as expected? What about sharing your environment with friends of yours? These are some of the things that Guix Home, which landed in Guix as a “technology preview” in September 2021, aims to make effortless, reliable, and fun.

• In a nutshell, Guix Home brings the fully declarative configuration of Guix System to home directories. With Guix System, users and administrators provide a configuration file that defines the operating system configuration; with Guix Home, users provide a configuration file that defines the configuration of their work environment in their home directory—their home environment. That configuration is meant to stand alone, to describe all the relevant aspects of your work environment. But what exactly goes in a home environment?

• The Mainline Kernel PPA has built the new kernel packages. It however requires libc >= 2.34 and libssl3. Which means only Ubuntu 22.04 user can try out the new Kernel packages. Though, Ubuntu 21.10 may try to meet the requirement via this tutorial.

Games

• GOG continues taking a leaf out of the book of Steam with their own little demo festival, along with a big sale on tons of games. On the Linux native side, the demo selection is a bit barren and it’s the same for their upcoming games list but no doubt you can get plenty of them working with Wine. There’s plenty of tools available to help with that, like Bottles.

• Like the tycoon and management sims of old, Office Management 101 has entered Early Access and so far it’s looking like players are enjoying it.

• Making fun of the real corporate world, it’s something of a satirical game. While it’s business focused it’s full of “quirky characters, slapstick humor, and unexpected events in a cheerful and detailed capitalist dystopia”. You assume the role of CEO of a fresh electronics company tasked with hiring employees, designing your office and turning it all into a “ruthless money-making machine”.

• Space adventure game 60 Parsecs! from Robot Gentleman has just recently had a small update and it should improve the experience on a Steam Deck.

• Currently, Valve gave it a “Playable” rating through Deck Verified noting it has some minor display issues. Seems that could be solved now, as the patch notes mention “UX improvements on Steam Deck” along with other improvements.

• At GDC 2022 Arm, Ampere Computing and Canonical will present a live talk accompanied by a cloud gaming demo built on top of Ampere Altra powered servers running Anbox Cloud providing a cloud gaming service visitors can try live in the Arm booth #S756

• Anbox Cloud was built use case agnostic, but cloud gaming has always been one of the key reasons that it is in demand — for running Android in the cloud. At its core, Anbox Cloud is built out to scale and have high density to deliver a sustainable and performant cloud gaming service. In 2017, when we started building the software stack, the Arm server ecosystem was in its early days and has grown stronger ever since. With the ongoing investment from Arm and partners like Ampere Computing and NVIDIA, the foundation for an Android-powered cloud gaming streaming service today is more powerful than ever before.

• “Arm-based smartphones are now the platform of choice for gamers everywhere, and for developers, the growing availability of Arm-based servers represents a greatly simplified way to develop, deploy, manage and monetize their games,” said Bhumik Patel, director of ecosystem development, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “Our collaboration at GDC 2022 with Canonical Anbox Cloud and Ampere Altra demonstrates how high-end Android cloud game streaming can be brought to mobile gamers with a high-performance, scalable experience.”

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Shortly after GEdit crashed on me, I replaced it with Kate and KWrite. Kate has developer-oriented features whereas KWrite is a stripped-down version for general text editing. Both versions have the feature I’ll discuss in this article.

• Kate has a feature that lets it recover your unsaved work from crashes and system crashes. It has two important caveats and I’ll get those out of the way first:

• The recovery feature only works with documents that have been saved once and reside in a writable directory. Kate won’t be able to recover your never-saved novel or changes. The document needs to have a writable path on a file system.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Coming two and a half months after GNOME 41.3 as it looks like the GNOME 41.4 update wasn’t announced, the GNOME 41.5 release is here with various bug fixes for some of the apps in the GNOME Stack, as well as core components.

• GNOME 41.5 includes Nautilus (Files) 41.5 with improved HighContrast style and drag-and-drop, Mutter 41.5 with the ability to force the EGLStream backend and use multiple DnD X11 peers to improve drag-and-drop from an X11 client to a Wayland native client, as well as GNOME Software 41.5 with disabled scroll-by-mouse-wheel support on the featured carousel and updated Details pages to show apps provided on command-line.

Distributions

New Releases

• In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new distribution and application version releases in the past week. This keeps you informed of the latest developments in the Linux world.

• Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 Released

• Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 is here. With the latest upgrade, you get Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS and Debian 11 as its base.

• You can expect to see all the improvements from Linux Mint 20.3. To learn more about it, check out our release coverage.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Finding and addressing vulnerabilities in code in a timely manner is critical to develop and maintain secure software. Unit testing new code changes is a common practice to maintain code quality. When test-driven development methodologies are employed, any new code must pass existing unit tests and pass one or more new tests as needed. While unit tests are typically quick to write and run, they are ideal for small-scale stress and load because they are typically limited by a small set of hardcoded inputs needed for the test. The fuzz testing is helpful for testing code with a large set of random inputs. A good set of fuzz test programs (also called fuzzers) together with comprehensive unit test coverage can give you high confidence of code’s quality and security.

• This blog post introduces you to fuzzing, describes how the etcd project integrated fuzzing to validate the quality of its code and make the project more secure, and how you can explore fuzzing for an open source project that you work on.

• This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat (https://libera.chat/).

• From financial institutions to universities, organizations around the world have counted on Red Hat OpenShift to face challenges and stay competitive with considerable flexibility. In this month’s customer success highlights, learn how Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform—along with our other solutions and services—has helped Credit Europe Bank, Santander Colombia, and Universidad Mayor adapt to demands in a rapidly changing world.

• And Red Hat’s container technology is not just helping these organizations tackle today’s priorities, it’s also helping lay the groundwork for future scalability. Even if their deployments have taken place on-premise, some of these customers are setting their eyes on a hybrid cloud future.

Debian Family

• Ubuntu is by far the most popular distros for people who want to try Linux for the first time. Without a doubt, it’s one of the easiest to use, is generously versatile in a wide range of situations, and everything from installation to initial setup is “touch and go.” The powerful APT package manager and wide feature set that appeals to Linux users from all walks of life gives all Debian distros a significant advantage over others. We offer a short walkthrough of several Debian-based distros for those looking for an Ubuntu alternative.

• PureOS: A Debian-based 100% free software truly convergent operating system developed and maintained by Purism. It is an Operating System that is not based on Android or iOS. Purism’s PureOS was also where all the development occurred for what we later pushed into GNOME; phosh, phoc, libhandy (now libadwaita), squeekboard, calls, chats, and the long list of adaptive applications. Other companies are adopting PureOS as their base OS for other services. Purism’s Librem One is built on PureOS, initially a reference platform. In the future, it will see tighter integration into PureOS and the Librem line of products.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 727 for the week of March 13 – 19, 2022.

Devices/Embedded

• Banana Pi has posted specs for a “BPI-R3” router board that runs Linux on a quad -A53 Mediatek MT7986 and offers dual 4×4 WiFi 6 radios plus 2x 2.5GbE SFP, 4x GbE, WAN, USB 3.0, mini-PCIe, and M.2 M-key.

• Banana Pi has been ramping up its router board product line over the last year and is now prepping a Banana Pi BPI-R3 model with a Mediatek MT7986 SoC designed for WiFi 6 router boards. The BPI-R3 is a major upgrade over the quad -A7 Mediatek MT7623N based Banana Pi BPI-R2. Other similar boards include the earlier dual -A53 MediaTek MT7622 powered Banana Pi BPI-R64.

•  While checking out Linux 5.17 changelog, I noticed the MediaTek MT7986 WiFi router processor that I had never heard of. It turns out MT7986 is the codename for MediaTek Filogic 830 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor designed for Wi-Fi 6/6E routers with up to 6 Gbps bandwidth, and two 2.5Gbps Ethernet interface

• ICOP announced that its x86 based Vortex86 SoC is automatically detected by Linux 5.16, thereby enabling new non-legacy applications. The company recently launched a 3.5-inch “VDX3-6726” SBC and “VDX3-ETX” module based on the up to dual-core, 1GHz Vortex86DX3.

• The Linux 5.17 kernel just came out with improved RISC-V support, a new AMD P-state driver, and improved support for Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake Turbo modes, among other enhancements. At the same time, ICOP has announced a key update to last November’s Linux 5.16 release, which adds automatic detection of the x86 architecture Vortex86 family of Linux-ready processors produced by ICOP’s DM&P Group sister company. ICOP recently announced a 3.5-inch, $342 VDX3-6726 SBC and $286 VDX3-ETX module based on the Vortex86DX3 (see farther below).

