● 06.10.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/06/2022: ExTiX Deepin 22.6 and Diffoscope 216

Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

•  Every computer science student has dabbled in Linux at some point of time in their life. But why should you bother learning Linux at all?

• You may be considering whether learning Linux is worth the effort since it’s much less popular on the desktop than macOS or Windows. There are plenty of reasons that learning Linux pays off, and here are some of them.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The HP Dev One is here! In this review, we’ll take a look at the new notebook from HP – powered by Pop!_OS! We’ll go over the specs, hardware, and much more.

Kernel Space

• Apple has introduced an interesting change with the incoming macOS 13 Ventura in terms of better Linux support, giving fresh powers to those running a Linux distro in a virtual machine (VM) on a Mac with Apple silicon, allowing such users to run x86 software in that VM.

• As The Register (opens in new tab) reports, this ability comes courtesy of Rosetta 2, which is Apple’s translation tech originally introduced with the M1, allowing that chip to run x86 apps.

• With macOS 13, Apple is extending support for Rosetta’s x86-64-to-Arm translation chops so it works in Linux VMs, meaning those running Linux in such a way will be able to seamlessly use apps written for Intel x86 processors.

• This is certainly a neat string to add to the bow of Linux VMs, albeit for a somewhat niche set of Mac owners.

Applications

•  A software synthesizer, also known as a softsynth, is computer software which creates digital audio. Computer software that generates music is not a recent arrival. However, with processors that offer multiple cores and faster clock speeds, software synthesizers can complete tasks that previously needed dedicated hardware. The advantage, of course, of software synthesizers is that they are less expensive than dedicated hardware, and simpler to integrate with other types of music software.

• Surge XT is a hybrid polyphonic synthesizer which supports MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) and runs as an LV2 plugin, or as a VST. The term “hybrid” usually means that the instrument uses a combination of analog and digital components, ideally providing some of the finer aspects of both realms.

Instructionals/Technical

• The digital world has been always displayed to us in a discrete way, in terms of 0’s and 1’s, bytes or pixels; so, raster images were so popular (and still) because of their discrete nature, yet when vector images appeared on the stage, they really took the lights, vectors are different from rasters in their underlying mechanisms, where under the hood vectors are mathematical descriptions of paths and objects.

• In this article we are going to explore how to vectorize (raster) images in Inkscape, also we will be building the vocabulary that is necessary for understanding the tool we are explaining.

• When using any Operating System (OS), it is sometimes necessary to find files. Some commands we’ll cover in this article will look for specific types of files. Others will look for any file in specific places and one will show you the explanation of a command.

• One of the best options in Inkscape image tracing is to remove background, which can be found in multiple scans in Trace Bitmap.

• Ticking this option removes the white background, but it results in a vector which might not be the desired output format, so this article will cover how to remove the white background and output either a raster image or a vector one.

• A while ago we wrote about Bottles, an opensource graphical application easily to run Windows software and Games on Linux operating systems. Today, we will discuss about a similar interesting project. Say hello to WineZGUI, a Wine GUI frontend to run windows apps and games with wine on Linux.

• This simple tutorial shows how to install the GNU Emacs text editor 28.1 and keep up-to-date in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 18.04

• GNU Emacs text editor has reached v28 release series for few months, though Ubuntu still has v27.1 in its universe repository. For those would like to install/upgrade the editor, here are 3 different ways to do the trick in Ubuntu and its based systems.

• One of the things that make Linux-based operating systems great is the high degree of customization they offer us. We can customize and adapt (almost) everything to our needs, from the options the kernel is compiled with, to the desktop environment. On any Linux distribution, the terminal emulator is an essential tool for power users and system administrators. Starship is a free and open source plugin written in rust we can use to customize our favorite shell prompt by using a variety of modules.In this tutorial we see how to install and configure Starship on Linux, and how to integrate it in the Bash and Zsh shells.

• On Linux computers, system resources are shared amongst the users. Try to use more than your fair share and you’ll hit an upper limit. You might also bottleneck other users or processes.

• I use a Vim session to restore my workspace when I return to work.

• Remember that a Vim session is a type of Vim script. So, if I refer to a script below, that information also applies to my problem with a session.

• Vim scripts are a series of Vim commands saved in a text file. Each Vim command appears on a separate line. If you use Vim to automatically generate a session file, that file can be edited manually.

