● 07.18.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 18/07/2022: Alpine 3.16.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 2:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Ubuntu – the distribution that many members of the Linux community love to hate. But why? Is the hate warranted, or are people overreacting? In this video, I’ll give you my thoughts on some of the criticisms that Ubuntu faces nowadays.

• The ‘column’ command is a standard command line utility that is part of the util-linux package. What ‘column’ does is takes input and adds columns to the output. This is especially useful for files that have field separator characters like CSV files.

• Linux User Space A podcast focused on connecting user space and community

Applications

• We list the top 10 best and most free video editors for Linux and Windows. Have a look.

• Video editors are costly software, especially those that are more advanced such as Adobe Premiere Pro. However, there are plenty of known/unknown Video Editors available, which are free of cost and open source. Here we list ten free video editors which might be helpful for you and your use case.

Instructionals/Technical

• With thousands of free Linux applications, it’s easy to lose track of what you once installed but no longer use. Here’s how to list the installed applications on the major Linux families.

• Save your time and maintenance effort by running WordPress in Docker container.

• Joomla is a free, open-source, and award-winning content management system that allows you to build websites and online web applications. It is written in PHP and uses MySQL as a database backend. In this post, we will show you how to install Joomla CMS with Apache and Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 22.04.

• Get the steps to install DaVinci Resolve video editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Linux using the command terminal.

• Professional software and special editing station hardware manufacturer for color correction and non-destructive video editing with an extensive powerful tool range Blackmagic Design offers a freemium tool known as DaVinci Resolve. The company’s solutions have been used in many film and television productions such as Solo Star Wars, Jurassic World, The Walking Dead…

• Although the offerings of Blackmagic design are paid, a few years ago, they started offering the basic version of the software for free. With each version number, the number of features increased, and mainly the editing functions, but also e.g. the audio and effect editing, grew in scope.

• The free edition is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Even if the origin of the program lies in color correction, many use it mainly as a non-destructive video editing program. This means that you can use it to cut and edit videos without changing the source material.

• Linux is a great operating system. I’ve expounded its virtues for over 20 years. I was the founding Sr. Technology Editor of the now defunct Linux Magazine in 1999. I was a principal consultant for open source data center technology at Unisys and IBM.

• Today I work for the Linux Foundation as its Editorial Director of Research. So yes, I get Linux.

• KDE Plasma is the graphical workspace environment that is created by KDE for Linux systems. It is based on the Plasma framework and is open source. This contemporary desktop environment is highly customizable making it users’ top choice. In this

• NetworkManager is a software application that manages network connections. It is included in the default installation of most Linux operating systems. An instance of NetworkManager runs for each network connection managed, which includes Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections, mobile broadband (GSM/3G), and others; NetworkManager will attempt to always maintain at least one active network connection available.

• If you are a system administrator and manage Ubuntu servers, you should hear about NetworkManager. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and use the basic NMCLI commands on Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 20.04.

• The find command in Linux is an excellent tool to find files and directories based on given criteria.

• You can take your findings to the next level by actually doing specific operations on the found files.

• For example, you found all the files with .jpeg extension. How about renaming them with .jpg extension?

• You cannot just pipe redirect the find command output to another command. It won’t work that simply.

• Ansible Vault lets you keep sensitive data, such as passwords and keys, in encrypted files. Here’s how to use it in playbooks to improve automation workflow safety.

Games

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Unlike Intel Macs, Apple silicon Macs were designed to run only Apple’s software. But the developers on the Asahi Linux team have been working to change that, painstakingly reverse-engineering support for Apple’s processors and other Mac hardware and releasing it as a work-in-progress distro that can actually boot up and run on bare metal, no virtualization required.

• The Asahi Linux team put out a new release today with plenty of additions and improvements. Most notably, the distro now supports the M1 Ultra and the Mac Studio and has added preliminary support for the M2 MacBook Pro (which has been tested firsthand by the team) and the M2 MacBook Air (which hasn’t been tested but ought to work).

•  Apple began shipping Macs with Apple Silicon processors in late 2020 and while those laptop and desktop computer ship with macOS, it didn’t take longer for developers to begin porting Linux to work with Apple’s new hardware. Earlier this year the Asahi Linux project released the first public beta of a GNU/Linux distribution designed for Macs with M1 series chips.

• But M1 was just the beginning. The first Macs with M2 chips began shipping this summer, and the folks at the Asahi project have already managed to port their Linux-based operating system to work on computers powered by Apple’s new processor.

• There are probably more variants of Debian than any other Linux distro, which can make it confusing. To provide some clarity,The Reg has lined up the main suspects.

• Toy Story, the movie that saved Pixar (and Steve Jobs’ fortune), was released in 1995. Although Debian 0.01 appeared in 1993, you can date Debian from Toy Story, because all of its stable releases are codenamed after characters from that film.

