● 06.20.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/06/2022: Linux 5.19 RC3 and OpenBGPD 7.4

Posted in News Roundup at 12:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Iowa is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Wisconsin to the northeast, Illinois to the east and southeast, Missouri to the south, Nebraska to the west, South Dakota to the northwest, and Minnesota to the north.

•  This week started strong with a big announcement from the Thunderbird project as they plan on developing an Android app for the popular open-source email client, the release of the KDE Plasma 5.25 desktop environment, and another big announcement, this time from Mozilla as they enabled the “Total Cookie Protection” privacy/anti-tracking feature by default for all desktop users.

• Also this week, we got new releases of our beloved software and GNU/Linux distributions, including but not limited to IPFire, GIMP, Proton, Manjaro, and Ubuntu Core. Below, you can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for June 19th, 2022!

• Welcome to this week’s Linux weekly roundup.

• We had a full week in the world of Linux releases with KDE Plasma 5.25, Amarok Linux 3.4.1, Manjaro 21.3.0, and Garuda Linux 220614.

• We hope you have a wonderful week and enjoying a splendid summer!

Audiocasts/Shows

• One of the pioneers of the web, VNC, Webcams, and more joins us; plus we’ll update you on a few projects we love.

• Brent sits down with Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser, computer scientist, serial-entrepreneur, inventor (perhaps) of the webcam, Augmented Reality Ph.D. who ran the very first web server at the University of Cambridge, among much more. We explore topics including computer science as an art-form, the origins of the Raspberry Pi and T9 predictive text, philosophies around innovation and invention, challenging the patent system, and more.

• **kdav** , **kdubaddons** , and a dozen **kde-cli-tools** from Slackware set **kde**.

• Josh and Kurt talk about the security of employees leaving jobs. Be it a voluntary departure or in the context of the current layoffs we see, what are the security implications of having to remove access for one or more people departing their job?

• The terms high level and low level language by themselves don’t really have that much meaning, what they require is an agreed upon point of reference and while a lot of people may agree on that point it’s certainly not universal

Kernel Space

• The 5.19-rc3 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “5.19-rc3 is fairly small, and just looking at the diffstat, a lot of it ends up being in the documentation subdirectory. With another chunk in selftests.”

Instructionals/Technical

• My aim was to get quickly, and as simple as possible, a web interface to my own git repositories.

• Sure, binary formats are more efficient and transfer less data over the network. For example, HTTP/2 and the proposal for HTTP/3 are binary protocols. But performance enhancements don’t come without complexity and new issues. And those improvements come decades after learning the optimizations needed for the simple plain text protocol.

• And think about them, Tomas! After you’re done, interpret them.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install WPS Office 2019 on Debian 11.

• Today we are looking at how to install Intellij Idea 2022 Community 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.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install AnyDesk on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, AnyDesk is a remote desktop application that allows you to access personal computers and other devices that are running the host application from anywhere. Anydesk is a cross-platform application. It is available for Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows operating systems. It can be used individually and in teams.

• 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 AnyDesk remote desktop application 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.

• Raspberry Pi is a pretty useful device that operates under a certain voltage and if enough voltage isn’t provided to the device, it may not boot up properly. Even if it boots up, it will warn you about voltage issues every time. If proper precautions aren’t followed to avoid the low voltage warning, then it might not be a good sign for your Raspberry Pi device, as this will reduce its lifetime.

• If you want to avoid low voltage warning on your Raspberry Pi device, you should follow this article that provides you with the guidelines to overcome this issue.

• In today’s tutorial, we will discuss how to disable and enable automatic updates on CentOS 7 using the PackageKit. The tutorial is divided into two parts. In the first part, we will demonstrate how to disable auto updates on CentOS 7. In the second part, we will show you how to enable auto updates. We will use the CentOS command line to perform the tasks. The commands are very easy to follow.

• “CMake is a popular and helpful cross-platform, open-source set of tools that utilize compiler and platform-independent configuration files to build, test, and package projects. CMake was developed as the solution for a cross-platform build space for open-source projects. CPack is a packaging tool that is cross-platform and distributed by CMake. However, it can be used independently of CMake, but it uses generator concepts from the CMake suite tool.

• This guide covers the installation and usage of CMake and CPack.”

