● 06.20.22

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● Links 20/06/2022: Pessimism About End of War/Cold War

Posted in News Roundup at 2:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Instructionals/Technical

• “The ffprobe is a Linux command used to retrieve information from multimedia files. The command then displays the output in a machine or human-readable format. With ffprobe, you can gather information, such as the size, bit rate, height, width, codecs, and pixel format of the multimedia stream. Ffprobe is a must-have tool in your video processing toolkit. You can use ffprobe as a standalone application or with a different textual filter to perform advanced processing, such as plotting and statistical processing.

• You can use ffprobe with different options. In this article, you will learn some of the common usage examples of the ffprobe to enhance your video analysis and information extraction skills. Let’s get started!”

• Byobu is a modern terminal text-based multiplexer that supports BSD, Linux, and Mac systems. Byobu allows using multiple windows and sessions, and you can run different commands under the same single terminal connection. The tool is helpful, especially when dealing with remote servers and workspace.

• “The aria2 is an open-source Linux command-line tool for downloading files using different protocols, such as FTP, HTTP/HTTPS, BitTorrent, SFTP, and Metalink. This multi-protocol download tool doesn’t come preinstalled like wget or curl, but it ranks best in efficiency and ease of use.

• If you’ve not used aria2 before, keep reading this guide to understand what aria2 is and its usage examples.”

• Aplay is a great option for playing audio files on the command line. It is a tool for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) sound card drivers. Aplay supports various sound cards and file formats on multiple devices, and it works similar to how a recorder does, only that in this case, it plays the audio instead of recording it.

• Aplay determines the bit rate, sample rate, file formats, and all other details from the sound file header before playing the audio. Let’s see some of the examples of using aplay in Linux.

• There are various tools that you can use to manage the archive files when using Linux. However, most of the tools are limited to specific archive formats. Luckily, you can use the atool utility, a Perl script available for managing Linux archives and supports multiple formats.

• The good thing with atool is that it has different commands such as aunpack, which extract files in an organized manner. Besides, it’s not the only available atool command, and we will go through all the available options and how you can use them for your archive files.

• Have you switched to a Chromebook from Windows recently? One of the things that you might want to relearn then is renaming a file. In this article, let’s look at how to rename a file in Chromebook.

• Renaming the files on your Chromebook is a pretty straightforward process. If you’ve renamed the files on Windows, renaming the files on Chromebook will be a breeze. The process is a little different from Windows’s, but it’s simple nonetheless.

• “Are you looking for a way to convert DOS or Mac format to Unix format? Any time you need to share files between Windows and Unix systems, the file format, especially plain-text, comes into play. The main difference is in the line break. For Unix and Linux systems, an end of a line gets represented by a single character, the Line Feed (LF).

• In contrast, Windows files use two characters to signify a line break, the carriage return (CR), represented as (\r), and the Line Feed (LF), expressed as (\n).

• Unless you have the right way of converting the files, you will have a broken script, code, or formatting, which is annoying. Here’s the good part, this guide will present examples of the dos2unix command usage to get you started. Check it out!”

• When it comes to using the internet, having a browser that offers you maximum control over your web-surfing experience is essential. While many options exist, none are as popular as Google Chrome.

• Since its release, Google Chrome continues to be a popular choice for all. Dominating not only the desktop market but the mobile marketplace as well. With its advanced privacy protection, easy-to-access GUI, and a wide variety of add-ons, no doubt that Google Chrome’s the go-to browser for most desktop and mobile users.

• The Kinit in Linux is a command often used for renewing or caching/renewing a Kerberos ticket authentication and granting features. This tool is used for the same purpose that MIT and SEAM References use Kinit in other Kerberos implementations. Notably, you can only use the Kinit command once you register as a principal with the KDC or Key Distribution Center.

• Ideally, the KDC alternatives, often identified by {realms} and {kdcdefault} features contained in the kdc.conf (which is the KBR5 configuration file), come in handy if you do not indicate any ticket flags in the command line.

• This article describes what a Kinix Linux command is. It also provides a step-by-step guide on using the Kinit tool to renew, obtain, or cache your ticket-granting tickets. Finally, we will highlight Kinit syntax or flags, environment variables, and files.

