● 10.24.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 24/10/2022: i3 4.21.1 and Python 3.11

Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• With the release of the 22.10 flavors of Ubuntu recently, I was hopeful this latest release would be ready for the (also recently released) dedicated Intel Arc GPUs. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case, as attempting to load the Kubuntu 22.10 installer from USB resulted in a blank screen. I was then given hope by Intel’s release of “packaged drivers” for the Alchemist GPUs for the 22.04 flavors of Ubuntu, but these hopes were unfortunately dashed as well after multiple attempts on fresh installs of 22.04.

• After reviewing what Intel’s instructions were installing, I decided to try another fresh installation of 22.04, however fully deviating from their instructions and moving on to Linux Kernel 6.0 and the bleeding edge Mesa stack. Thankfully this process resulted in very little editing of configuration files, and only needing to manually compile one package. This process should also be repeatable on the 22.10 flavors of Ubuntu as well.

• Before beginning, I’d like to suggest leaving any integrated graphics enabled, as well as ensuring an SSH server is running in the event of a blank screen that could result from any number of reboots. After running through this process twice, I believe the following instructions should not result in a blank screen.

• Sponsored by Red Hat.

• Here’s the weekly roundup #22.10 for you across the GNU/Linux and tech world.

• Welcome to the DebugPoint Weekly roundup #22.10, where you can find all the happenings from this week, mainly from the Linux and open-source space.

• This week, the major update was the Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu release and many distro updates. However, app updates were a few comparatively.

Server

• Being a Linux administrator is hugely rewarding. Sure, it’s a role full of challenges, and some days are harder than others. But you’ll never be bored, and if you have a true passion for Linux, there’s a job out there for you.

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Kubuntu 22.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• Today, I’m taking a very quick look at six of the official flavors of Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu.” While the flagship edition of Ubuntu,with the GNOME desktop gets most of the press, I think there is some really great work going on in the community distributions…

• As if Wi-Fi couldn’t get anymore tedious, five (yes, FIVE) vulnerabilities were discovered in the Linux mac80211 framework, which can potentially impact literally anyone that uses Wi-Fi. Thankfully, patches are already out to fix these vulnerabilities, but there’s important lessons to be learned here that this recent incident makes incredibly clear. Also, the ongoing White House security directive saga continues with some adjustments that broaden its scope.

• Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, and special guest Adam Lorimer present Bad Voltage…

• Distrobox is an incredibly useful tool for filling the gaps where your system is missing applications but what if instead of filling in gaps you used it as pretty much your entire user space.

• Dropping out of the fediverse The tiny text Mozilla Watch The community holds us ransom Our app is faster than light

• 0:00 Cold Open 2:26 Press ‘F’ to Pay Respects 9:47 The Elm Mail System 10:56 Enter, PINE 11:44 PICO, the PIne COmposer 13:17 TIP Is not PICO 14:23 NANO’s ANOther editor 14:57 “Lightning and the rest of 2000 17:37 2001, and the release of 1.0 18:49 2002-2015, Allegretta’s gone and back again 21:37 The Drama in 2016 24:17 2016 to 2022, and my, how boring things got 25:13 About nano, and What’s Next 31:26 Mozilla Watch 38:44 Feedback! 46:59 Community Focus: The Ransomware Files 48:57 App Focus: Warp 53:39 Next Time: Kali Linux 56:31 Stinger

• The Internet is going crazy with AI-generated media. What’s the open-source story, and is Linux being left out?

• Plus, we try out the new Ubuntu release on the ODROID H3+.

• So Valve’s just filed a trademark for the name “NEON PRIME” and the filing looks identical to the filing for “Half-Life: Alyx.” But nobody’s ever heard of it. So what could be? Plus, Valve’s working on better variable refresh rate support, 6000+ games are either playable or verified, more steam client updates, and so much more!

Kernel Space

• Linux kernel 5.19 was released on July 31st, 2022, and it’s a short-lived kernel branch, which means that it is supported with maintenance updates for about three months. It introduced new features like support for ZSTD-compressed firmware files, support for AMD’s Secure Nested Paging feature, as well as initial support for Loongson’s “LoongArch” RISC ISA CPU architecture.

• Renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today the release of Linux kernel 5.19.17, which is a pretty hefty update with 767 changed files, 7188 insertions, and 3389 deletions. But what’s most important is the fact that Linux kernel 5.19.17 is also the last maintenance release for the Linux 5.19 kernel series.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 5.19.17 stable kernel. “Note this is the LAST 5.19.y kernel to be released. This branch is now end-of-life. You should move to the 6.0.y branch at this point in time.”

