● 06.17.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 17/06/2022: Wine 7.11 and Summary of a Week in GNOME

Posted in News Roundup at 11:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• While the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web have certainly had some positive effects on the world, I think the single biggest threat that humanity faces today is social media. Social media is harmful to the individual and to the greater community…

• Welcome to Hardware Addicts, a proud member of the TuxDigital Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world.

• In this episode, we’re going to be talking about 3D Printing and how they are paving the way to the future. 3D printed homes, food, body parts, it’s all covered in this episode. Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will discuss camera gimbals that will make you want to start your own vlog.

• So Sit back, Relax, and Plug In because Hardware Addicts Starts Now!

Instructionals/Technical

• We have gone over hostnames in previous articles, but we are going to cover it again. We’ll also be covering hostname resolution for CentOS7 and Ubuntu 18.04. Trust me, this one was difficult to get resolved (no pun intended).

• A hostname is a simple name used to represent a device on a network. It is easier to remember the hostname than an IP Address.

• On a local network, names can be something like ‘Server’, ‘system1’, ‘laptop2’, etc. On a local network, the Domain Name of the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) is ‘.local’. The FQDN could be ‘Server1.local’, ‘system1.local’, etc.

• On the Internet, you have a FQDN such as ‘www.linux.org’. The hostname is ‘www’ and the domain name is ‘linux.org’.

• Today we are looking at how to install NewCP 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.

• Jack Wallen shows you what might be the easiest method of transferring files between Linux desktops on the market.

• If you want to be a Frontend developer, then you need to know how to install Angular. In this case, we have chosen CentOS 9 Stream as our system because it is a solid and new system that many developers can use for their purposes.

• This guide shows how to automatically set up updates on the Ubuntu system, also known as unattended upgrades.

• We know the Linux operating system is considered secure “by design.” However, regular maintenance by applying released security updates ensures that it will remain such. In addition, they address pre-existing vulnerabilities that malicious users can use to compromise the system.

• One of the most common approaches used by Linux system administrators is manually installing security updates. The problem with this approach is that it cannot ensure consistent regularity.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ntopng on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Ntopng is a web-based application for true network traffic flow monitoring that is available as open freeware. It’s an improved kind of innovative Ntop that displays network use, statistics, and analytical data. Ntopng comes in professional and corporate editions with license restrictions, as well as a free open source community version. It supports major OS including Unix, Windows, and macOS.

• 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 Ntopng network monitoring 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.

• Angular is a popular, open-source web application framework for building mobile and desktop apps. It was developed in 2009 by Google to help developers design complex applications from scratch without having expert knowledge of coding languages like C# or Java which can take up valuable time when you want something simple with little functionality at first but grow as your project develops over the years.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Angular on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal using the NodeSource repositories as the source for NodeJS and NPM.

• Signal Messenger is a free, open-source messaging app that has been around for several years and specializes in end-to-end encryption. When you need to communicate securely but find it hard because of the restrictions put on traditional messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, Signal messenger is one of the better forms of communication for those that require the utmost privacy.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install Signal Messenger on Debian 11 Bullseye. The tutorial will use the command line terminal with complete steps to install the official repository and tips on updating and removing the software securely and adequately.

• Vue is a progressive JavaScript framework that makes it easy for anyone with some knowledge of HTML and CSS to create beautiful web applications. With Vue’s various tools, you can build your project in no time!

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Vue.js on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal using the NodeSource repositories as the source for NodeJS and NPM.

• Nginx is a powerful web application server. However, combined with LEMP situations, PHP is known to be slow with requests needing to go to PHP-FPM, which then queries MySQL/MariaDB database, then Nginx will generate a static HTML page which is then delivered back to Nginx.

• So, the overheads increase dramatically if a website server is under heavy load. However, Nginx supports a cache solution with FastCGI to reduce the overhead and allow a server to handle more page requests with in-demand files being served from a cache instead of doing the whole route of going to the database and back.

• The following tutorial will show you how to set up Nginx FastCGI Cache on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa using the command line terminal.

WINE or Emulation

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 10 to June 17.

• It is with great sadness that we write about the death of one of the most significant contributors to Free and Open Source Software, Marina Zhurakhinskaya. Marina was a force for change and leaves a profound legacy of diversity, inclusion, equity and justice. It is impossible to imagine what Software Freedom Conservancy and Outreachy would be like without Marina.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• I opened port 22 on my router at home and left my RPi on so that I can conneect to it while I’m at my parents’. Before doing this I setup npf on NetBSD that is running on the RPi and also blacklistd to ban those who try to log in multiple times.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Bitwig and u-he have announced CLAP (CLever Audio Plug-in API), a new open standard for audio plug-ins and hosts.

• CLAP offers modern features, innate stability, and rapid support for plug-in and host developers. The developers say that, since it’s open source and liberally licensed, CLAP is a safe bet for the future.

• CLAP 1.0 is the result of a multi-year project initiated by u-he and Bitwig, with design and implementation contributions by a group of commercial and open source audio developers.