• FFmpeg is the leading free, open-source multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter, and play nearly all multimedia files that have been created on any platform. FFmpeg compiles and runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, BSD systems, and Solaris.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install FFmpeg on Fedora 36 Linux using the command line terminal with the default Fedora 36 repository.

• Go, or Golang, is an open-source programming language that Google created. It is statically typed and produces compiled machine code binaries, and go language is a compiled language. This is popular amongst developers as it means you do not need to compile the source code to create an executable file. Developers that use Google’s Go language say it is the C for the twenty-first century when it comes to syntax.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install and configure Go (Golang) on Fedora 36 Linux using the command line terminal with the default repository version from Fedora 36’s appstream.

• Changing document location will allow you to use another directory as a document location for storing site data in Linux. You can even set up multiple Nginx servers listening to different ports and redirect the traffic to two different document locations.

• By default, the Nginx Web server uses the “/usr/share/nginx/html” document location to store site data, which can be changed to something else.

• Today, you will learn how to change the Nginx Web Document Location on your Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora/CentOS Linux system.

• In this guide, we will show you how to install Calibre on Ubuntu systems

• Calibre (stylised calibre) is a cross-platform free and open-source suite of e-book software.

• Calibre supports organizing existing e-books into virtual libraries, displaying, editing, creating and converting e-books, as well as syncing e-books with a variety of e-readers. Editing books is supported for EPUB and AZW3 formats. Books in other formats like MOBI must first be converted to those formats, if they are to be edited.

• Podman is a container engine created by Red Hat. It is intended to be a solid alternative to Docker with some interesting additions.

• In this post you will learn how to install Apache Solr on Ubuntu.

• Apache Solr is an open-source, reliable, scalable, and fault-tolerant search tool written in Java. It uses NoSQL as its database backend and to store data and query it in almost near real time. It aims to provide distributed indexing, replication, load-balanced querying with automated recovery and failover. It provides full-text search, Snippet Generation and highlighting. It also supports database queries through REST API Like Elastic Search

• Successfully monitoring Linux file access is a very important milestone for users or Linux administrators confined in a shared or public network setting. Linux file access monitoring helps us answer questions like Who has had access to this file within the last week? Can I get a username list of all users accessing file x? Can I know when file y is being accessed?

• The set logging policies on your Linux operating system distribution should give us timely statistics regarding the system user and the period in which queried file(s) were accessed.

• Auditd or Audit Daemon emulates a Linux Auditing System solely focused on the userspace component. Under the Linux operating system spectrum, anything that is labeled a daemon implies that it is a background running service/application. Therefore, Auditd comfortably runs as a background service while collecting and writing audit-associated log files.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• The EasyOS image file has two different bootloaders, rEFInd for UEFI-BIOS booting, and syslinux for legacy-BIOS booting. You would download the image file and write it to a USB-stick and boot it. Prior to version 4.1, the three files ‘vmlinuz’, ‘initrd’ and ‘easy.sfs’ are in the boot-partition. This is a vfat partition with boot-flag and esp-flag set, and it has rEFInd and syslinux. There is also a second partition, the ext4 working-partition.

• For version 4.1, I placed ‘easy.sfs’ in the working-partition, as it could then be moved into the releases folder, rather than copied, a much faster operation.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Christmas came to my house early this year. May 3, to be exact. Boy! Was Santa Claus good to me! IBM gave me two presents! The first was a CL enhancement that I had desired for years. The second was an improvement that, to my delight, almost obsoletes a utility I wrote years ago. Both have to do with the CL CALL command.

• Not many colleges teach the IBM i and RPG anymore, which makes it hard for midrange shops to replenish talent that way.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

SaaS/Back End/Databases

Programming/Development

• These days web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are everywhere (scientific data sources, your system for Customer relationship management, cat facts API…). Do you need to write some R code wrapping a web resource such as an API? Packaging it up might be useful to you or your team for the same reason as any code. Now, whether you really want to publicize the package and to guarantee its maintenance might be slightly trickier than for other packages, as the usefulness and status of your package will depend on the web API being up and running according to expectations. This creates a surface for failures that might be more or less scary depending on your trust in the upstream maintainers.

