● 09.27.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 27/09/2022: Bash 5.2 and LXD 5.6

Posted in News Roundup at 6:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• We often see statements such as “If something doesn’t need to be on, switch it off at the wall or unplug it”. How relevant is that statement for a computer?

• We took 5 computers of different types and age. To calculate the cost per year we assume each machine is left connected plugged into the wall for 365 days, and that a kWh is £0.34 (the (revised) price cap from October 2022 in the UK).

• Here are the results.

• Featuring a micro-arc oxidized AZ291D alloy chassis and weighing only 1.4kg (3 pounds), the Star Labs StarFighter Linux laptop is powered by 45W 12th Gen Intel “Alder Lake” Core i3-1215U, i7-1255U, or i9-12900H, or AMD Ryzen 7 6800H processors with up to 64GB DDR5 RAM and up to 8TB SSD storage.

• But the best feature of Star Labs’ StarFighter Linux notebook is the 16-inch 4K 10-bit matte IPS display featuring a 16:10 aspect ratio, 1074M colors, 100% Adobe coverage, 600cd/m2 brightness, and FreeSync support. As a bonus, the screen turns 180 degrees to let you open and carry it flat like a tablet.

Server

• The LXD team is very excited to announce the release of LXD 5.6!

• This is another busy LXD release, coming with improvements all around, whether you’re using LXD to run some containers, virtual machines or are using clustering and projects.

• Version 5.6 of the LXD container manager is out. Changes include the ability to stream log messages to a Grafana Loki server, Infiniband support for virtual machines, a restricted network access mode, and more.

• Containers are all the rage and show no signs of slowing down. Most enterprise businesses are leaning heavily on containers to do much of the heavy lifting for app and service deployment and for that, admins might tend to use their favorite operating system of choice. But sometimes, that’s like using a jackhammer when a scalpel is necessary.

• StormForge today announced it has expanded its ability to vertically or horizontally scale Kubernetes pods automatically using machine learning algorithms.

• Rich Bentley, product marketing manager for StormForge, says the latest version of StormForge Optimize Live provides IT teams with a bi-dimensional autoscaling capability to both right-size pods and horizontally set utilization rates without any contention. Previously, IT teams had to opt to either vertically or horizontally scale Kubernetes clusters but could not do both simultaneously, he noted.

• In this article, you will learn how Kubernetes is quickly becoming one of the most popular solutions used by businesses to incorporate edge computing. You will also learn about the benefits of edge computing, the specific benefits Kubernetes offers to assist with edge computing and how Kubernetes distributions could be used for edge computing.

Audiocasts/Shows

• A lot of privacy concerned internet users are concerned about Chrome’s new Manifest v3 which in part aims to end the usefulness of content/ad blockers but Mozilla & Firefox has a slightly different plan

• In this video, we are looking at how to install DataGrip on Linux Mint 21.

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Archcraft 2022.09.16 and some of the applications pre-installed.

Kernel Space

• An ancient fix for power management issues on AMD systems has been reducing Linux’s performance since 2002. Now it’s gone.

• One of the joys of modern silicon chips is that power management is vitally important. It hasn’t been about saving power or extending battery life since the 20th century. Processor vendors survive by selling us more and more transistors, solely on the basis that most of them are turned off most of the time – otherwise the chips would rapidly incinerate themselves, no matter how good their cooling.

• This requires sophisticated interfaces between the OS and the hardware, and way back in 1996, a new standard called ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) replaced the positively stone age APM (Advanced Power Management) from the Windows 3 era.

• I added the patch indicated above to gentoo-sources behind the ‘experimental’ flag, for now. This is to remove a 20 year old workaround for newer AMD processors. I expect this to propagate to lower kernels via upstream directly. This will be in gentoo-sources-5.19.12 (USE=experimental)

• Linus and Intel have not always seen eye-to-eye. In the past, Linus has rallied against Chipzilla for stifling error correcting memory support on desktop platforms and has accused the company of providing lackluster solutions to the Spectre and Meltdown CPU flaws. Nevertheless, Linus understands the importance of the x86 architecture and Intel clearly respects the tireless contributions Linus has made.

Graphics Stack

• It’s been a while, but today’s blog is a zink blog. What’s been happening?

• Well, if you’ve been following prominent news sites, you might not think there’s too much happening on the performance front. And whew do I have news for you.

• Big news.