• I have a flip phone (it’s much less distracting than a smartphone), so I cannot use an app or a browser to check the weather when getting dressed in the morning. I tried NOAA’s dial-a-forecast, but the number for my state is out of service.

• Echo is a built-in Linux command-line utility that is used on standard output to display an argument i.e text or string. It is most generally used to display status text to the screen in batch files and shell scripts or used as a source part of a pipeline.

• You have seen or used it frequently in Linux or Unix-like Operating systems mainly to print the string or path variables. Here this article will help you know a more possible way to use the echo command along with examples. To demonstrate examples in this article I have used the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system.

• One of the jewels of open source is VLC. This powerful media player is capable of playing many formats as well as being useful for other functions. That’s why I’ve prepared this post for you, so you can learn how to install VLC Media Player on Manjaro Linux.

• Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Telnet on CentOS 9 Stream. It may not be of much practical use today, but it is always important to do it for educational and testing purposes.

• Telnet is the name of a network protocol that allows us to access another machine to manage it remotely as if we were sitting in front of it. It is a rather old protocol and few uses it nowadays, but it can be interesting for other purposes.

• As expected, we can install or enable it in many Linux distributions without too many problems. A case in point is CentOS 9 Stream, which is a system very focused on the professional environment.

• The top command is a handy command-line tool that displays running processes on a Linux system in real-time. It provides a summary of all the processes being handled by the Linux kernel and some vital system metrics such as uptime, load average, and resource usage (CPU & memory usage).

• Htop is an improved implementation of the top command, which is a text-mode interactive process viewer that provides real-time interactive monitoring of processes and metrics in a colorized output. It is more intuitive and provides a much more appealing look at the running processes and metrics.

• If you have multiple user accounts in your system, it is not a good idea to give administrative privileges to all of them. It is always safe to limit the privileges of certain accounts to prevent unauthorized and potentially harmful changes to the system.

• However, if you want to assign administrative privileges to certain users, you can do it using various methods. In this article, we will discuss the methods you can use to make a user an administrator in your Debian operating system. This includes both the GUI and the command line. When you make a user an administrator, they are given all administrative privileges, such as installing and uninstalling software, making changes to system settings and configurations, etc.

• We used Debian 11 and Debian 10 to successfully test the commands and procedures mentioned in this article.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Netdata on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Netdata is an open-source web-based tool designed for the real-time system performance monitoring solution. It collects real-time metrics for system activities like CPU, RAM, bandwidth usage, disk usage, etc. And displays the information on the web interface with graphical charts.

• 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 Netdata monitoring tool on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• As you get comfortable with the basics of Vim and start exploring it even more deeply, you discover new things.

• New things like splitting the screen while using Vim in a terminal. No need of tmux or screen. Just do it under Vim, natively.

• Yes, Vim allows you to have multiple horizontal or vertical splits in your active workspace.

• Let me show you how to split Vim and all the necessary keyboard shortcuts to navigate between the split windows.

• To run Java apps, open JAR files or compile some source code into bytecode you’ll need to install Java.

• SQLite is a framework that defines a transaction-oriented SQL database system that is self-contained and requires no deployment. SQLite’s codebase is in the mainstream, which means it could be used for every intent, personal or professional. SQLite is perhaps the most extensively used database worldwide, including an uncountable number of applications and some elevated initiatives.

• SQLite is a SQL database system for integrated devices. SQLite will not include a discrete server component like many other Database systems. SQLite writes data to regular database files natively. A single database file consists of a whole SQL database, including many tables, indexes, initiates, and columns. We can easily replicate a database across 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems because the file type of the database file type is multidimensional. SQLite is a widely used statistical File System because of these attributes.

• The “DISTINCT” term in SQLite can evaluate the “SELECT” command’s dataset and remove all duplicate values, ensuring that the retrieved entries are from a valid set of the “SELECT” query. When deciding whether or not a record is a duplicate, the SQLite “DISTINCT” term analyzes just one column and data provided in the “SELECT” command. In the SQLite “SELECT” query, when we declare “DISTINCT” for a single column, the “DISTINCT” query would only retrieve unique results from that defined column. When we can apply a “DISTINCT” query for more than one column in the SQLite “SELECT” command, “DISTINCT” can assess duplicate data using a combination of each of these columns. NULL variables are taken as redundancies in SQLite. Thus, if we are using the “DISTINCT” query on a column with NULL entries, this will only retain a single row containing NULL data.