•  Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, is considering dropping support for the Intel 486 processor. The move would come long after most users had moved on to newer processor architectures.

• In a message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, the main hub of Linux kernel development, Torvalds said that despite small pockets of use, he considered the 486 architecture obsolete.

• “I really don’t think i486 class hardware is relevant anymore,” Torvalds wrote.

• Kernel development will focus more on modern hardware in the future if Torvalds’ response is any indication.

• Linux Torvalds, founder of the Linux kernel, has posted in the kernel mailing list that he wants to drop support for Intel 486 (i486) processors, citing their age. The i486 CPUs were introduced way back in April 1989 and discontinued in 2007. They were designed by Pat Gelsinger, who is now Intel’s CEO.

• Support for i386 processors was removed back in 2012 and now there’s a desire by Torvalds to axe support for i486 a decade later. He has suggested that people still using i486 ought to be told to use an LTS kernel, but that the mainline kernel should lose support. A couple of people responded to the thread saying that it wouldn’t be too inconvenient to remove support, so there’s a good chance the plan could go forward.

• Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, suggested it is probably time for Intel i486 CPUs support to be dropped from the Linux kernel.

• Hardware evolution is a constant process that necessitates significant efforts from software developers who supply software support.

• Many Linux users are probably unaware of the effort made by Linux kernel developers to provide broad hardware support for nearly every architecture and CPU you can think of. After all, the Linux kernel is the layer that allows the software to communicate with the underlying hardware.

• Linux creator Linus Torvalds says a discussion over removing support for i486 was triggered by something not directly related, but that just touched on a similar area.

• “This discussion was all triggered by some unrelated code that wanted to do 64-bit accesses and had other entirely [different] approaches to avoiding CMPXCHG8B,” he told iTWire in response to a query on Tuesday.

• Torvalds’ suggestion about removing i486 support was made on the Linux kernel mailing list.

• However, his comments indicated that it was still up in the air. “It’s still just being discussed, and there are a couple of people who seem to have that old hardware, so who knows,” he said.

Applications

• The popular KeePassXC password manager got its 3rd update for the 2.7 release series with new features and various bug-fixes.

• The new release now has a graphical way to export XML via menu ‘Database -> Export -> XML file‘, via the same logic as the corresponding CLI export option.

• When searching in KeePassXC 2.7.3, a little save icon will appear in the right end of the search-box, allowing to save searches and access easily from the bottom-left panel.

• Corel Corporation is a Canadian software company specializing in graphics processing. They are best known for developing CorelDRAW, a vector graphics editor. They are also notable for purchasing and developing AfterShot Pro, PaintShop Pro, Painter, Video Studio, MindManager, and WordPerfect.

• Corel has dabbled with Linux over the years. For example they produced Corel Linux, a Debian-based distribution which bundled Corel WordPerfect Office for Linux. While Corel effectively abandoned its Linux business in 2001 they are not completely Linux-phobic. For example, AfterShot Pro has an up to date Linux version albeit its proprietary software.

• This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives to products offered by Corel.

• Intel’s DAOS is a distributed parallel filesystem for supercomputers, while Stratis is Red Hat’s answer to ZFS – new versions of each were released today.

• DAOS, or Distributed Application Object Storage, is Intel’s system for fast supercomputer storage, while Stratis is Red Hat’s next-generation filesystem, which combines logical volume management and COW snapshots. Both have uncertain futures.

• i3 is a tiling window manager, completely written from scratch. The target platforms are GNU/Linux and BSD operating systems, our code is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) under the BSD license. i3 is primarily targeted at advanced users and developers.

Instructionals/Technical

• Want to go two operating systems deep? Here’s how to run Ubuntu, from a USB drive, inside a Windows virtual machine.

• Today we are looking at how to install Minetest on a Chromebook.

• If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!

• Please use the video as a visual guide, and the commands and links below to install it on your Chromebook.

• In this article, we will cover how to install PostgreSQL15 database on Ubuntu 22.04. PostgreSQL is an open-source object-relational Database Management System.

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

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Sublime Text on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Sublime Text is a source code editor used by developers all over the world. It’s a cross-platform that supports many programming languages and markups such as Python, Java, C, and C#. Users can expand its functionality with plugins, typically community-built and maintained under free-software licenses.

• 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 Sublime Text on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install JasperReports on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, asperReports library is an open-source reporting engine that is entirely written in Java. Developers can use JasperReports as a stand-alone reporting and analytics library server. It is entirely written in Java and it is able to use data coming from any kind of data source and produce pixel-perfect documents that can be viewed, printed or exported in a variety of document formats including HTML, PDF, Excel, OpenOffice and Word.