• With XDC next week, I’m throwing down the gauntlet.

• Mesa 22.3 is going to be the BIG PERF RELEASE.

• I said it.

Applications

• One of the quickest ways to check a website for new updates is to add the site to your favorite RSS reader and let the tool notify you of any new content. However, an RSS reader can only check for updates within the confines of RSS-formatted code.

• This limitation means RSS readers won’t work on any static webpages or dynamic websites without RSS components. Fortunately, you can use third-party tools to monitor website changes and receive notifications for any new changes.

Instructionals/Technical

• After moving from rEFInd and Syslinux boot managers, to Limine, the “Fix broken video” menu entry got left out. I introduced this here…

• KVM is an open-source virtualization technology, it falls under the Type-1 Hypervisor category. KVM stands for Kernel-based Virtual machine that is available in all modern Linux kernels as a virtualization module, it allows the Linux kernel to work as a bare metal Hypervisor. Hence, all the Linux distros whether Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, OpenSUSE, etc. can be used as a full-fledged hypervisor system for providing virtualization. KVM works with Qemu which is another open source and free hardware emulator platform. With KVM, Qemu offers the emulation of hardware and peripherals of the system to the Guest operating system so that it can use them but the support of KVM and its direct interaction with the CPU helps the Guest OS to run almost at native speed.

• With the help of KVM, we can run multiple Virtual machines parallelly, however, make sure your Linux system’s CPU support virtualization extensions – Intel VT or AMD-V.

• Boxes is a great tool for easily spinning up virtual machines on Linux. With Boxes, you can create virtual machines from several pre-configured machines or even from your own ISO. Those VMs run smoothly and seamlessly, and can be spun up much faster than when using a tool like VirtualBox.

• But while Boxes is incredibly easy to use, it’s also not nearly as flexible as other solutions. Case in point, there isn’t even a Preferences option in the limited menu. All you can do is create virtual machines.

• That shouldn’t be a deal breaker for anyone. However, I recently ran into an issue. On my production machine, my primary drive was getting dangerously low on space. It turns out, a big part of that problem was Boxes. Why? Because Boxes stores the virtual machine files in ~/.local/share/gnome-boxes, which means it’s going to gobble up your local storage space fairly quickly. Given GNOME Boxes doesn’t have any preferences to speak of, what do you do?

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Tor Browser on Manjaro 21. For those of you who didn’t know, The Onion Router a.k.a Tor browser is a free and open-source anonymous communication tool. It helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and security.

• 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 Tor Browser on a Manjaro 21.

• When I first ran across PwnDrop, I was intrigued at what the developers had in mind with it. For instance, if you’re a white-hat hacker and are looking to share exploits safely with your client, you might use a service like PwnDrop. If you’re a journalist communicating with, well, just about anyone who is trying to keep their identity secret, you might use a service like PwnDrop.

• Logging in as the Linux root user is bad practice. Logging in as root over an SSH connection is even worse. We tell you why, and show you how to prevent it.

• In this video on Dave’s Garage, he discusses the “fork bomb,” a DoS (denial-of-service) attack where a process replicates itself until it depletes all system resources, slowing or crashing the system. The bomb is nothing more than an 11-character program that, when entered into a Bash prompt, will replicate itself until the computer crashes.

• MPV is a free, open-source command-line multimedia player. Unlike graphical players like VLC Media Player, MPV allows you to load any supported media file straight from your terminal. Furthermore, MPV also supports a wide range of codecs and formats. This means you can use MPV to play simple MP3 files as well as high-fidelity 4K HEVC movies.

• In this guide, we will learn how to install Atom Text Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish).

• Jack Wallen shows you how to return Pop!_OS to a brand new installation, without losing any of your user data and app configurations.

Games

• Okay, I admit it, I’m late to the party, but I’m not a gamer. But even I’ve now heard about the Steam Deck, a Linux-powered handheld gaming device. It will be interesting to see the future developments that may unfold…

• 0 A.D., the free open-source RTS game of ancient warfare, got a new release update a few days ago.

• It’s 0 A.D. Alpha 26, code-name ‘Zhuangzi’, features new civilization: The Han, which was the second imperial dynasty of China. It has beautiful new art, unique technologies, buildings, as well as new gameplay strategies to explore.

• The release also introduced 2 new map: Tarim basin – an endorheic basin in Northwest China, Xinjiang region; and Yangtze (aka Chang Jiang) the longest river in Asia.