• Slack is a real-time communication application that allows you to connect to your team. If you wish to collaborate development teams with corporations to conduct group meetings, then this app is the perfect choice for you. This app has many features, such as a channel system that lets the teams discuss topics and issues within a particular channel through audio and video chat or through exchanging important files, etc.

• For the purpose of installing Slack on Ubuntu 22.04, there are various methods available, and each of these methods has been discussed in this blog.

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install blender 3.2 On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Pop_OS 22.04, and Linux Mint 20.3.

• I’ve been using rsync for years and still did not know its full powers. I just wanted a quick and dirty simple backup but realised that rsnapshot is not in Debian anymore.

•  This blog post is based on a white paper style writeup Richard and I did a few years ago, since I noticed this week there wasn’t any other comprehensive writeup online on the topic of how to add the required metadata to get an application to appear in GNOME Software (or any other major open source appstore) online I decided to turn the writeup into a blog post, hopefully useful to the wider community. I tried to clean it up a bit as I converted it from the old white paper, so hopefully all information in here is valid as of this posting.

• Traditionally we have had little information about Linux applications before they have been installed. With the creation of a software center we require access to rich set of metadata about an application before it is deployed so it it can be displayed to the user and easily installed. This document is meant to be a guide for developers who wish to get their software appearing in the Software stores in Fedora Workstation and other distributions. Without the metadata described in this document your application is likely to go undiscovered by many or most linux users, but by reading this document you should be able to relatively quickly prepare you application.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

• Mr. Grumpy reporting for duty, sir. Today, my chore will be the review of Fedora 36, clad in Gnome. I will conduct the testing on my triple-boot IdeaPad, which is powered by AMD Ryzen + Vega graphics and has a small but fierce NVMe for I/O operations. Indeed.

• Recently, in my rather carefully and sparsely sampled spring distro testing season, I tried Kubuntu 22.04. It was okay, but there was no LTS bite to it, as if I needed anything to improve my already vastly cheerful mood and disposition toward Linux lately. But now, I want to try something less KDE, and there’s nothing better than Gnome in its vanillaest form, Fedora. Commence we do.

New Releases

• I’ve released a new version of ExTiX Deepin today (220610). This ExTiX Build is based on Deepin 20.6 released by Deepin Technology 220531. Using Refracta Snapshot (pre-installed in ExTiX) you can make your own live installable Deepin version with ExTiX 22.6 as “groundwork”.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE’s stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.

• As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company’s annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.

• The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.

• The picture is complicated by the fact that there are two different openSUSE distributions: Leap and Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is a rolling-release distro, akin to Arch Linux; there’s no stable version, and new packages emerge from the project’s Factory every day.

• In contrast, Leap is one of the most stable distros available. Major releases appear approximately every few years, with a new minor or point release annually. Since the last point release, 15.3, the project has synchronized its codebase with the enterprise distro. This makes it possible to migrate an installation of openSUSE Leap to the paid SLE product and receive commercial support.

Fedora, Red Hat, and IBM

• Java is a great programming language, but sometimes I want a Java-like language that’s just a bit more flexible and compact. That’s when I opt for Groovy.

• In a recent article, I reviewed some of the differences between creating and initializing maps in Groovy and doing the same thing in Java. In brief, Groovy has a concise syntax for setting up maps and accessing map entries compared to the effort necessary in Java.

• This article will delve into more differences in map handling between Groovy and Java. For that purpose, I will use the sample table of employees used for demoing the JavaScript DataTables library. To follow along, start by making sure you have recent versions of Groovy and Java installed on your computer.

• Automating repeatable tasks is a core part of a sysadmin’s daily routine. Increasingly, this automation involves interacting with web-based APIs to orchestrate activities across devices, cloud providers, or software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools. You must thoroughly test your code, whether you’re writing shell scripts or Ansible playbooks that interact with web services.

• Purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work.

• The Linux kernel documentation covers quite well how device drivers and devices are registered and how these two are bound. But the summary is that drivers and devices are registered independently and each of these specify their given bus type. The Linux kernel device model then uses that information to bind drivers with devices of the same bus type.

• Drivers and devices are registered using the driver_register() function which is usually called from either the drivers’ module_init() function or platform code.