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Codenamed “Ruah”, Manjaro 21.3 ships with the same Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series, alongside the older Linux 5.10 and 5.4 LTS kernels for older hardware, as it looks like the Manjaro Linux devs decided to stick to LTS kernels for new releases and not adopt the latest and greatest kernel branch, Linux 5.18, which is already the default kernel upstream in Arch Linux’s repositories.

BSD

• In 2017, I wrote a series of articles [1], [2], [3] and [4] on FreeBSD’s famous version 4.11 (and an experiment to use Pkgsrc to get modern software running on it), but I’ve been interested in the history of my operating system of choice for longer than that.

• It’s been half a decade since I visited 4.x, my familiarity with FreeBSD has grown further and I finally dare to embark on the adventure to look at the very beginning. I had originally thought about doing this in a VM. However while dusting off an old laptop of mine to test 13.1-BETA releases on, I thought that I might give ancient FreeBSD a shot on that machine. It is an Acer TravelMate 272XC laptop that I got in 2003 (see dmesg at the bottom if you want to know more). It is not the oldest machine that I still have, but it is the last one with a working floppy drive!

• So I would simply install FreeBSD 1.0, mess with it a little and then write an article about it. Nothing too complicated, should be done in a couple of hours on a weekend! Except it turned out to be… just a little more involved.

• [...] However, the release notes may be found in this mailing list post from June 14th, 2022: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=165521316007652&w=2

• Lets get back to the computing world. Can you officially name FreeBSD a UNIX? No. That is because Open Group company owns copyright to the ‘UNIX’ term. You can call it only a UNIX-like system … but that does not mean its not UNIX. You just can not call it like that because of the lawyers.

• NetBSD team also gave good example with their ‘duck’ explanation – https://mollari.netbsd.org/about/call-it-a-duck.html – available here.

• Apple paid $100 000 to call their Mac OS X (now macOS) system a UNIX officially.

• This document will guide you through the setup of a NetBSD VM using UTM on an Apple M1 to perform all your course work on. Please follow these steps as shown; if you run into problems or have questions, please send them to the class mailing list.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• I recently finished Effective Software Testing – A Developer’s Guide by Maurício Aniche, and I really liked it. I have been coding for a long time and I think I have been writing pretty good tests for the features I have implemented. Even so, I found this book quite valuable. Particularly the chapters on how to systematically come up with test cases based on the specification, inputs, outputs and the structure of the implementation.

• The book also covers many other common topics relevant for developers writing automatic tests, such as: test-driven development, mocking, designing for testability, and property-based testing. The author does a good job describing these. I especially like the code examples – they are larger than the most basic cases, but still small enough to easily keep in your head.

• The author is an Assistant Professor in Software Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. He has also worked for several years as a developer. The book apparently grew out of lecture notes from a course on software testing. The academic background shows in that there are plenty of references to relevant research (something I also liked with Code Complete).

• Reproducibility is an important tool to empower users. Why would a user care about that? Let me elaborate.

• For a piece of software to be reproducible means that everyone with access to the software’s source code is able to build the binary form of it (e.g. the executable that gets distributed). What’s the matter? Isn’t that true for any project with accessible source code? Not at all. Reproducibility means that the resulting binary EXACTLY matches what gets distributed. Each and every bit and byte of the binary is exactly the same, no matter on which machine the software gets built.

• The benefit of this is that on top of being able to verify that the source code doesn’t contain any spyware or unwanted functionality, the user now is also able to verify that the distributable they got e.g. from an app store has no malicious code added into it. If for example the Google Play Store would inject spyware into an application submitted by a developer, the resulting binary that gets distributed via the store would be different from the binary built by the user.

• Why is this important? Well, Google already requires developers to submit their signing keys, so they can modify software releases after the fact. Now, reproducibility becomes a tool to verify that Google did not tamper with the binaries.

• The existence of frameworks is a boon to all the developers as it contains actual programs using which software is built. To speed up your development, it provides ready-made components. We can’t forget about PHP when we are talking about frameworks. PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a fast, flexible, and very popular scripting language specially implemented for web development. According to a report by W3Tech, PHP is used by 78.9% of the websites as a server-side programming language.

• I’m working on rebuilding a side project in Remix. Right now it’s pure client-side, meaning no JavaScript = no functionality. Why did I build it that way? Honestly, because it’s the only way I knew how. But now with Remix I feel empowered to build it with progressive-enhancement in mind: it works before JavaScript loads, then when (or if) the JS loads, the page gets enhanced.