• After a first release on the Epic Games Store in 2021, Kena Bridge of Spirits, is making its debut on Steam for the first time today on the 27th of September. I took it for a quick spin to see how well it would run on Linux. You have the answer below in video.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Plasma Mobile Gear 22.09 is here three months after Plasma Mobile Gear 22.06 and brings a new default Homescreen designed for simplicity and one-hand usage. The Homescreen’s configuration has been updated as well to make it easier to switch between the old homescreen (Folio) and the new one.

• Another exciting feature is a new default email client called Raven, which currently only works as a basic email reader, but the devs work on support for sharing components with Kalendar’s upcoming email support.

• The Plasma Mobile team is happy to announce the developments integrated into Plasma Mobile between July-September 2022. In this report you can also read about the release of Plasma Mobile Gear ⚙ 22.09.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Over the decades, I’ve witnessed countless Linux desktop distributions, each of which attempts to set itself apart from the competition. Some of them, such as ZorinOS and Deepin Linux, have done a fairly remarkable job of doing just that. Since I started covering Linux back in ’99, I’ve proclaimed distributions such as Elementary OS, ZorinOS, Deepin Linux, and Garuda Linux to be offering the most beautiful desktop on the market.

• BellSoft, creator of progressive Java runtime for a complete Java experience, Liberica JDK, and an OpenJDK contributor, today announced the release of BellSoft Alpaquita Cloud Native Platform and Alpaquita Linux.

• The company stated that these offerings are intended to address the growing demand for more efficient, secure, and supported Java software that performs well as well as reduces cloud computing costs.

• [...]

• Additionally, Alpaquita Linux is a Linux distribution tuned specifically for a Java runtime. Based on Alpine Linux, it offers users performance and security enhancements as well as a smaller size and improved flexibility.

• BellSoft today is adding a BellSoft Alpaquita Cloud Native Platform to its portfolio that makes it possible to more efficiently run Java applications encapsulated in containers. As part of that effort, the company is making available an Alpaquita Linux distribution that is optimized for the BellSoft Alpaquita Cloud Native Platform.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• An updated version of ONLYOFFICE is available to download for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

• ONLYOFFICE 7.2 ships with all of the latest changes to the online version, plus some ‘unique features’ exclusive to the desktop editors, including automatic light/dark mode on Windows and macOS (the feature is present on Linux builds but doesn’t, in my testing, do what it should).

• Such as? Well, the new version of the Document has ligature support in text files; lets you easily insert the current heading into a table of contents; and adds a new “Headings” panel to the main toolbar (replacing the navigation panel). Converting .pdf, .djvu, and .xps documents to .docx is also said to have improved.

• The Presentation tool now supports custom path animations, offers advanced settings, is able to playback audio and video in slides without requiring VLC, and intros advanced “placement” options for images, when selecting an image and choosing ‘advanced settings’.

Fedora Family / IBM

• If you were an advocate of CentOS Linux, you knew all about it. You knew its traits, its ways, its bugs, its quirks. You knew its personality. You knew how to tease the best out of it, and how to avoid the things it did that drove you crazy. You developed a CentOS skill set that became second nature. Together with CentOS, big things got done, systems and careers were built, successes achieved. So when CentOS passed into end-of-life two Decembers ago, something central was taken out of the work life of its users.

Debian Family

• Early 2011, six months after the Debian Day volunteer suicide (Frans Pop), a mysterious livejournal blog appeared in Russian about a US-based kernel developer in trouble.

• William Lee Irwin III was a kernel developer and Debian Developer who worked at Oracle. He pioneered support for page clustering on x86. After a medical problem or a seizure, it is suggested that Oracle simply dumped him in the street and he ended up in a homeless shelter.

• Is America’s health system really so bad that they need to rely on Russian support to keep kernel developers above the poverty line? (Yes, American healthcare really is that bad)

• The Russian blog post is followed by a comment in English hinting that a debian-private (leaked gossip network) thread found a job for Irwin. We examined all messages in the thread and found the claim is over-optimistic.

• Back in April I wrote about issues with how we handle firmware in Debian, and I also spoke about it at DebConf in July. Since then, we’ve started the General Resolution process – this led to a lot of discussion on the the debian-vote mailing list and we’re now into the second week of the voting phase.

• [...]