• 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 JasperReports 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.

• Secure Shell (SSH) is the de facto standard for gaining access to remote Linux machines. SSH took the place of telnet long ago, to add a much-needed layer of security for remote logins.

• The rsync tool copies files and directories between two computers. It uses a sophisticated algorithm that scans directory trees to find files on the source computer that don’t exist on the destination computer. These files are transmitted to the destination computer. What makes rync so clever is it can figure out which pieces of existing files have been modified, and it only sends the changed portions.

• You can use rsync to copy files to a different location on your hard drive, to a different hard drive in the same computer, to an externally connected USB drive, or any other network-accessible location.

• Here’s how to clean up Flatpak apps to reclaim your precious disk space. Follow along.

• Flatpak (like Snap) packages run in sandbox mode. By design, it takes a considerable amount of disk space for an individual application, even if it is a smaller one. For example, a simple Test editor or a basic image annotator application can take up more than 100+ MB of storage space.

• It’s how Flatpak or even Snap operates fundamentally. It pulls all dependencies for an app and runs independently. The advantage of this design is – you do not need to worry about dependencies or updates. All you need to do is install and run. On the contrary, it takes up a huge amount of disk space.

• And if you are running Ubuntu, elementary OS or any distribution for a longer period, you would be surprised that Flatpak keeps taking up more space over time.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install RustDesk on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, RustDesk is a simple, open-source useful application for remotely accessing other PCs, with built-in file transfer and TCP tunneling, written with Rust programming language. It alternative to TeamViewer and AnyDesk. It provides free remote desktop services on its cloud and self-hosted infrastructure for organizations.

• 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 RustDesk remote desktop software 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.

• Learn how to install ProItnerface on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using the printrun package in using the command terminal.

• Pronterface – also known as Printrun – is a free open-source software for Windows, (older Macs) and Linux intended to control the 3D printer via the USB interface. It has a terminal window that can be used to send targeted commands to the printer and log errors, a temperature graph to control the heaters, and a manual control panel for axis control.

• Pronterface is very useful for configuration/tuning and diagnostics. Normally, Pronterface is not required, the main benefit lies in the configuration of the printer by means of the M-codes of the respective printer firmware and the monitoring in case of problems. You can start Pronterface before starting a print and then simply listen in.

• The git log command offers many opportunities to learn more about the commits made by contributors. One way you might consume such information is by date. To view commits in a Git repository created on a specific date or range of dates, use the git log command with the options –since or –until, or both.

• Using clear-text protocols like HTTP can put your network at risk. Learn how to upgrade to HTTPS.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The community has spoken and we are happy to showcase the following setups. The author of each setup has provided us with a little blurb to get to know them a little more, as well as their setup.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Kubuntu 22.10 users can upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.26, the latest stable release of the colossally popular open source desktop environment.

• The latest release of Ubuntu’s official KDE spin ships with the KDE Plasma 5.25 release by default, but KDE Plasma 5.26 can be installed on Kubuntu 22.10 using the official Kubuntu Backports PPA.

• KDE Plasma 5.26 introduces support for animated wallpapers, a new compact KickOff menu layout, resizable panel popups, and a large array of bug fixes aimed at improving overall stability and consistency.

• KDE Neon’s package base has been migrated from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS, and the upgraded ISO images are now available for download.

• KDE Neon is a Linux distribution and live DVD developed by KDE based on Ubuntu LTS releases.

• In addition, it includes a collection of additional software repositories containing the most recent versions of the Plasma desktop environment, Qt 5 toolkit, and other suitable KDE apps.

• I wish I had a better way to preserve the silhouette of the ground (foreground/middleground/background/dragon/character) and the layer stack of Krita did not help about that. The alpha inheritance workaround for clipping mask is not fluid to work with, except if you have only one or two group like that in your file.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• After almost seven months of development effort, GNOME Web (Epiphany) is now ported to GTK4. The code is now merged into the main branch of GNOME Web, which you can download and try out (instructions below).

• The work took time because GNOME Web has many old code bases. Since it is a web browser, the complexity becomes more. The entire work consists of 100+ changes in files catering for 15+ individual merge requests.

• Those wishing GNOME 43‘s new Quick Settings menu had an edit button need to check out a new add-on added to the GNOME Extensions website.

• It’s called Quick Settings Button Remover and —shock— it does exactly what it claims to: remove buttons from the podrific Quick Settings menu.