• In this post, we will go over whether you should bother maintain a package wrapping a web API and we will provide suggestions of useful resources.

• A Two Dimensional array of pointers is an array that has variables of pointer type. This means that the variables stored in the 2D array are such that each variable points to a particular address of some other element.

• A vector is the basic data structure in R that stores data of similar types. For example,

• Suppose we need to record the age of 5 employees. Instead of creating 5 separate variables, we can simply create a vector.

Python

• We will discuss about Pyspark – a significant data processing technology that can handle data on a petabyte-scale, PySpark When Otherwise, and SQL Case in PySpark When.

• We’ll learn about the PySpark library in this session. It is a general-purpose, in-memory, distributed processing engine that lets you effectively manage the data across several workstations. We’ll also learn about the PySpark fillna() method that is used to fill the null values in the dataframe with a custom value, along with its examples.

• Pandas isin() method helps search the input set of values in the given DataFrame . We will discuss Pandas, its isin() method, and its examples.

• We will be discussing Pandas in Python, an open-source library that delivers high-performance data structures and data analysis tools that are ready to use. We will also learn about the DataFrame, the advantages of Pandas, and how you can use Pandas to select multiple columns of a DataFrame . Let’s get started!

Java

• Each time an array is declared in the program, contiguous memory is allocated to it.

Leftovers

• We often take our “SoftwareSerial” libraries for granted, and don’t investigate what goes on under the hood — until they fail us, at least. Would you like to learn how to harness the power of interrupt-driven bitbanging? [Jim Mack] teaches us how to make our protocol implementations fly using the LTC protocol as a springboard.

• The sight of a car limping along on a near-flat tyre, or a roadside wheel change are still common. So is the expense of replacing tyres that have worn out prematurely, perhaps because the driver may not have been checking the pressure as regularly as they should. Sometimes it’s difficult not to feel tyres are a car’s weak link. But is this about to change?

Hardware

• While 7-segment displays are all well and good, they’re considered a bit old hat these days. This project from [Matt Deeds] brings them screaming into the future, though, sporting every color under the rainbow.

• It sounds like a rhetorical question that a Midwestern engineer might ask, something on the order of ‘can you fix this bad PCB spin?’ [Tom Stanton] sets out to answer the title question and ends up building a working e-bike with a drone motor.

• [Drew Pilcher] needed durable, custom-wound coils with no core, and perfectly flat sides. Coils can be wound by hand, of course, but reliably creating perfect coils with thin wire and lots of layers requires some additional help. Happily, [Drew] shares his method for doing exactly that. Perhaps coming as no surprise, the key to repeatable, high-quality coils is good preparation and tools.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Not all hacking happens on hardware — every now and then, we ought to hack our software-based tools, too. [Ducko] tells us about a partially open-source rewrite of Discord’s Electron-based frontend. Web apps can be hard to tinker with, which is why such projects are to be appreciated. Now, this isn’t a reverse-engineering of Discord’s API or an alternative client per se, but it does offer a hopeful perspective on what the Discord client ought to do for us.

Defence/Aggression

• It has been nearly four months since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine and with peace talks stalled, the chief of NATO warned Sunday that war could drag on for years.

• “We have to prepare for it to last for years,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

• Vladimir Putin’s missile rattling has reawakened people’s concern about nuclear weapons even as it exposes the lack of true understanding of the nuclear threat. An Associated Press poll found 75% of people in the U.S. are concerned or very concerned about a nuclear attack. What are we worried about?

• The United States appears to have entered a new cold war with both China and Russia. And U.S. leaders’ portrayal of the confrontation as one between democracy and authoritarianism fails the smell test, especially at a time when the same leaders are actively courting a systematic human-rights abuser like Saudi Arabia. Such hypocrisy suggests that it is at least partly global hegemony, not values, that is really at stake.

Finance

• Ukraine inherited none of the Soviet Union’s debt, just as Scotland will inherit none of the United Kingdom’s debt.

