● 06.09.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 09/06/2022: KDE Gear 22.04.2 is Out, Microsoft Abandons GitHub’s ‘Open’ Atom to Push Proprietary Instead

Posted in News Roundup at 6:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• There are many tools and utilities around security and network management, and in this episode of Enterprise Linux Security, Jay and Joao discuss some of their favorites.

• SUSE Enterprise is already switching to the new NVIDIA open kernel driver, a Matrix-powered Walkie-Talkie, and the details on Apple’s Rosetta for Linux.

• Fundamentals of the FreeBSD Shell, Spammers in the Public Cloud, locking user accounts properly, overgrowth on NetBSD, moreutils, ctwm & spleen, interpreting a traceroute, and more

• Ubuntu Mate 22.04 LTS is out and it is an amazing release. Out of all the flavours of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Mate has always commanded a special place. Ubuntu Mate is a lightweight Linux distribution that offers a great experience for users who are looking for high performance

Kernel Space

Applications

• The free open-source 3D creation software Blender 3.2.0 was released! Finally, it adds support for AMD GPU rendering for Linux!

• Blender 3.2.0 introduced a new type of Cycles render pass that contains only the lighting from a subset of light sources. It’s ‘Light Groups’ which can be used to modify the color and/or intensity of light sources in the compositor without re-rendering.

• Cycles now supports selective rendering of caustics in shadows of refractive objects. Paint is now available in Sculpt mode. New paint brush comes with a bunch of new settings like tip shape, wet mixing, flow and density.

• PeerTube 4.2, a free video platform, includes detailed viewer stats for videos, video editing directly from the web interface, and much more.

• PeerTube allows anyone to set up their video streaming site. It is a free, self-hosted, and open-source software that can be installed on your server to create a video hosting and sharing platform. In other words, it is like having your personal YouTube at home.

• Furthermore, all PeerTube sites can connect to each other, and users having accounts on one can interact with people on the others. All PeerTube servers are interoperable as a federated network, and video load is lowered thanks to P2P (BitTorrent) in the web browser via WebTorrent.

• Recently, PeerTube’s developers have finally launched PeerTube 4.2. Let’s have a look at the new features.

Instructionals/Technical

• I am a new Linux and Unix command line user. How do I test or check reverse DNS (rDNS) for given IP address under Linux, macOS, BSD, Unix-like or Windows desktop/server based systems?

• A DEB package is an archive containing all the files including the compiled version of the applications, source codes, configuration files, images, and installation commands. DEB files in Debian-based operating systems like Ubuntu and Kali Linux are equivalent to the EXE files found in Windows.

• Here’s how you can develop your own DEB packages for a Debian-based Linux distro.

• Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.

• It is s an open source containerization platform. It enables developers to package applications into containers—standardized executable components combining application source code with the operating system (OS) libraries and dependencies required to run that code in any environment.

• In this guide we are going to explore various options to install docker in OpenSUSE Leap15.

• One of the most useful tools in Inkscape is the gradient tool, which enables the user to create magnificent gradients.

• Those gradients, in turn, enrich any piece of graphic design, and in this tutorial, we are going to explore how to create a linear rainbow gradient in Inkscape.

• One of the most important concepts in programming is the concept of arrays. An array can be thought of as a collection of data recorded together. As the set of values in an array are kept together, they are usually operated on jointly or in succession. They are handy in real-life scenarios, as we often have to deal with certain data sets.

• The terminal commands of Bash can be used along with certain syntax operators as a whole programming language, which is referred to as Bash scripting. Today, we will bring these two areas together and see how arrays can be used in Bash scripts.

• Today, I will share one helpful tip that allows FreeBSD developers and sysadmin to make a backup list of installed all FreeBSD packages and then restore it. Hence, this is useful for disaster recovery (DR) or simply rebuilding a new server. It will save you time.

• One of the greatest features of Inkscape is its ability to export images in many formats, from the formats that most of us know, like PNGs, PDFs and JPGs, to less common ones like PostScript and TIFF. In this article, we will learn how to save Inkscape images as a JPG.