• Fundamentally, my motivation for starting this vote was to ask the project for clear positive direction on a sensible way forward with non-free firmware support. Thus, I’ve voted all of the options that do that above NOTA. On those terms, I don’t like Choice 4 here – IMHO it leaves us in the same unclear situation as before.

• I’d be happy for us to update the Social Contract for clarity, and I know some people would be much more comfortable if we do that explicitly here. Choice 1 was my initial personal preference as we started the GR, but since then I’ve been convinced that also updating the SC would be a good idea, hence Choice 5.

• I’d also rather have a single image / set of images produced, for the two reasons I’ve outlined before. It’s less work for our images team to build and test all the options. But, much more importantly: I believe it’s less likely to confuse new users.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In 2004, Ubuntu computer operating system was invented by Mark Shuttleworth. It is a Debian-based Linux operating system and it is distributed as free and open source software. The word Ubuntu comes from the Bantu language and it means “humanity towards others” or “I am because we are”.

• Ubuntu is popular for its ease of use and its wide range of applications. Over 20% of the web runs on Ubuntu. French Police migrated over 80 000 desktops to Ubuntu from Windows and saved over 2 million euro.

• Canonical is thrilled to announce today the availability of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with real-time kernel support and optimizations for Intel’s latest FlexRAN Reference Software. Designed to meet telecom network transformation needs for 5G, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS real-time kernel delivers performance, guaranteed ultra-low latency and security for critical infrastructure. With this release, Canonical strengthens its commitment to help telecommunications service providers benefit from the technological and economic benefits of open source-software in a secure and supported manner.

• [...]

• Besides offering real-time-kernel capabilities in Ubuntu which are suited for today’s 5G networks, Canonical offers a full stack of supported open-source technology building blocks, providing a unified approach for telco transformation.

• Canonical conducted detailed performance testing, with OpenRAN on bare metal as well as on Canonical’s MicroK8s and Charmed Kubernetes distributions. The tests showed that Ubuntu delivers better results than any other operating system thanks to the company’s tight collaboration with upstream kernel development and extremely fast patching and release cycles. Telecom providers can deploy containers without compromising on performance or security.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Smart home technology has a ton of useful and fascinating use cases for humans, but what about our pets? For most of us, our furry friends are members of the family, and if we can make modifications to our home to help them, we do it.

• The good news here is that there are tons of home automation tools that you can use to make life easier and more fun for your pets, and many of them can be done with just a handful of starting materials and basic knowledge.

• In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the ways smart homes can benefit pets, and explore some projects from the Arduino community.

• ESP32-S3 has been in the news recently and we just wrote about the Bee S3 and BPI-PicoW-S3 boards yesterday, but there’s more, and LilyGo T-SIMCAM ESP32-S3 is another interesting ESP32-S3 board with a 2MP camera as well as support for an optional 4G LTE module.

• The board can make use of the AI capabilities from the ESP32-S3 microcontroller through the built-in camera and microphone and offers two options for power with 5V through a USB Type-C port, as well as a 2-pin JST connector for connecting a battery.

• If you’re more than 30 years old, then there is a good chance that BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was the first programming language you used. Many early computers shipped with a BASIC interpreter in firmware, so it was the first thing users saw when they booted up their computer. While other languages are more useful for most tasks today, BASIC still has benefits. To take advantage of it, Stefan Lenz used a Nano RP2040 Connect to build a standalone computer that runs BASIC for Internet of Things applications.

• The Raspberry Pi RP2040 is a powerful microcontroller that immediately became popular after it hit the market in January 2021. The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect is one of the newest boards in the Arduino lineup and gives users access to the RP2040 within the friendly Arduino ecosystem. In addition the MCU, this board also contains a u-blox WiFi and Bluetooth® adapter, a six-axis IMU, a microphone, 16MB of flash memory, and even a CryptoAuthentication chip. The u-blox adapter was particularly useful for this project, since it enables IoT control over a wireless network.

• Modern elevators are powerful, but they still have a payload limit. Most will contain a plaque with the maximum number of passengers (a number based on their average weight with lots of room for error). But nobody has ever read the capacity limit when stepping into an elevator or worried about exceeding it. In reality, manufacturers build their elevators to a size that prevents an excessive number of passengers. But as a demonstration, Nekhil R. put together a tutorial that explains how to use the Edge Impulse ML platform with an Arduino Nicla Vision board to count elevator passengers.