• The first named release, “Buzz”, came out in 1996. Debian 2.1, “Slink”, appeared in March 1999, and delivered the Advanced Package Tool (APT), which brought automatic dependency resolution to Linux software management. (Arguably, FreeBSD’s ports system had something comparable earlier.)

New Releases

•  The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.16.1 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

• This release includes various security fixes, including…

Fedora Family / IBM

• The Rocky Linux Project has released version 9 of its RHEL-compatible distro and debuted its new build service.

• Rocky Linux 9, codenamed “Blue Onyx”, is here at last, some two months after the upstream distro on whose source code it is based. Its progenitor, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, was announced on May 10. The best-known other modern CentOS Linux replacement, AlmaLinux 9, went into beta in April, and shipped just over a fortnight after Red Hat.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

•  Libre Computer’s latest Ubuntu 22.04 desktop and server images for ROC-RK3328-CC board are based on Linux mainline, namely Linux 5.18.2, and other boards from the company, based on Allwinner H2+/H5 processor or Amlogic S905X, have gotten the same treatment.

• Some companies will churn out boards regularly but provide limited software support. Libre Computer seems to have taken a different approach, as they released most of their board in 2017 and 2018, starting with AML-S905X-CC “Le Potato” board based on the Amlogic S905X processor, followed by ALL-H3-CC “Tritium” SBC with Allwinner H2+, H3, or H5 processor, and finally ROC-RK3328-CC “Renegade” board, but still release updated OS images in 2022.

Devices/Embedded

• Last year Seeed Studios launched the reTerminal, a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 based touch display terminal with a pretty good list of features. One of the features that looked promising was their high-speed expansion interface on the back, which they said would be used to add plug-in modules to expand on the reTerminal’s functionality and IO.

•  IoT hardware solution provider Mixtile has created a new IoT edge computer supporting both Linux and Android based embedded systems in the former the Edge 2 Kit. Designed to provide users with a ready to run IoT edge computer the compact computer features a 3.5-inch form factor, 6 Antenna ports, mini-PCIe and M.2 modules and comes preloaded with an Android 11 and Linux container.

• Features of the IoT edge computer include support for dual hard drives, dual network ports or Hi-Fi music decoding and other functions, meets the needs of a variety of application scenarios at a low cost. Reserved CAN, I2C, and UART internal interfaces for developers with hardware capability or customization needs together with an industry-standard interface RS-485 to meet the compatibility needs of other peripheral expansion. As well as Gigabit Ethernet ports and supports Wi-Fi 6 for faster IoT and wider accessibility.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

•  So, what about an alternative that is more transparent, private, and available for Linux?

• That’s where AppFlowy shines!

• Build with Rust and Flutter, AppFlowy follows a minimal approach to simplify things yet with enough room for tweaks.

• AppFlowy is fairly new. We reported its development status last year after its initial launch.

• It is an open-source project that aims to overcome some limitations of Notion in terms of security and privacy. It helps you manage tasks, add to-do lists, add due dates, track the events, add pages, and format text for your notes/tasks.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Tor Browser is the de-facto standard for users looking to utilize Tor network, and want strict privacy settings on their web browsers.

• With the latest 11.5 update, Tor Browser made some major improvements to secure the experience for users.

• Let me give you a quick overview of the features introduced with this release.

GNU Projects

• The REUSE initiative[1] is a Free Software Foundation Europe program that facilitates the documentation of licenses of Libre projects like GNU Health.

Programming/Development

• Have you ever read sci-fi books that envisioned the world becoming a digital utopia around this decade? The reality isn’t quite as glamourized – however, we are getting there as machine learning and AI technology is advancing like no other. In retrospect, learning to program is the trend now, and there are tons of free coding games that make it a fun experience.

• Let’s be honest – programming as a beginner can be daunting. While it’s thrilling to see your first program run successfully, many people struggle to apply programming concepts to real problems. That said, there’s an abundance of resources to learn programming on your own from scratch and challenge yourself in several ways to grow skills.

• gem-compare v1.2.0, new contributors, and 200+ GitHub starts.

• My little RubyGems plugin got some new contributions. Read the v1.0 announcement to know what’s the gem about.

• Ariadne Conill explores ways to make the Unix cat utility more efficient on Linux.

Perl / Raku

• It is hot. It will keep getting hotter in the coming years. Enjoy the coolest summer you’ll ever have. Not much else to say.