Events

• This week, I finally went back to A Coruña for the Web Engines Hackfest and internal company meetings. These were my first on-site events since the COVID-19 pandemic. After two years of non-super-exciting virtual conferences I was so glad to finally be able to meet with colleagues and other people from the Web.

• Igalia has grown considerably and I finally get to know many new hires in person. Obviously, some people were still not able to travel despite the effort we put to settle strong sanitary measures. Nevertheless, our infrastructure has also improved a lot and we were able to provide remote communication during these events, in order to give people a chance to attend and participate !

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• It is relatively easy to get a group of people that creates a new database management system or new data store. We know this because over the past five decades of computing, the rate of proliferation of tools to provide structure to data has increased, and it looks like at an increasing rate at that. Thanks in no small part to the innovation by the hyperscalers and cloud builders as well as academics who just plain like mucking around in the guts of a database to prove a point.

• But it is another thing entirely to take an open source database or data store project and turn it into a business that can provide enterprise-grade fit and finish and support a much wider variety of use cases and customer types and sizes. This is hard work, and it takes a lot of people, focus, money – and luck.

GNU Projects

• Check out the great work our volunteers accomplished at today’s Free Software Directory (FSD) IRC meeting.

• Every week, free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on Libera.Chat to help improve the FSD. This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, June 17, 2022 meeting, where we saw a couple of new programs added and several entries updated.

Programming/Development

• I’m going to create a cgi-bin called “iss” with golang.

• My plan is to get the ISS coordinates and the number of people aboard.

• Early-stage startups shouldn’t run on Kubernetes yet.

• But eventually, growth-stage and large companies should be running on Kubernetes in some form. Kubernetes Maximalism doesn’t mean one-size-fits-all.

• Infrastructure should progressively grow with your workloads and team. How can you choose the right technology now so that you can maximize growth and minimize pain later when you inevitably outgrow it?

• jQuery is an open-source, feature-rich JavaScript library, designed to simplify the HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax with an easy-to-use API that supports the multiple browsers. It makes the easy interaction between the HTML & CSS document, Document Object Model (DOM), and JavaScript. With the help of jQuery, the multiple lines of code can be wrapped into methods, which in turn, can be called with a single line of code to perform a particular task. This, in turn, jQuery makes it easier to use Javascript on the website, along with enhancing the overall performance of the website.

Standards/Consortia

• It’s been almost three weeks since I last wrote anything about Hafnium, it might seem like nothing is happening, but that’s wrong.

• I didn’t make the changes public yet, I’ll roll out the commits once I’m sure that everything works fine.

Leftovers

• Recently, there’s been some “union activity” around the company I work for. Some of the lowest-paid and most-public-facing workers have started agitating to join a local union. I’m all for it, I’d join if I could. We were emailed a letter today about it, take a small look. I’m paraphrasing here, I don’t want to get sacked lmao

• Do not tell. Do not shout. People will not change their opinion if you just tell them they are wrong. Metaphorical shouting, cancelling, no platforming, they do not work. You have to explain patiently, with understanding, with sympathy for why they think what they think.

• The pandemic and war in Ukraine have caused serious disruption to supply chains. Analysis by Interos shows that more than 2,100 U.S.-based firms, and at least 1,200 in Europe, have Tier 1 suppliers in Russia. In addition, more than 190,000 firms in the U.S. and at least 109,000 in Europe have Tier 2 and 3 suppliers located there.

• As companies navigate through the continued pandemic response and uncertainty caused by the war, they’re facing challenges around instability of supply, price inflation, logistics disruption and labor impacts. As a result, the traditional notion of building resiliency in supply chains is evolving — and it should. No longer can companies focus only on flexible manufacturing, increasing inventory or varying supply sources. Instead, the key to building resilience is visibility.

• Research from Accenture found that companies with greater visibility are better positioned to handle all kinds of disruptions, creating a more resilient supply chain. What may come as a surprise is that companies don’t need full visibility into everything: An intelligent view into certain product lines, customers or suppliers is often enough.

• But what is visibility — and, more specifically, “intelligent visibility” that can be achieved with the use of new technologies and analytics? Most supply chain professionals have a general ideal of what the word means, but there actually are two types of visibility that create resilience in supply chains: structural and dynamic.

Science

• In a bid to accelerate the development of quantum computing applications, supercomputer manufacturer Fujitsu has come up with what it says is the world’s fastest 36-qubit quantum simulator.

• Quantum simulators attempt to emulate quantum operations on a classical computer. While their speeds are slower than quantum machines, they can serve as a bridge technology before wider implementation of quantum computers, which have limited computing range and can be prone to errors.

• The new Fujitsu machine operates on a 64-node PRIMEHPC FX 700 hardware system with the same A64FX processors used in Fugaku, the Fujitsu supercomputer that was knocked off its leading position in late May in the new TOP500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• TODO Group is proud to announce a new OSPO Mind Map version release. The mind map shows a Open Source Program Office’s (OSPO) responsibilities, roles, behavior, and team size within an organization. This post highlights the major improvements done by the community in this new version of the OSPO Mind Map.