• David Barsamian: Let’s head into the most obvious nightmare of this moment, the war in Ukraine and its effects globally. But first a little background. Let’s start with President George H.W. Bush’s assurance to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch to the east”—and that pledge has been verified. My question to you is, why didn’t Gorbachev get that in writing?

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• On Monday, protests erupted throughout Ecuador. The demonstrations, coordinated by the CONAIE, or Conderation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, accompanied by student groups and labor unions, resisted a planned hike in fuel prices.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Residents of Barkam have been barred from posting reports, pictures and any other information about the quake, which has devastated houses, stupas and monks’ residences, a third source who requested anonymity to speak freely told RFA.

• The provisions cover many types of comments, including anything from forum posts, replies, messages left on public message boards, and “bullet chats” (an innovative way that video platforms in China use to display real-time comments on top of a video). All formats, including texts, symbols, GIFs, pictures, audio, and videos, fall under this regulation.

• A 65-year-old political activist in Belarus has been handed a 42-month prison term on charges of discrediting the nation and slandering its authoritarian ruler, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, as the government continues its heavy-handed crackdown on dissent.

• Alena Hnauk was sentenced on June 17 by the Pruzhany district court in the western region of Brest, her relatives said.

• Too many things are patently wrong and worrisome with the killing of Deborah. One is that her accusers are also at the same time her prosecutors and judge; a phenomenon clearly against the grain of justice, fairness and the Nigerian constitution. Two, it is not right for anyone, no matter how aggrieved, to take laws into his hands and visit punitive measures on another considered to have erred one way or the other. This is exactly what the killers of Deborah did. Three, blasphemy for which she was accused is not an offence under the Nigerian constitution; and even if a state law or Sharia enactment exists to criminalise blasphemy, that law can be deemed to be inconsistent with provisions of the constitution and therefore void to that extent. The same constitution guarantees freedom of expression and right to life as fundamental rights that cannot be abridged by fiat, as the killer mob did. In any event, neither the Sharia nor the conventional laws allows a mob to pass judgment and execute same without recourse to proper trial by a competent court.

• Following the outrage that greeted the barbaric killing, including statements of condemnation from the President, the Northern Governors’ Forum, Sokoto State governor, among others, a shocking tweet, which has not been denied, appeared from an unexpected quarter. The Chief Imam of Abuja National Mosque, Prof Ibrahim Maqari, defended the horrific lynching of Deborah Samuel in the following words: [...]

• In taking impunity to the highest level, some students of the Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto State recently lynched one of their colleagues, Deborah Samuel, and burnt her remains in broad daylight. They did not stop at that; they made a video of this most inhuman and horrific act of savagery, dancing and rejoicing in a dramatic show of self-adulation. The act was heart-wrenching, barbaric, reprehensible and an assault on our humanity. Justice must be served in this case as the world is watching.

• A Muslim mob in Warji, Bauchi, Nigeria failed to get its violent hands on the target of their lynching efforts: a 40-year-old Christian woman accused of blasphemy on social media. So in a frenzy, they rampaged and “set fire to over a dozen commercial and residential properties.”

• Usman, a 30-year-old resident in the Lugbe area of Abuja, was stoned to death and burnt by a mob over an alleged blasphemous comment against Prophet Muhammed and Allah, in the Lugbe area of the country’s capital city.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• It’s of course terrifying for Assange, who doctors have warned may end up dying in prison as a result of this treatment. But it’s even more terrifying for what it would mean for press freedoms in the United States and the world, given that it would establish a precedent letting the US government imprison and torture journalists and publishers who reveal its secrets — and letting it do so to any reporter or publisher anywhere in the world.

• As police in Brazil revealed Sunday that more suspects have been identified in the murder investigation of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips, they were remembered around the world for their commitment to Indigenous people and the Amazon rainforest.