• The Nicla Vision is a new board built specifically for computer vision applications — especially those that incorporate machine learning. In its small footprint (less than a square inch), there is a powerful STM32H747AII6 microcontroller, a 2MP color camera, a six-axis IMU, a time of flight sensor, a microphone, WiFi and Bluetooth, and an onboard LiPo battery charger — and it’s officially supported by Edge Impulse, making it well suited for ML projects.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• When someone is thinking about the best contactless card payment system, he must count NFC as the best option. Basically, NFC stands for near-field communication, and it is one of the most popular contactless payment or money transfer systems. Most people use their smartphones to use this service.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• With fresh faces wide-eyed for new challenges, Collabora happily welcomes new teammates to the growing roster! A testament to the open environment created by collaborative remote work, our latest joiners are equipped to contribute to the exciting projects we have in the works.

• Data labeling is one of the most fundamental aspects of machine learning. It is also often an area where organizations struggle – both to accurately categorize data and reduce potential bias.

• With data labeling technology, a dataset used to train a machine learning model is first analyzed and given a label that provides a category and a definition of what the data is actually about. While data labeling is a critical component of the machine learning process, recently it has also proven to be highly inconsistent, according to multiple studies. The need for accurate data labeling has fuelled a bustling marketplace of data labeling vendors.

Events

• Last weekend I was in Vienna for EuroBSDcon, an event where BSD users are gathering from Europe (and all around the world). And while you could follow the event online, to me, the greatest value of the conference was not in the talks themselves (not to lessen their value of course, as they were fantastic) but rather in meeting people during the hallway session. The line-up consisted of sudo and syslog-ng users, BSD users and developers, and even some people from history books

• Hacktoberfest is an annual hacking event hosted by DigitalOcean to encourage people to contribute to open source throughout the month of October.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

• The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 106 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

• Chrome 106.0.5249.61 ( Mac/linux) and 106.0.5249.61/62( Windows) contains a number of fixes and improvements — a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 106.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• WordPress 6.1 Beta 2 is now available for download and testing.

• This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 2 on a test server and site.

GNU Projects

Programming/Development

• C has an added benefit over other scripting languages since it is a procedural programming language. We can also say that C is a compiler-based programming language that distinguishes between Python and Java, which are interpreter-based. As a result, coding compilation and execution are expedited. The data types in the C language are the declarations or definitions for variables. This defines the variety and volume of data about the variables. C is a strong choice language for beginners to learn programming with. The C programming language is used to write the Unix operating system and practically all Unix applications. Due to this reason, C is currently a frequently used professional language.

• The operative systems of component programs, in a particular way, were initially developed using the C language. Because it produces the code that executes almost rapidly code written in assembly language, and C was adopted as a system development language. To run any C-language program, we must first compile it using a C compiler, which turns C into a computer-understandable language. Visual Studio is the best compiler for user code compilation in C language.

• The topic we will discuss in our article is related to the “C” language, which is a simple keyword that is “extern”. The programmers and coders use this keyword to extend the visibility of any variable and function. Eventually, we don’t need function definition in the “C” language because the function will remain visible in the code by default.

• Furthermore, it has a proclivity to disseminate variables and functions visibility over many source files. We can say that declaring a variable without the assassination of memory allocation. It is not required regularly to declare any function while coding a program. It tweaks the affiliation criteria so that the C compiler does not amend the symbol with extra information. In “C” language, we have another prefix, “static”, which could not be used along with the “extern” in the same declaration of a function definition. External is standardized as an “extern” in the C programming language.

• When we have a program to run, the command line arguments could be the arguments declared in the system’s command line preceding the program’s name. Our program will accept the types of arguments to be passed from the command line after the program’s execution. In the command line argument, we have two main parameters, which are “argc” and “argv”. The “argc” is the argument count, whereas “argv” is the argument vector in the C language. The parameter argument count indicates how many arguments were entered in the command line while writing the program. In context, the argument vector parameter is an array of pointers of the characters of the object in the C programming language for command line argument. The parameter argument count border is frequently more notable than or equal to 1.

• A range of order line parameters presented by the programmers is flawed strings. Argv[0] is the order in which the show triggers the program. The main command-line assertion is argv[1].