• But before that, what is JPG?

• A lossy image compression method, yet the quality of the images doesn’t drop significantly if you choose the output to be of high quality.

• The tools for editing objects are essential in every vector graphics software. Transformation and rotation are the most basic tools that should be present in every vector graphics editor.

• There are two ways to rotate objects: using the Rotation Handles or using the Transform menu.

• While LXD is mostly known for providing system containers, since the 4.0 LTS, it also natively supports virtual machines. With the recent 5.0 LTS, LXD virtual machines are at feature parity with containers. In this blog, we’ll explore some of the main LXD virtual machine features and how you can use them to run your infrastructure.

• Vim is one of the most popular terminal-based text editors for decades.

• But no matter how long you have been using Vim, there are always more tips and tricks that you did not know about.

• This one is about setting up indentation width in Vim to 2 spaces or 4 spaces. This is particularly helpful if you are a programmer, a Python one especially.

• In your vimrc file (located at ~/.vimrc), add the following line to automatically use 2 spaces instead of tab in Vim.

• The term orchestration is relatively new to the IT industry, and it still has nuance that eludes or confuses people who don’t spend all day orchestrating. When I describe orchestration to someone, it usually sounds like I’m just describing automation. That’s not quite right. In fact, I wrote a whole article differentiating automation and orchestration.

• An easy way to think about it is that orchestration is just a form of automation. To understand how you can benefit from orchestration, it helps to understand what specifically it automates.

•  Boost is a portable set of C++ programming language libraries. It contains libraries for pseudo-random number generation, linear algebra, multi-threading, image processing, regular expression, and unit testing. At the time of writing this article, boost has 168 different libraries included in boost.

• In this article, you will find the steps to install the boost library in Ubuntu or any other Debian-based distribution.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OnlyOffice on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, OnlyOffice is a powerful and versatile office suite that allows you to edit text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, as well as productivity tools such as mail, document and project management, CRM, calendar, and communication hub. It is available for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the OnlyOffice office suite on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install RPM Fusion on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, RPM Fusion is a repository specifically for Fedora Linux. It is an amalgamation of the software repositories Livna, Freshrpms, and Dribble to bundle resources. The RPM Fusion repository comes in two variants, Free and Non-Free. The free repository contains a free version of the software that is open source and non-free, which has mostly almost all free software but is closed source and mainly proprietary.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the RPM Fusion on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

• Although Windows is the clear dominator of PC gameplay, the truth is that Linux is becoming more and more full of different games every day to have a good time. Today, you will learn how to install Bomber on Linux Mint 20 so that you can play it and get some distraction.

• If you are looking for a free and open-source Linux-based solution for handling streams and multimedia files like videos, audios, and images, then you should strongly consider what FFmpeg has to offer.

• The FFmpeg tool requires that its users are familiar with the Linux command-line environment usage in terms of syntax reference, command implementation, and execution.

• As for its installation of the Linux operating system distribution you are using, you need to have root/sudoer user privileges to successfully invoke the associated installation command.

• The core of the Linux operating system is the kernel. It handles the primary interaction between the hardware and the software. It also accomplishes tasks such as memory management, process management, system security, and hardware interactions, to name a few. Such an essential piece of the operating system inevitably has flaws or vulnerabilities that need to be patched and maintained.

Games

• We are still observing a relatively low rate of addition of verified/playable games for the Steam Deck. Nevertheless we are now more than 3300 games validated (3312 games to be precise at the time of publication) on the Steam Deck – in two categories…

• After many months of patiently waiting for the next-generation Tuxedo Stellaris Gen 4 laptop by Tuxedo Computers, I’m happy to finally report it’s now in my hands.