• So far, it’s going really well. I’m learning a lot along the way—often more about the web platform than about Remix the framework.

• I figure I’ll start blogging about what I learn. A series of posts, perhaps, which I’ll tag something like #TILAWPUR: Things I Learned About the Web Platform Using Remix.

Python

• If we choose to raise exceptions, naive code which doesn’t check for the exceptions will simply get no further — the exception will propagate up and terminate the handler. With the second option where we return error objects, those objects can’t be accidentally converted into success values — the VerifyExpired object contains the email address, but it is a completely different shape of value from the happy case.

• Both of these approaches, to some degree, respect the principle that can be summed up as Parse Don’t Validate. Instead of merely validating a token and extracting an email address as two independent things, we are parsing a token, and encoding the result of the validation in the type of objects that will then flow through the program.

• But which is better?

• Python’s regular expression function substitution is a handy and powerful way to do certain sorts of very generalized text substitution in a low hassle manner. The one caution to it is that you probably don’t want to use it in a performance sensitive situation, because it does require a Python function call and various other things for each substitution. The last time I looked, pure text substitutions ran much faster if you could use them. Here, not only is the situation not performance sensitive but there’s no way out of running the Python code one way or another, because we can’t do the work with just text substitution (at least not if we want powers of two humanized numbers, as I do).

Java

• There are many instances when data is stored as key-value pairs. In Java, it can be achieved by “map” which is a collection. Keys usually should not be null and they should point to only one value. In Map, there are various classes available and among them, Hashmap is a class that implements the Map interface.

Leftovers

• When I read this I thought: if “the medium is the message”, what’s the message behind the medium of a personal blog?

• Today, I figured I would write something up on what it feels like to be 10,000 feet above sea level. It is a sensation few experience, although having been born and raised in Colorado, I imagine my respiratory system is adapted to such heights. Even for me, someone who’s lived next to mountains for my entire life, the lofty reaches of Guanella Pass are elusive and awe-inspiring.

• It’s almost 20h local time (well actually 21h on the clock due to mandated clock skew) and its still 31°C outside. My thermometer peaked just a whee bit before 40, but I have seen 39.5°C today. Unbelievable.

Science

• As world leaders wrap up the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, new scientific research shows that there is still a great deal of magical thinking about the contribution of fertilizer to global warming.

• Philanthropist Bill Gates fed the retreat from science in his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster earlier this year. “To me fertilizer is magical,” he confesses, nitrogen fertilizer in particular. Under a photo of a beaming Gates in a Yara fertilizer distribution warehouse in Tanzania, he explains that “to grow crops, you want tons of nitrogen – way more than you would ever find in a natural setting [sic]…. But nitrogen makes climate change much worse.”

• That last part, at least, is true, and new research suggests that the climate impacts of excessive use of nitrogen fertilizers is much worse than previously estimated. Researchers estimate that the N-fertilizer supply chain is contributing more than six times the greenhouse gases (GHGs) produced by the entire commercial aviation sector.

• Civilians in Ukraine are recording three-dimensional (3D) models of artifacts in a permanent digital archive far away from the war as part of Backup Ukraine, a project to save the country’s cultural heritage.

• Organizers said the scans’ resolutions are fine enough to project them into physical spaces, and to use them to reconstruct destroyed artifacts.

• The joint project of the VICE media group, cultural heritage preservation organization Blue Shield Denmark, and the Danish UNESCO National Commission marks the first time a country’s artifacts are being archived in augmented reality during a war.

• Backup Ukraine’s Tao Thomsen said the initiative includes 150 volunteers who scan up to 10 artifacts daily with mobile devices, using the Polycam application to access the archive.

• Project leaders are in communication with Ukraine’s Heritage Emergency Rescue Initiative, and coordinate with 3D scanning professionals to digitize artifacts faster and at larger scale.

• Today I was portable QRV on a small hill near my home QTH and was testing my new AlexLoop Magentic Loop Antenna. Unfortunately the band conditions were not very good today due to some magnetic turbulence, so I am not able to really say something about this antenna.

• [...]

• The antenna has one real benefit: It comes with a handy backpack with some smaller pockets were you can store all the stuff you need. I am QRV 6 minutes after arrival and it does not need much space. I will not be able to do so with a wire antenna

• A robotic arm with an attached microphone has learned how to locate noisy objects tossed into a bag, grabbing a set of keys by listening for the telltale clinking sound and picking out a crinkly bag of crisps sight unseen.