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• One of Android’s biggest draws is that it offers countless opportunities to customize your device. Case in point, did you know you can create custom icons for any of your Android apps? It’s a pretty straightforward process. This article will show you how to do that on your Android handset.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Daniel Pocock has been excluded from the Debian community for his abusive behaviour, he’s not been a Debian Developer since late 2018, and I doubt he would ever be welcomed back.

• We are writing to request the association’s opinion on the phenomena of Codes of Conduct in the free, open source software domain.

• The association operates a Code of Ethics with the stated aims of improving standards of professionalism in the industry at large.

• The free, open source software domain is becoming increasingly prominent as a subset of the industry. In many cases it is the first point of contact for students in computing.

• The largest and most well known employers in the industry have all engaged with the open source concept in some way. These employers and their management count among the members of the association governed by the official Code of Ethics.

• We would also like to recognize and thank Josh Simmons, Megan Byrd-Sanicki and Italo Vignoli who are leaving the OSI board. We hope the entire open source software community will join us in thanking them for their service and their leadership. The OSI and the open source software movement are better off because of their contributions and commitment, and we thank them.

• ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation’s bylaws.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• If you somehow found this blog post because you googled or binged “site not working Chrome 100”, well, congrats my SEO trap worked successfully.

• [...]

• (Also, test your site in Firefox Nightly – not all three digit parsing bugs will affect both Chromium browsers and Firefox, but it’s good to verify in case you need to fix your bugs in multiple places.)

• From designers to writers, multi-media producers and more—if you perform creative work on a computer there’s a good chance you can find a browser extension to improve your process. Here’s a mix of practical Firefox extensions for a wide spectrum of creative uses…

• Firefox is about to let you in on a little known industry secret…did you know some of the leading visual effects studios including Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), utilize Firefox to help make movie magic?

• Color calibration — the process of adjusting colors in order to display images consistently in color and brightness across monitors — is a critical component of visual effects. As visual effects studios and their vendors transitioned to remote work due to the coronavirus pandemic, this process that was easy to manage in-office suddenly became difficult to achieve. Over the past year, Firefox worked with Industrial Light & Magic to build a game-changing solution and developed the Extended Color Management Add-On.

FSF

GNU Projects

• The Emacs editor was born, according to Wikipedia, in 1976, same year as myself. I am clearly not among its first users. It was already a well-established citizen when I first learnt it; I am fortunate to be the son of a Physics researcher at UNAM, My father used to take me to his institute after he noticed how I was attracted to computers; we would usually spend some hours there between 7 and 11PM on Friday nights. His institute had a computer room where they had very sweet gear: Some 10 Heathkit terminals quite similar to this one:

• [...]

• So, what could he teach me so I could use the computers while he worked? TeX, of course. No, no LaTeX (that was published in 1984). LaTeX is a set of macros developed initially by Leslie Lamport, used to make TeX easier; TeX was developed by Donald Knuth, and if I have this information correct, it was Knuth himself who installed and demonstrated TeX in the Foonly computer, during a visit to UNAM.

Programming/Development

• I tried to design a dynamically typed lisp with maximal applicability of procedures—as in, “reverse” should be able to reverse a string, a vector, or a list, as opposed to having “string-reverse“ or “vector-reverse” defined separately. I found that in order to implement that, I needed an isa-hierarchy of types (or, rather, derive an isa-graph from a tag cluster, kinda duck typing style). For example, strings, vectors, and lists are all “sequences”. So, in that sense, types are great.

• Chances are your code looks like crap, is hard to read, and hard to understand. There… I’ve said it. Sorry if that sounded harsh, but it’s the painful truth. Writing readable code is difficult.

• I’ve seen too much code in my career that was written so badly that I had to throw it away and redo the entire project. And the most painful fact is that this code was not written by beginners either!

• Writing nice, readable code takes time and effort, sure. But it’s also a matter of learning the right habits. With a few simple tweaks to your coding style, you can improve your code quality ten-fold without much effort.

• What is gem-compare, you ask? gem-compare is a RubyGems plugin that can compare gem versions. I originally created it to vet new gem versions I packaged for Fedora, but it’s useful for all kinds of tasks.