• I had reviewed the third generation last September. Notable improvements with this version is the upgrade in the CPU and RAM department, utilizing Alder Lake graphics and DDR5 respectively. It also comes with a more performant GPU, sporting a RTX 3080 Ti. This laptop is even meaner than it was before.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

•  Coming less than a month after KDE Gear 22.04.1, the KDE Gear 22.04.2 point release is here to improve the Dolphin file manager by making it more reliable when downloading and installing new context menu services, adding a proper fix for sorting by access time, and addressing a visual glitch in the Details view when right-clicking on an empty part of the view, also allowing you to paste files in the currently visible view.

• Over 120 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.

• Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including…

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In a sign of how display handling is evolving, the GNOME desktop’s 3D-compositing Mutter window manager is gaining support for variable refresh rate (VRR, also known as Adaptive Sync) displays.

• Mutter is an important chunk of code. As the project page says, it’s “a Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.”

• It’s the basis of GNOME Shell, which is implemented [PDF] as a Mutter plug-in, but other desktops use it as well.

• For instance, the PIXEL desktop of the Raspberry Pi OS.

• It’s also used in Pop!_OS’s Cosmic desktop. Cinnamon uses a fork of it called Muffin.

• Its name comes from Metacity + Clutter. Metacity was the old GNOME 2 window manager, which used Gtk2 to render to the screen, and Clutter used to be GNOME’s OpenGL rendering library.

• The long-outstanding change to give it VRR support has finally lost its “work-in-progress” tag. Once merged, it will be visible in the GNOME Control Center as a simple on/off toggle.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Regolith desktop 2.0 aims to meet the needs of those who seek a fast and efficient desktop Linux experience controlled (primarily) from the keyboard. Regolith pairs the i3 tiling window manager with GNOME Flashback, and adds in an assortment of other open-source components to deliver a curated, keyboard-driven UX.

• And are some big changes since the Regolith 1.6 release from last summer.

• Users of EasyOS will have seen a message on the screen, very early in bootup, showing “read speed test”. Firstly, there is a message about looking for the drives, then this…

• If you’ve gone further into the Linux world than the standard desktop distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora, you have undoubtedly come across some more purpose-built distributions. Some examples are Kali for security testing, DragonOS for software-defined radio, or Hannah Montana Linux for certain music fans. Anyone can roll their own Linux distribution with the right tools, including [Shadly], who recently created one which only loads enough software to launch the 1993 classic DOOM.

• The distribution is as simple as possible and loads no bloat other than what’s needed to launch the game. It loads the Linux kernel and the standard utilities via BusyBox, then runs fbDOOM, which is a port of the game specifically designed to run on the Linux framebuffer with minimal dependencies. After most of that, the only thing left is to use GRUB to boot the distribution, and in just a moment, Doomguy can start slaying demons. The entire distribution is placed into a bootable ISO file that can be placed on any bootable drive.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The Linux Mint XApps suite of cross-desktop accessories has a new member – the Timeshift backup tool.

• The Linux Mint blog post for June revealed that Mint team lead Clement Lefevbre recently took over maintenance of the Timeshift backup tool used in Linux Mint.

• Timeshift is akin to Windows System Restore in that it automatically keeps backups of system files. It’s not Mint-specific and was originally developed by Tony George. That name might sound familiar as we recently mentioned his company TeeJeeTech as the creator of the original Unity-based remix, UMix.

Devices/Embedded

• Normally when we talk about our high-security boot firmware PureBoot, it’s in the context of the advanced tamper detection it adds to a system. For instance, recently we added the ability to detect tampering even in the root file system. While that’s a critical benefit PureBoot provides over our default coreboot firmware, it also provides a number of benefits outside of security that can aid tinkerers who need to recover a system that won’t boot. In this post I’m going to talk about the powerful recovery console PureBoot provides, and explain some of the extra things you can do with it compared to a traditional GRUB recovery console.

• Coreboot is a free software boot firmware that we ship on all of our hardware and replaces the traditional proprietary BIOS. When a coreboot-powered system boots, coreboot executes, initializes some hardware, and then executes a payload that can perform the remaining steps of a traditional BIOS to boot the system. Common payloads include SeaBIOS (what we include with our default coreboot builds), GRUB (GRUB is the standard boot loader used by most Linux distributions to select and boot into the OS), or Heads (what we use with our PureBoot firmware).