Education

• Finally, and perhaps least obviously, it means the end of the library model that has served us so well for hundreds of years. Increasingly, libraries are unable to buy copies of ebooks outright, but must rent them. This means that they must follow the strict licensing conditions imposed by publishers on how those ebooks are lent out by the library. For example, some publishers license ebooks for a set period of time – typically a year or two – with no guarantee that renewal will be possible at the end of that time. Others have adopted a metered approach that counts how many times an ebook is lent out, and blocks access after a preset number. Karpeles writes: [...]

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• This crisis, however, is in some sense artificial, given that it is not driven by any actual shortage of food in the world. Even with the Ukrainian wheat off the market, there is still plenty of grain to go around. The issue is all about how much it costs and how it is distributed. And Putin is not the only one who is exploiting this situation. Commodity traders make money off wild price swings, shippers make money off people desperate for grain, fertilizer manufacturers make money off farmers desperate to maximize their yields, and proto-fascist politicians are happy to exploit rising food prices as evidence of the failure of democracy.

Proprietary

• It’s tough to know what to believe here. On the one hand, it’s no secret gas stations aren’t the most secure pieces of technology out there. It’s also no secret that the cops don’t always tell the truth.

• It’s also puzzling that the drivers lined up at the gas station to purchase the stolen gas don’t appear to have been arrested or even mentioned beyond a few sentences in the release. And it’s not like locals seem very upset about the duo’s entrepreneurial spirit, either.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Collectively branded as “lawful intercept” companies, they claim to only sell to customers with legitimate use for surveillanceware, such as intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

• “In reality, such tools have often been abused under the guise of national security to spy on business executives, human rights activists, journalists, academics and government officials,” the researchers warned.

• Hermit is a modular spyware that hides its malicious capabilities in packages downloaded after it’s deployed.

• In recordings of internal staff meetings and presentations obtained by BuzzFeed News, TikTok employees reportedly mentioned having to ask their colleagues in China to access US user data, as they weren’t able to access this data themselves. One member of TikTok’s trust and safety department team allegedly stated that “Everything is seen in China,” while another employee said a China-based engineer “had access to everything.”

Defence/Aggression

• As part of a renewed motion for bond for her client Zach Rehl, Carmen Hernandez released a copy of the “We the People” plan referenced in the indictments that include Enrique Tarrio. The document is disturbing and in some way reflects the plan to occupy the Capitol achieved during the insurrection on January 6. And it is evidence reflecting Tarrio’s — though not necessarily Rehl’s — motive. But it is not Tarrio’s plan.

• After a long stay in Guantanamo, “Cheik” Lahmar was acquitted of all charges in 2009 and admitted to France. He had subsequently incited several people to join the jihad, including a man who died in combat at the end of 2015.

• “But when the customer was leaving, he stole the prostitute’s N5,000 and after discovering that her money had gone missing, the prostitute chased him to ask for her money.

• “The Northerners, who were with the customer that the girl accused of stealing her money, asked if she was sure that he stole her money. So, they decided to go and search her room where she attended to her customers.

• “While searching the room, they found Quran under her pillow and started asking what she was using the Quran for as a prostitute. So, they started attacking her; they stabbed her, took her out and set her ablaze.

• Ethiopia is experiencing widespread ethnic tensions in several regions, most of them over historical grievances and political tensions. The Amhara people, the second-largest ethnic group among Ethiopia’s more than 110 million people, have been targeted frequently in regions like Oromia.

• Authorities have identified the attackers as mostly young herdsmen from the Fulani tribe caught up in Nigeria’s pastoral conflict between host communities and herdsmen over limited access to water and land.

Environment

Energy

• Surely this is Australia’s Enron. The electricity market has been shut down after years of fossil fuel thuggery culminated in naked extortion this week. Michael West reports.

• Fed up with being bullied and scammed, the operator seized control of the electricity “market” on Wednesday, shut it down to stabilise the grid and make sure millions of Australians on the East Coast could turn their lights on. It was a belated though commendable move from AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) to finally call the bluff of the energy giants.