• “Their work mattered because our planet, the threats to it, and the activities of those who threaten it matter. That work must be continued.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• The English word “custody” went from a mid-fifteenth century meaning of safe-keeping and protection to its late-sixteenth-century sense of restraint of liberty and confinement (probably not coincidentally in the years of the land enclosure riots), and it comes from the Indo-European root (s)keu-, meaning to cover or conceal. Even the most potted hypothetical history of the word and concept is suggestive about a species that, in the name of property and utilitarianism (with its justice-free notion of the “greater good”), fences off, encloses, locks up, hides away, demarcates, “owns” natural resources and all their human and non-human elements, and also tucks away gigantic concentrations of wealth by a tiny minority. Liberal regimes still try to suggest the protective sense, but you only have to look at who is in custody and who the custodians are, in prisons, refugee camps, institutions (like children’s homes), and also many private homes, to find general abuse by certain groups (usually male, white, heterosexual, well-off, and exercising social and political power) of certain other groups (usually powerless, dark-skinned, women, Indigenous, and socially and culturally marginalised people). In the end, this cruel confinement of all aspects of the lives of certain species, and certain human groups, this plundering of everything, human and non-human, in the name of some insane idea of “progress”, is one of the constructs of humanity that is now threatening the conditions of existence of all species, including our own, on planet Earth. Even in these dire circumstances, there’s not much honest examination of basic political categories and assumptions that have brought us to such a pass. And, when they are actually exposed, in the death-throes wailing of an incarcerated woman, any revelation is quickly covered and concealed ((s)keu-). Veronica, automatically ill-treated and silenced in her short life as a First Nations woman, brought it all out, laid it bare for anyone who wants to know, with her death.

• “The internet and social media have turbocharged hate speech, enabling it to spread like wildfire across borders. The spread of hate speech against minorities during the COVID-19 pandemic provides further evidence that many societies are highly vulnerable to the stigma, discrimination and conspiracies it promotes,” he noted.

• Organizing at the Towson store has been done by a group of employees that called themselves AppleCORE (an acronym for Coalition of Organized Retail Employees). The workers have said they want to expand their rights, specifically asking for a say when it came to pay, hours, and safety. AppleCORE is associated with a larger, established union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

• After Apple employees in Maryland voted Saturday to form the tech giant’s first retail store union in the United States, workers’ rights advocates across the country celebrated the “pathbreaking win for labor.”

• “We love our jobs. We just want to see them do better.”

• It remained unclear what steps would follow the vote in Towson. Labor experts say it’s common for employers to drag out the bargaining process in an effort to take the wind out of union campaigns.

• The IAM bills itself as one of the largest and most diverse industrial trade unions in North America, representing approximately 600,000 active and retired members in the aerospace, defense, airlines, railroad, transit, healthcare, automotive, and other industries.

• Thupten Lodoe, also known by his pen name Sabuche, is a university graduate in his 30s from Seshul county (in Chinese Shiqu), part of the Garze (Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan province. The husband and father of two children is fluent in Chinese, English, and Tibetan and is known to have studied at a school established by the Panchen Lama, a Tibetan spiritual leader. The Chinese government offered him 10,000 yuan (U.S. $1489) to accept a job, which he turned down to advocate for the preservation of the Tibetan language.

• “Lodoe was arrested unexpectedly by the Chinese authorities six months ago from Seshul County and taken to Chengdu, [Sichuan’s capital],” a Tibetan source in Tibet told RFA’s Tibetan Service, on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

• Do you know the story of Juneteenth?

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Netflix and many other content landlords want to force you to pay rent instead of being able to own your home. This makes them more money. And as soon as you can’t pay, they change your locks and take your home from you.

• When you buy a book, you own it. You pay a pretty penny for it, and after you’re done reading, it’s yours to sell, use in an art project, donate, or lend to friends. That’s how it’s always worked.

• Or that’s how it used to work… Content landlords are now spending millions to change the rules and convince the public it works differently.

• Brick and mortar libraries provide a lot of value beyond serving as a home for books. They host programs, enable internet access, and connect patrons with an array of essential services. But I want to talk about books for a moment, because the future of this fundamental service is at risk.

• There are some things worth knowing about libraries: [...]

• Pirate site blocking is widely regarded as an effective tool to combat online piracy. But just how effective is it? Data show that a recent torrent site blocking order in the Netherlands had no visible impact on local downloading and sharing activity. Old habits die hard apparently; especially when there are still plenty of alternatives.

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