• Devices are registered using the register_device() function which is usually called by subsystems that parses a list of devices from some hardware topology description, some enumerable bus or platform code that hardcodes the devices to be registered.

• A Kubernetes operator is a method of packaging, deploying and managing a Kubernetes application. A Kubernetes application is both deployed on Kubernetes and managed using the Kubernetes API. Operators automate the management of applications or service life cycles on behalf of a human operator, providing for the ability to automate at every level of the stack—from managing the parts that make up the platform all the way to applications that are provided as a managed service.

• Engineering teams can use the power of Operators, which offer autonomous management by exposing configuration natively through Kubernetes objects, for quicker installation and more frequent, robust updates. In addition to the automation advantages of Operators for managing the platform, Red Hat OpenShift makes it easier to find, install and manage Operators running on clusters.

• Version 8.2.0alpha1 is released. It’s still in development and will enter soon in the stabilization phase for the developers, and the test phase for the users.

• RPM of this upcoming version of PHP 8.2, are available in remi repository for Fedora 35, 36 and Enterprise Linux 7, 8, 9 (RHEL, CentOS, Alma, Rocky…) in a fresh new Software Collection (php82) allowing its installation beside the system version.

• As I strongly believe in SCL potential to provide a simple way to allow installation of various versions simultaneously, and as I think it is useful to offer this feature to allow developers to test their applications, to allow sysadmin to prepare a migration or simply to use this version for some specific application, I decide to create this new SCL.

• I also plan to propose this new version as a Fedora 38 change (as F37 should be released a few weeks before PHP 8.2.0).

• RPMs of PHP version 8.1.7 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 34 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky…) and in remi-php81 repository for EL 7.

• RPMs of PHP version 8.0.20 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 34 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky…) and in remi-php80 repository for EL 7.

• RPMs of PHP version 7.4.20 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 34 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky…) and in remi-php74 repository for EL 7.

• In addition, she understood how to meld technology with market realities to ensure that any products developed would solve critical issues facing current customers and prospects.

• Sounds perfect, right?

• There was one issue: In interviews, she did not excite the hiring executives.

• Just because it’s a candidate’s market for tech jobs does not mean hiring executives will make an offer, even when a seemingly perfect candidate is at their doorstep.

• Putting such a model into practice will require a great deal of research in the coming decades, said Russell in conclusion. “This won’t be easy. But it’s clear that this model must be in place before the abilities of A.I. systems exceed those of humans in the areas that matter. If we manage to do that, the result will be a new relationship between humans and machines, one that I hope will enable us to navigate the next few decades successfully.”

Debian Family

• In 2018, I raised the concerns about a volunteer bequesting EUR 150,000 to the FSFE. I have never stated the name of the volunteer. On the other hand, after receiving the cash, FSFE had removed the elections, dramatically changing the nature of the organization that would spend that money. With no more community representatives to look out for that money, the relationship between the cash, the paternity leave and the elections was critical. In an organization that boasts about transparency in its mission statement, those things can be discussed without the name of the volunteer.

• On the theme of privacy, the recent case of Australia’s Attorney-General opens up a similar conundrum. The Federal Court has published the dossier of the woman who died. We can see that the Attorney-General was 17 years old at the time of the alleged crime. Therefore, I presume that Australia’s system of privacy for juvenile offenders would retrospectively give him the same protections as the victim. It is a bizarre thought, an Attorney-General of Australia being smuggled into the children’s court to be tried for something he did as a teenager and sentenced under the laws applicable to somebody of that age.

• In 2014, Alyssa Funk, a 19 year old straight-A student took the family gun and shot herself.

• Alyssa had chosen to do a casting couch video using the name Stella Ann. Her career starting and finishing on the same couch where Belle Knox (Miriam Weeks) was reportedly earning $1,300 for each scene.

• These girls were not what you would perceive to be hookers. They were both university students. The novellist behind the anonymous Belle de Jour prostitute diaries revealed herself to be a prominent research scientist who worked her way to a PhD in expensive London.

• Debian and DebConf is going to Prizren, Kosovo, offering women the opportunity to earn $7,000 for an Outreachy internship. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) offers students in these countries a fee between $1,500 and $3,000 for the same 3 months work.