• The command-line interface credentials are used in C whenever it is essential to provide the program’s attributes to external sources, and there is no desire to use them within the code. Working framework arguments are the traits that the order line passes to the C program when the instruction is executed. Any parameter presented to the script is indicated by a pointer that is maintained within a pointer vector referenced by “argv[]”. The count of arguments passed to the program is addressed by “argc”. By using Command Line Arguments, the program to be operated can be regulated from a range rather than by hard coding the parameters inside the program.

Rust

• On Friday, 14 October, we will discuss how to deal with “disabled tests”: tests that are turned off at some point (e.g. due to failures in a component we do not control). We do not currently have any protocols in place to review such tests or decide when to try to re-enabling them.

• A lot of system design is about thinking of the nature of the domains we encounter. And only later, once we understand them, encoding this understanding in a way that machines can verify it.

• I often find async Rust to be misunderstood. Conversations around “why async” often focus on performance 1 – a topic which is highly dependent on workloads, and results with people wholly talking past each other. While performance is not a bad reason to choose async Rust, we often we only notice performance when we experience a lack of it. So I want to instead on which features async Rust provides which aren’t present in non-async Rust. Though we’ll talk a bit about performance too at the end of this post.

Leftovers

Proprietary

• The US Securities and Exchange Commission has asked Oracle to pay more than US$23 million (A$35.7 million) to resolve charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

• In a statement, the SEC said Oracle’s subsidiaries in Turkey, the UAE and India had created and used slush funds to bribe officials for business between 2016 and 2019.

• Oracle subsidiaries in Turkey and the UAE also used these slush funds to pay costs for foreign officials to attend tech conferences. This violated the company’s policies and procedures, the statement said.

• [...]

• The SEC said its investigation was conducted by Samantha Martin and Laura Bennett and supervised by David Reece. It thanked the Capital Markets Board of Turkey, Emirates Securities and Commodities Authority, and the Securities and Exchange Board of India for their help.

Security

• The ransomware encrypts some files and avoids others, including files with an extension associated with its own activities (.FARGO, .FARGO2, etc.) and that of GlobeImposter, another ransomware threat targeting vulnerable MS SQL servers.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (dovecot and firefox-esr), Fedora (firefox and grafana), Red Hat (firefox and thunderbird), Slackware (dnsmasq and vim), SUSE (dpdk, firefox, kernel, libarchive, libcaca, mariadb, openvswitch, opera, permissions, podofo, snakeyaml, sqlite3, unzip, and vsftpd), and Ubuntu (expat, libvpx, linux-azure-fde, linux-oracle, squid, squid3, and webkit2gtk).

• The Apptainer community today announced version 1.1.0 of the popular container system for secure, high-performance computing (HPC). Improvements in the new version provide a smaller attack surface for production deployments while offering features that improve and simplify the user experience. Apptainer continues the legacy of Singularity with backwards compatibility, stability, added security, performance and reproducibility.

• CISA and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) has updated joint Cybersecurity Advisory AA22-228A: Threat Actors Exploiting Multiple CVEs Against Zimbra Collaboration Suite, originally released August 16, 2022. The advisory has been updated to include additional Malware Analysis Reports and indicators of compromise.

• CISA has released three (3) Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on September 27th, 2022. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.

• Both sides of politics are putting pressure on Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin to step down over her handling of the data breach which the company made public last Thursday.

• Opposition cyber security spokesman James Paterson joined the chorus of criticism on Tuesday, calling on Bayer Rosmarin to resign if the public had been misled on the company’s reaction to the breach.

• Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, who on Monday described the attack on Optus’ network as being anything but sophisticated — as Bayer Rosmarin had claimed — expressed concern on Tuesday about reports that Medicare details had been leaked in the data that was made public.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Personal data, in the digital space, is synonymous with CVV or card pin protection. It’s part and parcel of the virtual web, giving no room for compromise when it comes to its safekeeping. So, why is there a big fuss about data privacy protection?

• To understand why it needs shielding, it’s prudent to understand what it is. Your data is the digital trail collected from all your Internet activities. Think Hansel and Gretel – your online activities leave a whole lot of breadcrumbs. It contains your confidential information, browser history, and even social media activity.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• More than a set of techniques to improve individual fitness, Johann Friedrich Ludwig Christoph Jahn’s gymnastics were meant to train a new form of body politic.