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

• Vue Advanced Chat is a web application service that leverages multiple technology, it is compatible with Vue 2, Vue 3, React and Angular.

• It is an open-source, flexible, and customizable.

• The Holy Grail was A List Apart’s famous article, a culmination of years of forebears delicately floating things around, abusing padding and negative margins to achieve something it took a <table> to do before. It’s hard to appreciate 16 years on, but that article was my bible for a while.

• As CSS standards improve and old versions of IE died off we saw the rise of CSS Frameworks, third party code, pre-hacked for edge-cases, just follow their markup, use their classes and everything would work. Most of the time. I’ve been through a few: Blueprint, 960, Bootstrap and most recently Tailwind.

• And I hate them all. That’s not fair. They’ve helped me, professionally, cope with an increasing number of browsers, and increasingly complex layouts (waves in responsive), and they’ve definitely got better —depending on your opinion on utility-first classes— but they all reset to something slightly different, and while the form classes are genuinely helpful, and they all served a purpose for layout, I’d rather have not depended on any of them. It’s those moments where you notice that somebody decided that display: table was the best option to meet IE10 support. And until PurgeCSS came along, they also meant a serious hit to the page weight.

Mozilla

• Mozilla Firefox 101.0.1 will be released later today (if you are reading this on June 9, 2022). The new point release of Firefox Stable fixes three main issues and several smaller issues, including a rare issue on Windows that is making the browser unusable.

• I will be officially leaving Mozilla on the last day of June. My last working day will be June 16. Perhaps I should say I will be leaving the Mozilla Corporation — MoCo, as it’s known internally. After all, once you’re a Mozillian, you’re always a Mozillian. I was there for a significant part of my life — nine years, most of them great, some tough. I was empowered and supported by leadership to move between cities and across countries. Started by moving to London (first time I lived abroad) in February 2013, then Zürich in May 2014, Engelberg (my personal favorite) in May 2015, Zürich again in February 2017, and now here in Berlin since September 2018. In the same time period I moved in with my wonderful partner and we became the lucky parents of two amazing children. It isn’t always easy, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. They bring me joy every day.

• [...]

• So long, and thanks for all the browser engines. And remember, always ask: is this good for the web?

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

•  Coming a little over a month after LibreOffice 7.3.3, the LibreOffice 7.3.4 point release is here to fix a total of 88 bugs across all core components of the open-source office suite in an attempt to make the LibreOffice 7.3 series more stable and reliable for daily use.

• If you’re already using the LibreOffice 7.3 office suite in your GNU/Linux distribution, I highly recommend that you update your installations as soon as possible to version 7.3.4 for the best possible experience.

• LibreOffice 7.3.4 Community, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.3 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

• The LibreOffice 7.3 family offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, starting with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats in the areas of security and robustness – to superior support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files.

• Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by ISO in 2008, which is artificially complex, and not on the ISO approved standard. This lack of respect for the ISO standard format may create issues to LibreOffice, and is a huge obstacle for transparent interoperability.

Programming/Development

Python

• Many open source projects have test suites that include nondeterministic test cases with unpredictable behavior. Tests might be nondeterministic because they launch several parallel processes or threads that interact in an unpredictable manner, or because they depend on some activity in the operating system that has nondeterministic behavior. The presence of these tests can interfere with automated regression checking in CI/CD pipelines. This article shows how to automate the discovery of nondeterministic test cases using a short Python script based on the Bunsen test suite analysis toolkit.

Leftovers

• Earlier this week, MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy launched a new podcast, The Digital Insider with Sinan Aral. Aral is Professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy, where I’ve been a Fellow since it was founded in 2012. He’s the author of the 2020 book The Hype Machine.