• The numbers are clear: a woman can get an extra $4,000 by doing Outreachy. That bonus is equivalent to three times the fee paid to Alyssa Funk for one couch scene.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In the previous blog, SQL vs NoSQL Database, we discussed the difference between two major database categories. In a nutshell, the main difference between NoSQL and SQL is that NoSQL adopts a ‘right tool for the job’ approach, whilst SQL adopts a ‘one tool for all the jobs’.

• While SQL remains a standard in organisations worldwide, many other database systems have recently emerged. This is mainly due to the rising volume of highly varied data, scalability, changing storage requirements, the need for high processing power, low latency, and evolving requirements in analytics that database applications have to cater to. NoSQL is a class of newer database systems that offer alternatives to traditional RDBMS so it can cater for one or more of these specialised needs.

• Many IT decision-makers, developers and analysts are familiar with the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) and the structured Query Language (SQL). The SQL database language emerged back in 1970. Its primary focus was to reduce system data duplication by creating data structures and schemas.

• While SQL remains a standard in organisations worldwide, we see many other database systems emerging. This is mainly due to the rising volume of unstructured data, changing storage requirements, the need for high processing power, and evolving requirements in analytics that database applications have to cater to. NoSQL is one of these newer database systems.

• Last May, KubeCon gathered multiple tech enthusiasts, students, professionals, and companies. The event highlighted various topics and insights on how to collaborate on pushing the boundaries of cloud-native computin

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• I read Ephemerons explained today after finding it on Hacker News, and it was good but lengthy. It was also described in terms of the Squeak language and included post-mortem finalization, which is unavailable in JavaScript (and frankly sounds terrifying from an implementation point of view!) I thought I’d try my hand at writing up a shorter and hopefully simpler explanation covering only what is available in JS.

• Dennis is a Python command line utility (and library) for working with localization.

• Mozilla will be represented on the WHATWG Steering Group by Tantek Çelik going forward.

Leftovers

• We have moved to a new house in a different town much closer to my wife’s work. Eliminating her long commute was the main goal of our move but we are really enjoying our new area for more reasons than that. Our new town is smaller, more cohesive and appears to have more of a real community feel than where were before. This is something we’ve been craving and missing for a while. Something else we’re really liking about the area we live is the ways of getting around. Specifically our options for getting places we want to go without getting in a car.

• [...]

• Here we are on Friday and I haven’t sat my tush in a car all week and I count that as a huge win! I haven’t been just hanging out at home doing nothing either. We’ve gone to a really nice playground and splash pad. I’ve gone to pick up breakfast, dinner and coffee by foot and by bike. Yesterday we walked to the monthly food truck rally in the square downtown. I have groceries delivered most of the time but I still need to explore a little more and see if I can find a bike friendly route to the closest grocery store. A few blocks over there is a small neighborhood market that might be a good enough option for small shopping trips. I still need to get over there and check it out for myself. There are more things still yet to discover that are well within walking/biking range including the downtown area that is actually pretty lively and the hub of most community events around here. It’s such a nice change of pace from the last couple places we lived. We have lived places more like this in the past and I really missed it.

Science

Proprietary

• This is a short post to mention that the new Plex Desktop app for Linux is now available on Flathub.

• The proprietary Plex Desktop and Plex HTPC apps made their Linux debut on Canonical’s Snap Store a few weeks back. At the time the media-streaming company said that Flatpak builds would follow in the future.

• The Times They Are A-Changin’ and no, I am not referring to the Bob Dylan song. It has recently been reported that Microsoft is pushing vendors to use Solid State Drives (SSD) and not Hard Disk Drives (HDD) as system boot drives.

• From a performance standpoint, this makes complete sense but at the expense of price. The above article highlights the minimum requirements that Microsoft is pushing for Windows 11 to OEMs with a deadline of 2023. Honestly though, I am not against this move. Assuming that a reasonable quality SSD is being utilized, this could potentially provide a better user experience to the consumer.

• Coder, coder in the hall, which is the best editor of them all!

• Sorry for the really cheesy opening line. I could not prevent myself from writing that. Just as we all could not prevent the certain demise of the most loved open source code editor of the last decade, Atom.

• Atom is being archived for official sunset on December 15, 2022.