Security

• Two of the more prolific cybercriminal groups, which in the past have deployed such high-profile ransomware families as Conti, Ryuk, REvil and Hive, have started adopting the BlackCat ransomware-as-as-service (RaaS) offering.

• The use of the modern Rust programming language to stabilize and port the code, the variable nature of RaaS, and growing adoption by affiliate groups all increase the chances that organizations will run into BlackCat – and have difficulty detecting it – according to researchers with the Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team.

• Yesterday I was asked for advice on anonymously reporting a new crypto scam that a potential victim had spotted before they lost money (hint: to a first approximation all cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets are a scam). In the end they got fed up with the difficulty of finding someone they could tell and gave up. However, to give the advice I thought I would check what the National Crime Agency’s National Cyber Crime Unit suggested so I searched “NCA NCCU report scam” and the first result was for the NCA’s Contact us page. Sounds good. It has a “Fraud” section which (as expected) talks about Action Fraud. However, since 2019 this page has linked to the National Archives archive of an old version of the Action Fraud website. So for three years if you followed the NCA’s website’s advice on how to report fraud you would have got very confused until you worked out you were on a (clearly labelled) archive rather than the proper website, which is why none of the forms work.

Privacy/Surveillance

• In an age when it seems like we’re being solicited for feedback every time we open up an app on our phones (especially if Facebook is paying us $20 a month for the privilege of siphoning our entire lives off our phones)

• Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to effectively overrule the government on border privacy rules. These developments raise the puzzling question of why the federal government – led by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez – are so indifferent to privacy, at best treating it as a low priority issue and at worst proposing dangerous measures or seemingly hoping to cash in on weak privacy laws in order to fund other policy priorities.

• The privacy alarm bells have been ringing for weeks. For example, the Globe and Mail recently featured an important story on children’s privacy, working with Human Rights Watch and other media organizations to examine the privacy practices of dozens of online education platforms. The preliminary data suggests some major concerns in Canada, most notably with the CBC, whose CBC Kids platform is said to be “one of the most egregious cases in Canada and really all around the world.” The CBC responded that it “complies with relevant Canadian laws and regulations with regard to online privacy, and follows industry practices in audience analytics and privacy protection.” Yet that is the problem: Canada’s privacy laws are universally regarded as outdated and weak, thereby enabling privacy invasive practices with no consequences. Soon after, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released findings in an investigation involving the Tim Hortons app tracking location data. First identified by then-National Post reporter James McLeod, the commissioner found privacy violations, yet Canadian privacy law does not include penalties for these violations.

Defence/Aggression

• The Russian army is suffering high casualties in the war against Ukraine and Vladimir Putin badly needs fresh troops. He wants to avoid a general mobilization, so the military is relying on other methods.

Environment

• We only have limited resources on this rock we call home. If, for example, we can make supplies last for 10 more millenia instead of 1, or, even 9, I am all for that.

Finance

• Wells Fargo limits online credit card payments from non-Wells Fargo bank accounts.

• I use my credit cards like debit cards. I slide them to pay the bills and then pay them back in a day or two, so debts are basically temporary and causal, most of them are for something I must do or would do anyway, and they just generate credit card points.

• To pressure people who have a Wells Fargo credit card to open a Wells Fargo bank account, they do something I have never seen another credit card company do.

• If you try to make more than like 4 payments in a month online using a non-Wells Fargo bank account, they will refuse to accept the online payment until it’s a new month, and then say “You can make further payments by calling them in over the phone to this number.”.

• Then you have to call a toll free number, tell it your Wells Fargo account number, and then tell it the bank account routing and account numbers you want to use to make the payment.

• Locke says that property arises when the empty, unimproved natural places are mixed with human labor. You own your body, so you own its labor and the fruits of its labor. No one owns an empty place, so when you influse your body’s labor into a place, it becomes yours.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A South African student studying at the University of Toronto, Vuyo is obtaining a double major in Mathematics and Political Sciences, and a minor in Statistics. However, it is seemingly by chance that he ended up enrolling in Ron Deibert’s first-year political science class:

• “I did not know much about Professor Deibert’s course before taking it. I was looking for a politics course and it seemed interesting from its description! I applied for the award because after taking the course, I found that I was really curious about the work that they did at the Citizen Lab. Learning about the intersection between politics and the internet (and climate change!) has been such an eye opening experience, and I wanted the opportunity to learn from a group of people who are doing important work for the world.”

• When not studying, Vuyo can be found head-first in a science-fiction/fantasy novel or exploring the parks and gardens around Toronto.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• I went from being a copyright zealot to being a copyright abolitionist (this was in 1999 so most of y’all know me after). I realized the limitless potential of sharing & caring. Copyright abolitionism was also my gateway to anti- and post-capitalist politics.

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