• Mind you, when we rang up to ask who actually owned AEMO – it looks like a government regulator but is in fact part owned by the very corporate thugs who are gaming it – they stonewalled. “Commercial in confidence” they replied. How can a state-controlled essential service possibly claim they have to hide their shareholders? Owned 60% by the states and 40% by these apparently confidential corporations, AEMO is sadly part of the problem.

• I set up a helium hotspot today, It was ordered in january and finally arrived last week. As you can probably figure with bitcoin and basically everything shitting the economic bed, now is not exactly the most profitable time to recieve a cryptocurrency miner.

• That’s the opportunity I see here. So much engineering, hardware, and mental space was spent on this pointless tech. Let’s start fixing problems again, and relegate scammers to, as conservative Australian MP Michelle Landry so eloquently put it, the anals of history.

• Nine years of Coalition dithering on climate and energy have surely taken their toll. Way behind the eight-ball on transition to renewable energy, the new government is now grooming Australians to subsidise multinational fossil fuel corporations to keep their polluting coal and gas power stations running way into the future.

Finance

• Some lost their homes. Some emptied their retirement accounts. Some struggled to feed and clothe their families. Medical debt now touches more than 100 million people in America, as the U.S. health care system pushes patients into debt on a mass scale. People from all walks of life and all corners of the country are living with health care debt.

• Section 3.1, The longest chain rule discusses the basis for the “consensus” in “Nakamoto consensus”. Proof-of-Work both deters Sybil attacks and elects a network node to add the next block to the chain. Because there are inevitable delays in propagating the result of this election across the network, other nodes may initially believe that they were elected and work on a chain with their block added. The “longest chain rule” (LCR) mandates that miners work on the longest chain, which over time leads to consensus.

• [...]

• The intuition here is that defense against Sybil attacks requires that the reward for an attack be less than the cost of mounting it. There is nothing in this constraint about how the cost is imposed.

• I caught Upside decreasing rebates depending on how close you are to the restaurant or gas station.

• The Upside app is a rebate app that pays you to eat out and fill up your gas tank, but I caught them changing the discount if you pull up and then claim it.

• Qantas is trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons. Passengers stranded, flights cancelled, accusations of price gouging, refunds on hold. What’s the scam?

• Cost cutting, that’s the scam. Following our story on the charmed government funded life of CEO Alan Joyce and his shareholders, we have been getting lots of comments and messages about the travails of being a Qantas customer or travel agent.

• The slow processing of refunds is a common complaint. John [withheld] told us the story of his elderly parents who had their trip to Cape York in September 2021 cancelled because of Covid. They were promised a credit, later changed to a “Qantas Pass” in April, without notification, and then told they could now ask for a refund “at any time”.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A total of 14 accounts — including those of party leaders Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour — were compromised in such a way that some emails were forwarded to addresses outside the party, the Greens said.

• The EU has begun using Mastodon as a sovereign and privacy respecting federated microblogging platform.

• Put like this, the US can barely say no – that is, to an Australian prime minister who makes it known with firmness and confidence he believes, as he said in December about Assange, “Enough is enough.” That is, it’s enough he suffered the three years in Belmarsh prison, sometimes with arms and legs shackled as if Hannibal Lecter, on top of eight years of self-imposed exile in the Ecuadorian embassy.

• The single transferable vote (STV) is a family of voting systems designed to achieve proportional representation. It is widely used in Australia in multi-winner elections, in both governments and private contexts.

• Most STV systems in use in Australia fall into one of two categories: exclusive Gregory methods (used, for example, by the ACT Legislative Assembly), and inclusive Gregory methods. Within the category of inclusive Gregory methods, systems can be divided into weighted and unweighted inclusive Gregory methods.

• The weighted inclusive Gregory method (WIGM) is regarded by the Proportional Representation Society of Australia as one of the options in a gold standard STV system, and is used for WA Legislative Council and NSW local government elections. The unweighted inclusive Gregory method is the method currently used to elect members of the Australian Senate.

• The unweighted inclusive Gregory method is deeply flawed. To demonstrate this, we will consider a concrete example.

• I see where these commentators are coming from; global press treating a parliamentary election like a presidential campaign ignores a lot of important context. But claiming people “don’t vote for leaders” conflates the electoral mechanism with voter intent, which contributes nothing to discussions.

• Professors Peter Desberg and Jeffrey Davis explain how leaders can enhance their persuasive skills by mastering the craft of the pitch.

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