• Microsoft released the final version of its next big Windows 11 update (22H2) to Release Preview testers on Tuesday, and accidentally made it available to PCs that aren’t officially supported. Oops. Microsoft has strict minimum hardware requirements for Windows 11, leaving millions of PCs behind, so the mistake will once again highlight the company’s controversial upgrade policy.

• Windows 11 leaves those with older systems in the dust. This is what made it confusing this week when these machines were suddenly offered the newest build. Microsoft was quick to jump in and explain that it was just a bug that allowed unsupported PCs to upgrade to Windows 11. Owners of these systems are not simply lucking out, however.

Security

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 216. This version includes the following changes:

• * Print profile output if we were called with –profile and we receive a

• TERM signal.

• * Emit a warning if/when we are handling a TERM signal.

• * Clarify in the code in what situations the main “finally” block gets

• called, especially in relation to handling TERM signals.

• * Clarify and tidy some unconditional control flow in diffoscope.profiling.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-bottle), Fedora (grub2 and kernel), Mageia (python-pypdf2, python-ujson, and vim), and SUSE (fribidi, grub2, mozilla-nss, and webkit2gtk3).

• Google has released Chrome version 102.0.5005.115 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system.

• The Stable channel has been updated to 102.0.5005.115 for Windows, Mac and Linux which will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

• At RSA Conference 2022, Morphisec launched Morphisec Knight for Linux, a standalone security solution purpose-built for Linux servers to stop supply chain, data theft, ransomware, and other advanced attacks.

• It provides lightweight cloud and server workload protection across bare metal, virtualized servers, and CWPP with almost no performance impact or false positive alerts. Knight uses Morphisec’s revolutionary, patented, Moving Target Defense (MTD) technology to proactively prevent advanced attacks. Knight is low-friction, cost-efficient, and highly effective.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• Intezer security researcher Joakim Kennedy and the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team have analyzed an unusual piece of Linux malware they say is unlike most seen before – it isn’t a standalone executable file.

• Dubbed Symbiote, the badware instead hijacks the environment variable (LD_PRELOAD) the dynamic linker uses to load a shared object library and soon infects every single running process.

• Once Symbiote has infected all running processes, it delivers the attacker rootkit function with the ability to harvest credentials and remote access capability.

Defence/Aggression

• The rise of the “boomer shooter” has been interesting to watch. Those sorts of games have always enjoyed some level of popularity, but seeing them become so succesful to the point of influencing other games outside of the genre is impressive in an age where video game molds seem very set. Hard Reset, though, is a game from before this renaissance; and so is uniquely interesting to me, someone not especially a fan of the genre.

• [...]

• Gunplay is simplified, and probably my major critique. Instead of an arsenal of different guns, you essentially have two; a kinetic and an energy weapon, which you gradually unlock variation modes of. Each mode has multiple upgrades, and it doesn’t end up being boring gameplay wise, but I would’ve loved to see a bit more visual variety in the weaponry.

Censorship/Free Speech

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (“TRAI”) released a consultation paper on “Issues relating to Media Ownership” on April 12, 2022. Highlighting that media pluralism is antithetical to the phenomenon of concentration of media ownership, the paper sought views on the need and method of regulation of cross-media ownership. We sent our comments on June 6, 2022, where we pointed out that regulation of cross media ownership will not necessarily lead to media pluralism, and that the former must not be done at the cost of freedom of speech and expression.

• I’ll be writing a series of posts detailing issues I have while setting up my server and site to serve Gemini and HTTPS without sacrificing the quality of either one. It will be fairly technical, but I’ll try to make it somewhat understandable for nontechnical† people without boring hackers.

Monopolies

• Over the last several years the European Union and the United Kingdom have debated proposals to regulate digital platforms to protect consumers and promote competition. These proposals recognize that while dominant platforms require changes in traditional antitrust law to constrain their market power, they also require changes in traditional consumer protection law and sector-specific experts to protect users from fraud, unfair conduct, algorithmic discrimination, and dangerously deceptive disinformation.

• Until now, Congress has sat out the regulatory conversation – leaving it to foreign governments to regulate American companies and without consideration of American consumers or American values. But now, Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Representative Peter Welch (D-VT) have introduced the first comprehensive consumer protection bills to fill this gap. The Digital Platform Commission Act would create a new federal agency designed to work in concert with existing antitrust agencies and build on the competition legislation currently pending in Congress. The new agency draws heavily on work by Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld and Brookings Visiting Fellow Former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler.

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