• One of the first issues that I had to solve when I started to use gRPC was how to inject a DB connection pool to the function handling the request. The DB connection injection is needed because creating a new SQL connection every time there is a new gRPC request (and tearing it down at the end) is a massive waste of resources. Also, this approach could limit the scalability of the API since the database probably has a limited number of connections it will accept.

• There are different possible ways of doing this, and some people would deem this solution as “dirty” since you will leverage Go’s context to pass the SQL connection pool to the function. Despite this, I (and many others) do not see any potential practical issue with this practice. If you see practical issues, let me know!

• Deno 1.19 was released in February 2022 as the latest incremental update for the secure-by-design JavaScript runtime. Among the changes are a streamlined permissions management experience, first-class support for vendored dependencies, and new native web streams for files, network sockets, and standard input and output.

• Composable code describes classes and functions that can be readily combined to create more powerful higher-level constructs. Composability compares favorably to alternative forms of code reuse such as object-oriented inheritance. It advocates the creation of small self-contained units that are treated as building blocks for bigger systems.

Perl/Raku

• Justin DeVuyst has done it again: the Rakudo Compiler Release 2022.03 is now available, binary releases have been made available by Patrick Böker, and the Linux packages by Claudio Ramirez should also be available soon. No exciting new features, mostly maintenance and some nice-to-haves this time.

Python

• If you are both a maker or a professional farmer, your smart watering project will always start from measuring the ground moisture. With the Capacitive Soil Moisture sensor and Raspberry PI Pico you can get great results with an affordable cost

Rust

• I literally wrote the book on unsafe Rust. And the book on pointers in Rust. And redesigned the Rust’s pointer APIs. And designed the standard library’s abstraction for unsafe heap-allocated buffers. And maintain the alternative Vec layout.

• Aria Beingessner points out a set of problems with Rust’s conception of unsafe pointers and proposes some fixes in this highly detailed post.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Supermicro’s new “Universal GPU” servers, announced on Monday, is as equal-opportunity as silicon tech can get – it does not discriminate on CPUs, GPUs, storage, and networking technologies.

• The boxen can be constructed in a number of ways to include processors from Intel and AMD, and graphics accelerators from AMD and Nvidia. It can be further customized to include proprietary technologies that include Nvidia’s NVLink or AMD’s Infinity Fabric interconnects to link up multiple GPUs.

• The datacenter-class systems, which will come in 4U or 5U sizes, have a “modular” architecture based on standards established by the Open Compute Project, such as the OCP Accelerator Modules (OAM). The modular approach allows for more economical CPU and GPU upgrades without replacing entire systems, Supermicro said.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• This happens to all Clown Computing disservices, including Google and Microsoft.

• When it happens, it’s not affecting them, only the fools who don’t realize the value in avoiding Disservices as a Software Substitute. (DaaSS)

• It’s terrific when your business can’t access files, emails, and documents for hours on end, isn’t it? What is the lost productivity worth? And yet you still keep paying these people.

• The latest Release Preview of Windows 11 adds an undocumented feature that slaps a line of text in the lower right hand side of the Windows desktop and a similar warning in the Settings app for any system that fails to meet Windows 11′s exacting standards.

• Secondly, I think nobody will find controversial the affirmation that, the fact that researchers had access to the source code (BECAUSE IT WAS OPEN SOURCE!) facilitated identifying the offending and neutralising the offending snippets. Imagine how much harder that would’ve been if all they had had to work with were a bunch of compiled binaries.

Security

• It’s easy to get caught up things we want to believe to be true. I know people who still maintain changing your password on a regular basis is more secure. There is actual research that shows changing your passwords on a regular cadence is less secure than using one very long password, actual real research. But because it feels wrong, it must be wrong.

• I find myself doing this all the time. I might have a certain opinion and it’s really hard to objectively unlearn something. My favorite example I use of this is I once thought PGP was the best possible form of secure messaging. The keys are generated locally, you can pass messages via any medium. You can send messages to nearly anyone. In theory it’s a great system! But in reality it’s terrible. It took me a long time to realize my love of PGP was mostly emotional. The data was clear, PGP has a lot of problems. I try not to use it now.

• I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad for whatever view they may or may not have in this post. I wanted to scribble down some quick thoughts because the whole conversation reminded me that opinion is not fact. Facts need data. And sometimes we believe something for so long, we don’t even notice we are trying to pass off our opinions as facts.