Leftovers

Hardware

• The hyperscalers and cloud builders are not the only ones having fun with the CXL protocol and its ability to create tiered, disaggregated, and composable main memory for systems. HPC centers are getting in on the action, too, and in this case, we are specifically talking about the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

• Researchers at KAIST’s CAMELab have joined the ranks of Meta Platforms (Facebook), with its Transparent Page Placement protocol and Chameleon memory tracking, and Microsoft with its zNUMA memory project, is creating actual hardware and software to do memory disaggregation and composition using the CXL 2.0 protocol atop the PCI-Express bus and a PCI-Express switching complex in what amounts to a memory server that it calls DirectCXL. The DirectCXL proof of concept was talked about it in a paper that was presented at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference last week, in a brochure that you can browse through here, and in a short video you can watch here. (This sure looks like startup potential to us.)

Security

• Juniper Networks has pushed security updates to address several vulnerabilities affecting multiple products, some of which could be exploited to seize control of affected systems.

• The most critical of the flaws affect Junos Space and Contrail Networking, with the tech company urging customers to release versions 22.1R1 and 21.4.0, respectively.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (mat2 and xen), Fedora (butane, caddy, clash, direnv, geoipupdate, gitjacker, golang-bug-serial-1, golang-github-a8m-envsubst, golang-github-apache-beam-2, golang-github-aws-lambda, golang-github-cespare-xxhash, golang-github-chromedp, golang-github-cloudflare, golang-github-cloudflare-redoctober, golang-github-cockroachdb-pebble, golang-github-cucumber-godog, golang-github-dreamacro-shadowsocks2, golang-github-dustinkirkland-petname, golang-github-etcd-io-gofail, golang-github-facebookincubator-contest, golang-github-facebookincubator-dhcplb, golang-github-facebookincubator-go2chef, golang-github-facebookincubator-ntp, golang-github-facebookincubator-nvdtools, golang-github-goccy-yaml, golang-github-gojuno-minimock, golang-github-google-wire, golang-github-hexdigest-gowrap, golang-github-intel-goresctrl, golang-github-j-keck-arping, golang-github-jamesclonk-vultr, golang-github-liamg-scout, golang-github-liamg-tml, golang-github-mattn-colorable, golang-github-mdlayher-ethernet, golang-github-moby-buildkit, golang-github-mock, golang-github-niklasfasching-org, golang-github-nxadm-tail, golang-github-path-network-mmproxy, golang-github-rakyll-statik, golang-github-shopify-toxiproxy, golang-github-shulhan-bindata, golang-github-skynetservices-skydns, golang-github-sophaskins-efs2tar, golang-github-spf13-cobra, golang-github-spyzhov-ajson, golang-github-task, golang-github-temoto-robotstxt, golang-github-theoapp-theo-agent, golang-github-tinylib-msgp, golang-github-tklauser-numcpus, golang-github-valyala-fasthttp, golang-google-protobuf, golang-honnef-tools, golang-k8s-kube-openapi, golang-k8s-pod-security-admission, golang-k8s-sample-cli-plugin, golang-mvdan-sh-3, golang-storj-drpc, golang-x-tools, gopass, harfbuzz, hcloud, manifest-tool, moby-engine, mqttcli, nex, php-laminas-diactoros2, podman-tui, seamonkey, snapd, tinygo, vgrep, vultr, vultr-cli, weldr-client, xen, and yubihsm-connector), Mageia (golang and java), Oracle (grub2, kernel, kernel-container, and squid), and SUSE (crash, kernel, nodejs12, nodejs14, and nodejs16).

• It seems like if you’re a company with a popular online presence that you should expect to be hacked at some point. The latest to be hacked is the gaming platform Roblox. A cybercriminal connected with the right person in Roblox and posted internal employee documents online in what appears to be an extortion attempt.

• A breakpoint is intentional “pause” in normal execution of a program, generally used to inspect the internals of said process in more detail. This is the *most* used feature of any debugger.

• On x86 CPUs, there are two types of breakpoints: hardware breakpoints and software breakpoints. While they overlap to a certain degree they are not exactly the same.

• In most of debugging cases, you will be using software breakpoints, which do not need any special hardware support. These are implemented using same interrupt mechanism which is used by pretty much everything else. On x86, 3rd interrupt is used to implement a breakpoint. When you set a breakpoint, your debugger overwrites target address (where you want to put the breakpoint) with INT 3 (0xCC in hex). When this instruction gets executed, debugger gets the control back from target process, and can inspect its state (registers, memory etc). To resume the execution, debugger will silently remove breakpoint, execute the instruction, and set the breakpoint again before letting the process resume (until it terminates, or breaks). Features like step over, step out are also implemented using “transparent” software breakpoints, which are set and removed automatically by debugger. Generally, you can set any number of software breakpoints; however these cannot be set on non-code address (i.e. these can break the program only when target address content is executed; but not if the address is read from or write to).