Hardware

• A couple of months ago, the Storage Unpacked Podcast published an episode where they interviewed two representatives from Seagate (Tim Walker and Mohamad El-Batal from Seagate Research) to discuss the NVMe HDD and a bit more. It was a good episode and a lot was discussed about NVMe technologies, multi-actuator drives and the future of spinning disk. So, yes….Seagate developed a spinning magnetic disk (the Hard Disk Drive or HDD) that natively speaks the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol instead of the very aged (and bloated) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA). The logic is built directly into the SoC (or System on a Chip) The company made the official announcement late last year. Another article can be found here.

• What prompted this post is a recent announcement from StorONE and they are integrating HDDs into their NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) network. Why is this interesting?

Microsoft Chooses Proprietary

• The free open-source text and source code editor, Atom, is reaching the end of life!

• Does anyone out there still use GitHub’s Atom text editor?

• If so I’ve some bad news to impact: it’s being discontinued! Oh, I know: precisely no-one reading this is shocked at the news – though I suspect more than a few will be saddened by it.

• On December 15, Microsoft’s GitHub plans to turn out the lights on Atom, its open-source text editor that has inspired and influenced widely used commercial apps, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, and GitHub Desktop.

• The social code biz said it’s doing so to focus on cloud-based software.

• “While that goal of growing the software creator community remains, we’ve decided to retire Atom in order to further our commitment to bringing fast and reliable software development to the cloud via Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces,” GitHub explained on Wednesday.

• Ever since Microsoft bought GitHub back in 2018, we knew that Atom’s days were probably numbered. And now they have made it official. GitHub is “sunsetting” Atom so they can focus their time on other projects. What does this mean for Atom users?

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (mailman and python-bottle), Red Hat (java-1.7.1-ibm, java-1.8.0-ibm, subversion:1.14, and xz), Scientific Linux (python-twisted-web), Slackware (httpd), and Ubuntu (ca-certificates, ffmpeg, ghostscript, and varnish).

• Over the past year, software engineers have lived through the shock of infiltrated or intentionally broken NPM packages, supply chain attacks, long-unnoticed backdoors, the emergence of dependency confusion threats, and more. This has created a firestorm of activity around how to securely build software. Many organizations, from the Linux Foundation to the United States government, are calling for and building new practices and regulations, and one of the primary threads is around “reproducible builds.”

• A reproducible build “produces the same byte-for-byte output no matter what computer you run on, what time you run it, and what external services are accessible from the network,” states FOSSA.

• And, reproducible builds can strengthen software supply chain security, but getting there can be challenging. This article outlines some guiding principles for designing reproducible builds.

• Fedora 36 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9) are out, and both ship with OpenSSL 3 that has tighter security defaults and a brand new “provider” architecture. While users were testing the beta and other development versions, issues in interoperability with servers and devices such as Wi-Fi access points showed up and caused some confusion between various uses of the rather overloaded word “legacy” that we would like to clear up.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Access Now is disappointed that Alphabet’s management failed to prioritize human rights when they voted to reject a civil society-backed shareholder proposal led by SumOfUs at the 2022 Annual General Meeting. The proposal comes after red flags were raised around the company’s plan to build a cloud region in Saudi Arabia.

• However, in spite of company leadership’s recommendation to vote against the proposal to commission a human rights assessment of the planned expansion of Cloud centers in countries with poor human rights records, the majority (57.6%) of independent shareholders voted in its favor,* sending a clear message that aligns with civil society’s call: put human rights first.

• “While Access Now is troubled that this opportunity for Alphabet to elevate people over profits wasn’t seized by all, the number of independent shareholders’ votes that supported human rights assessments signals how close we are to sparking real change within one of the most influential companies in the world,” said Laura Okkonen, Investor Advocate at Access Now. “We will continue our work to ensure safeguards are in place before Google Cloud centers are built — and people’s private data is stored — in Saudi Arabia or other regions with poor human rights records.”

• Google, along with other tech giants, has a long way to go in respecting the rights of people within the Middle East and North Africa region.