• There’s an old hacker saying “question everything”. It’s very relevant in this discussion.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• In April 2021, a bug in the Linux kernel was discovered by Max Kellermann, who later published his findings. However, like most discovered bugs, it is only months after its discovery that it is announced to the world, giving security experts time to update systems and introduce fixes. The new bug, called CVE-2022-0847, has now been fixed and is only an issue for systems using Linux kernel versions between 5.8 and has now been fixed in 5.16.11, 5.15.25, and 5.10102.

Finance

• In a prior post I wrote about the basics of blockchain and proof-of-work Bitcoin mining. One topic omitted from that post was the alternative consensus mechanism, proof-of-stake. Last week, the EU turned down a proposal purporting to outlaw the use of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies in the EU. Also, Ethereum–the world’s second most popular crypto blockchain–is in the process of moving from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. So this week, I am looking at the difference between these methods of consensus, and why proof-of-stake is likely to eclipse proof-of-work in the future.

Civil Rights/Policing

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Access Now supports Open Society Justice Initiative’s complaint calling for accountability filed with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) against A1 Telekom Austria for its role in 2020 internet shutdowns during, and in the aftermath of, disputed elections in Belarus.

• “A1 Telecom Austria must be held up to the light, and its role in cutting people’s access to information and denying them their freedom of expression and association must be exposed for the world to see,” said Anastasiya Zhyrmont, Regional Outreach Coordinator (Eastern Europe & Central Asia) at Access Now.

• You know the old proverb about “new wine in old bottles?” Derived from a biblical parable, it refers to an existing concept or idea being offered as though it were a new one.

• In our view, the EARN IT Act of 2022 is just…old. Despite overwhelming objections to the original version based on how it would threaten free expression and jeopardize access to encrypted services, its sponsors have brought back the act with virtually every one of its flaws still intact. And it still will not accomplish its stated goal: to encourage digital platforms to report and remove more child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, by threatening their Section 230 protections for hosting it.

• First, some background: The EARN IT Acts of both 2020 and 2022 establish a “national commission” to develop “best practices” for interactive computer services to moderate material that sexually exploits children, including CSAM. The original EARN IT Act conditioned Section 230 liability protections to platforms that follow these “best practices.” We warned how this bill could threaten user privacy and security when it was originally introduced back in 2020 (fact sheet here, and blog posts here, and here). The new EARN IT Act simply eliminates Section 230 protections for any interactive computer services provider facing a claim derived from child exploitation law.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Epson’s ReadyPrint subscription-based printing service is designed to take the hassle out of printing but its not working as intended, at least not for everyone.

• The service was created to let users print as much as they like without worrying about running out of ink. For a small monthly fee, the firm will send customers refills for their Epson inkjet before they run out.

• However, when something goes wrong, the user can also get locked out of their printer, unable to produce any documents, as is the case for one Epson customer who discovered Epson was unable to process his payments.

• Reg reader John Lamont signed up for ReadyPrint last year, and the service worked perfectly until February when he got an email informing him that it had not been possible to collect his monthly payment for ReadyPrint, and that Epson would attempt collection again in 14 days.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Copyright does exist, and has existed in its current form (i.e. consumer-facing regulation in the face of VCRs and mixtapes and modems) for a couple of decades (unfortunately) and a lot of our fave designers and artists have bet their proverbial farms on it. The proliferation of commons and crowdfunding might be one way to gradually and safely move towards a better and more fair world. ♥ Although I’m kinda pessimistic that that’d be enough: maybe we need to evolve more robust and more sustainable economics generally, since market capitalism is so plagued by exploitation and unaccounted-for externalites. Whether this new system should stand on the shoulders of capitalism, or reject it and its values, is an interesting and unanswered question. BTW, capitalism’s advocates, if they also advocate for copyright (which Ayn Rand did, convolutedly, it’s a core theme in both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) tend to go through these extreme mental gymnastics to redefine “ownership” and to advocate for a strong and mighty—but immutable, untouchable, unchangable by democratic processes and evolving legislation—night-watchman state, which’ll send a team of soldiers to your house if you copy that floppy but which’ll go whistling past if you’re starving in the gutter. Or arrest you for loitering on a company-owned road, I guess…

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