• Hardware breakpoints, on the other hand, are much more powerful and flexible than software breakpoints. These can be set to break not only on execution, but also on memory access (read and write both), I/O port access etc. These debuggers are set by writing into special “debug registers” which are largely platform specific (and not all platforms will have support for hardware breakpoints). On x86, registers DR0-3 and DR6-7 are used to set these breakpoints (DR4-5 are reserved as of now). If you have ever used “watchpoints” which let you break when certain memory address is accessed, you have used hardware breakpoints.

• As a cornerstone of the cloud-native community, Kubernetes empowers enterprises to deploy and manage containers in production environments more efficiently. Although Kubernetes was initially designed with basic security capabilities, broad and rapid adoption and an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape have made Kubernetes more vulnerable to attacks. Developers and security experts are now tasked with extending Kubernetes’ built-in security to effectively protect against cyberattacks that are more complex, volatile and frequent.

• The previous “trust but verify” approach has proven ineffective for the complex distributed nature of cloud computing, so Kubernetes must move to the “never trust, always verify” ideology of the zero-trust model to provide greater protection to businesses.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Some sites, including Facebook, add parameters to the web address for tracking purposes. These parameters have no functionality that is relevant to the user, but sites rely on them to track users across pages and properties.

• Facebook has started to use a different URL scheme for site links to combat URL stripping technologies that browsers such as Firefox or Brave use to improve privacy and prevent user tracking.

Civil Rights/Policing

• After years of concerns that Thailand was purchasing Israeli-made cyberoffense surveillance technologies, rights groups have found the first forensic evidence linking the NSO Group’s infamous Pegasus spyware to the Southeast Asian kingdom.

• A new report by Citizen Lab, published Monday together with two Thai civil society groups, says digital forensic evidence indicates that at least 30 cellphones belonging to activists in Thailand were targeted with Pegasus.

• “We can now officially add Thailand to the growing list of countries where people peacefully calling for change, expressing an opinion or discussing government policies may trigger invasive surveillance with a profound toll on an individual’s freedom of expression, privacy and sense of security,” said Etienne Maynier, a technologist at Amnesty International, who peer reviewed the report and its methodologies.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Today, reports indicate that Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), along with Rep. Matsui (D-CA) and other co-sponsors, will soon introduce a bill to reinstate net neutrality and the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over broadband service. The “Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act” would codify the FCC’s authority to classify broadband as a “Title II” communications service and regulate it as such.

• The bill effectively reverses the unprecedented abdication of authority over broadband that FCC Chairman Pai instigated in the agency’s 2017 repeal of its 2015 Open Internet Order that established the net neutrality rules under Chairman Tom Wheeler. Those rules prevented broadband providers from blocking websites, throttling web traffic, or creating “fast lanes” only for those able to pay for prioritization. Prior to Chairman Pai’s abdication, Republican and Democratic Commissions had agreed the FCC had authority over broadband – the question was just under which title of its statute. The bill also prevents a future-FCC from backtracking on other broadband consumer protections – fundamental in an increasingly online world. Public Knowledge urges Congress to swiftly pass this bill once introduced.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• One thing that I’ve never told anyone is that I freated a game that I’ve been playing for more than 10 years.

• The concept of the game is really weird, as it’s about floor patterns, the position of the feet, and breathing. There are floor patterns that requires me to put my left foot and right foot in a certain position, some that may require me to stop breathing once I stepped on it, some are non rewaeding, some are very rewarding. It’s quite a mess, it’s also quite dangerous as I have to look at thr floor for most of the time, but it’s fun for me, and I somehow survived playing it.

• I’ve been a pseudo conspiracy junkie since I was very young. Not in that I believe in any, but that I’ve always found them interesting. Belief in such phenomena is very quaint; not in a negative way, but in that it harkens back to a very “early human” mindset. Which makes it ironic then, that I became such a big Deus Ex fan without knowing how central it played a part in the originals. I got enthralled by HR, but only ever really gave IW a decent try; always failing to struggle through the OG.

• A while back I stumbled across a well-put-together thread on /x/ about weird/spooky anime. The OP of that thread created these beautiful collages for each one and really piqued my interest in checking them out. I finally got around to watching some of them and decided to finally make use of my page here to talk about them as I go through them. My main motivation for this right now is to have a personal record of these shows and movies that I can look back on. But I also hope that I can spread some enjoyment to others out there should any of these interest you

• i recently had an excellent conversation with a fellow kinkster about kink aesthetics, during which we discussed the pervasive idea that a kink event must (apparently) have a medieval-industrial vibe: a ‘dungeon’ flooded with industrial music[a]. Not only that, but there is a relative homogeneity to the sort of outfits seen as appropriate for such an event: leather, for example, is expected in a way that brightly-coloured drag gear is …. not. Still, and much to my delight, they were planning to attend just such a kink event in just such gear.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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