• Despite their best efforts to keep still and straight-faced, the young, uniformed bodies in Heinrich Hamann’s turn-of-the-century photographs of Hamburg’s St. Pauli gymnastics society (Turnverein) remain in motion. Girls shaping a human pyramid alternate looks of attentiveness and amusement. Boys performing handstands on parallel bars are flanked by onlookers who smile, fidget, or grimace. A series of images involving inventive uses of the pommel horse — to reenact Don Quixote, to strike tableaux vivants of Romulus and Remus, and, when paired with a bicycle, to play “Texas Yack” (Jack) — allow physical education to decay into silliness. Only the adult gymnasts in these photographs approach the gravity of purpose desired by their coach. One can see in Hamann’s photographs both the playful spontaneity of the Turnvereins’ original exercises and the rigid postures and movements that would soon help meld individuals into the fascist masses of the Nuremberg rallies and 1936 Berlin Olympics.

• The Turner movement and its calisthenic equipment sprang from a man known as “the Turnvater”: Johann Friedrich Ludwig Christoph Jahn (1778–1852), a German gymnastics educator and fervent nationalist who took the rough-and-tumble turnen (romping about) of unruly schoolboys and molded it into a populist force. Beginning with simple hikes alongside his students in the Berlin countryside, Jahn developed jumping, throwing, and catching games, as well as now-familiar gymnastics exercises — often performed during patriotic commemorations — to train the undisciplined youth. “Just as the gymnasts bounced over their bars with the firm strength of their bodies”, writes Hans Kohn, “so they expected to bounce into the future Volksstaat with the firm strength of their conviction and will”. More than a set of techniques to improve individual fitness, Jahn’s refinement of Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths’ earlier exercises was meant to train a new form of body politic.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• There’s a lot of things going on in my mind, right now. Too many things I want to bring them out, but how? Pain, mistakes, regrets, just aches that I have, oh wow! Things I wish that I had stopped doing by now, no doubt.

• Every nice thing I try to do goes wrong, you know? Break yourself along with the people you love, oh no! I tend to win them back with some more truth, although! They wont ever know the darker side of me, just hope.

• after i returned from my 2 months parental leave i found a great email in my inbox. one from the weekly capitalism update made by a joint delegation of company leaders and hr.

• a bit of background, i work in a german company. in german there is the generic masculinum, which traditionally included all genders (assume hunter, it’s a collection to include everyone that has the profession hunter). usually a profession has a gender, but these are very random and don’t follow any rules. there is something we call “movierung” which is the stem of the word, but in the opposite gender (for hunter this would be huntress). there are different reasons for this, a popular one was to address the spouse of the person in a profession. in german a few hundred years ago you’d call the wife of a carpenter something like carpenteress.

• Hi folks, been a while — was coordinating The Grand Migration of one apartment to another.

• [...]

• Read the damn contract. If you moved in and no one painted the apartment for you, then you don’t need to paint it on the way out.

Technical

• So I started to re watch a web series, Power Corrupts by darkmatter2525, as the final episode was posted a few days ago and I wanted to go from start to finish to fully enjoy the end. Its a great series and I highly recommend watching it.

• At one point in the story the subject about the ethical treatment of purely digital life comes up. Not just a robot, or a computer that can think. But rather, entire civilizations of fully sentient beings living out their entire lives all in a simulation. *Spoiler Alert* (or not really as its pretty obvious in the first few minutes) these simulated civilizations are created for the shear purpose of providing a testing ground for the “moral fiber” of the flesh and blood human who acts as a god inside the simulation. As the title of the series states power corrupts and the test is to see which humans go bad and which are humble enough and have the will power to not let power go to their heads.

Programming

• I’ve always been more of a CGI guy. Output of pages are exactly what gets displayed, no pages with a single div and no content when i examine source. Kind of an odd thing to say as a full stack developer. Within Gemini there isn’t any other option for dynamic data so I feel right at home.

• There are a bunch of rambling essays by Chuck Moore and Jeff Fox at www.ultratechnology.com, referring to 10x Forth and 100x Forth and whatnot.

• They are a fun read for us desperate for Forth trivia and memorabilia… Jeff Fox (Godess rest his soul¹) was a bit of a windbag (look who is talking — I am sure I am called worse), and was not a good explainer of things (neither is Chuck, honestly), but I am due to reread his site because there are morsels of good stuff there.

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• This will not work in your dad’s Forth (GForth?), because of interleaved headers. I think you can do that in ColorForth. My newest Forth keeps heads elsewhere, so it is perfectly legal to run into the next-defined word.

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