• AS RUSSIA CONTINUES its unprovoked armed aggression, reports from Ukraine note that the smartphones in civilians’ pockets may be “weapons powerful in their own way as rockets and artillery.” Indeed, technologists in the country have quickly created remarkable apps to keep citizens safe and assist the war effort—everything from an air-raid alert app to the rapid repurposing of the government’s Diia app. The latter was once used by more than 18 million Ukrainians for things like digital IDs, but it now allows users to report the movements of invading soldiers through the “e-Enemy” feature. “Anyone can help our army locate Russian troops. Use our chat bot to inform the Armed Forces,” the Ministry of Digital Transformation said of the new capability when it rolled out.

• Twitter was fined $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses collected for two-factor authentication for ad targeting.

• Twitter has agreed to pay a $150 million penalty for targeting ads at users with phone numbers and email addresses collected from those users when they enabled two-factor authentication. Twitter agreed to the fine and “robust compliance measures to protect users’ data privacy” to settle a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by the US government.

• “As the complaint notes, Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads,” Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said. “This practice affected more than 140 million Twitter users, while boosting Twitter’s primary source of revenue.”

• The settlement was reached with both the FTC and Department of Justice. “The $150 million penalty reflects the seriousness of the allegations against Twitter, and the substantial new compliance measures to be imposed as a result of today’s proposed settlement will help prevent further misleading tactics that threaten users’ privacy,” DOJ Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said. The payment will go to the US Treasury, according to the settlement.

Environment

Wildlife/Nature

• A video shows the cephalopod changing from a stark black color to transparent in seconds.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Instagram is one of the last avenues for online open dialogue in Iran, and parent company Meta must instil Persian content moderation practices that uphold and promote human rights in the country — especially freedom of expression.

• “You can’t silence communities simply because you don’t understand them,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy Manager at Access Now. “That’s exactly what Meta’s ‘take down, ask questions later’ approach has been. For too long, people who don’t know the Persian language or its nuances have been deciding Instagram’s narrative in Iran. We’re calling on Meta to end its regime of censorship, and place human rights at the core of its content moderation.”

• According to polls, more than 50% of people who use the internet in Iran are on Instagram, but there have been major issues around the arbitrary and uninformed content moderation processes of Persian-language posts.

• ARTICLE 19, Access Now and the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) have come together to make recommendations to Meta and Meta’s Oversight Board in an effort to streamline processes to ensure freedom of expression is protected for users who rely on their platform in Iran, especially during protests.

• On 7 June 2022, ARTICLE 19 hosted a RightsCon session that included Meta’s Content Policy manager Muhammad Abushaqra, a member of of Meta’s Oversight Board, Julie Owono, and BBC Persian’s Rana Rahimpour. The event covered Instagram’s Persian-language content moderation processes and problems. Because Instagram, which is owned by Meta, is now the main platform for communication in Iran given its status as the last remaining uncensored social media in the country, the discussion focused on Meta’s regulation of this platform. According to polls, Instagram hosts 53.1% of all Internet users in Iran on its platform, the second most-used app in Iran after WhatsApp.

• Instagram suffers from a deficit in trust and transparency when it comes to content moderation practices for the Persian community. Despite acknowledgments by the company, the case loads remain high through the communication and network mechanisms that organisations like ours alone maintain, which represent problems from only a small fraction of the community. Many Iranians are abandoning Instagram because they distrust the platform’s policies and/or enforcements.

Civil Rights/Policing

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• How to download a file over TLS using the Racket programming language. It is surprisingly straightforward. As with the Go example I gave earlier I have ignored verification of certificates. It looks a job of work.

• Below is the “simplest thing that could possibly work” in terms of fetching a file from a Gemini server. There is no verification of certificates, or any of that ilk. This example just fetches the root document “/”, which should translate to “/index.gmi”. It is trivial to fetch any document you like, though.

• Cloudflare, the internet services giant, has just announced Private Access Tokens. These aim to reduce the number of CAPTCHAs you see on the web while improving your privacy.

• As you may have found out, CAPTCHAs are a horrible experience on mobile. They often end up occupying the entire screen and can be impossible to complete at times.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.