• Once installed, you can use extension’s settings dialog to choose whether native toggles supported by the new menu appear or not. Dark mode and night light toggles are are the ones I’ve seen users query removing most often, and this can hide both.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• DietPi is a Debian-based Linux distribution developed for small board computers like the Raspberry Pi. It is an ultra-lightweight Linux distribution making an excellent choice for devices like Raspberry Pi, Odroid, Pine64, and other SBCs with limited resources compared to a regular PC.

• Luckily, this operating system is not limited to SBCs alone; you can now install DietPi on your regular PC or Virtual Machine. This post will give you a comprehensive guide on the various DietPi features and how to install DietPi on your PC.

New Releases

• IceWM is a window manager for the X Window System. The goal of IceWM is speed, simplicity, and not getting in the user’s way. It comes with a taskbar with pager, global and per-window keybindings and a dynamic menu system. Application windows can be managed by keyboard and mouse. Windows can be iconified to the taskbar, to the tray, to the desktop or be made hidden. They are controllable by a quick switch window (Alt+Tab) and in a window list. A handful of configurable focus models are menu-selectable. Setups with multiple monitors are supported by RandR and Xinerama. IceWM is very configurable, themeable and well documented. It includes an optional external background wallpaper manager with transparency support, a simple session manager and a system tray. IceWM is available on popular Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, Slackware, CentOS, antiX, NixOS, and also compiles on most *BSDs.

• [...]

• The latest released version is 3.1.0 (2022-10-24).

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• With the release of the Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) prototype ‘Les Droites’ in September, the first Alpine summit of more than 4,000 meters has been reached. As the Adaptable Linux Platform is a shift towards a modular operating system, what would be more natural than to accompany it with modular documentation? Since the initial publication of the ‘SUSE Smart Docs’ pilot last year, which is based on this approach, the collection of articles on the ‘Smart Docs’ beta documentation page has grown.

Red Hat

• Even as companies adopt remote and hybrid work as the new normal, many are still struggling to adapt to the digital processes they now rely on to bring new products to the market.

• Kubernetes is great at automating the deployment, monitoring, and scaling of applications. Whatever you want Kubernetes to control—a service, deployment, etc.—is called a resource. This article shows you how to extend Kubernetes’s capabilities by writing a Custom Resource Definition (CRD) and an Operator in Java.

• CRDs specify how to install, monitor, and manage resources, whereas Operators are agents that actually carry all that out. The usual language for writing an Operator is Go. But most Java teams prefer to keep all their code in Java: they want to avoid doing a deep dive into a new language, and to maintain a unified environment without supporting two sets of tools and practices.

• This article explains how to create a CRD and Operator in Java, complete with sample Java code and YAML specification files. We’ll use the Java Operator SDK, the Fabric8 Kubernetes Java client, and a brand new CRD-to-Java mapping generator.

• If you’d like to extend Kubernetes with Java, you are in the right place. If you are just curious about the concepts described so far, you are also welcome to continue.

• In the previous article, Automate Red Hat JBoss Web Server deployments with Ansible, I discussed how to fully automate the deployment of Red Hat JBoss Web Server with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. However, this initial installation and configuration is only the beginning. Once the Java server is in use, it must be maintained and updated. Otherwise, critical bugs could affect its operation, or a security vulnerability might expose it to bad actors.

• Fortunately, we can utilize Ansible and the JWS collection to mitigate these concerns, enabling it to fully patch your deployment by automation and to upgrade the server itself. In this article, we will cover, in detail, how to implement such automation.

• A progressive web app (PWA) is a web application that uses modern web technologies to deliver a user experience equal to any mobile app. An active open source community, in conjunction with tech leaders like Google and Microsoft, pushes the PWA agenda forward in an effort to “bridge the app gap.”

• Basically, a PWA runs your app in a web browser. Because there’s essentially a two-party system of the Play and App stores, the focus is on two browsers: Google Chrome and Apple Safari (built on top of the open source Chromium and WebKit, respectively).

• I won’t be covering creating desktop apps. For more information on that topic, look into Electron.

• PWAs are built the same way as any website or web app. They use the latest mobile technologies and implement UX best practices. PWAs can also hook the browser in with native code to improve the experience.

• If you type “What is a PWA” in your favorite search engine, you’ll probably get a stock response similar to “PWAs are designed to be fast, reliable, and engaging, with the ability to work offline and be installed on a device’s home screen.” While this is partly true, it’s just the tip of the iceberg for what a PWA has the potential to be and what it’s evolving into, even as I write this article.

• Developers love command-line productivity. We get that. This article describes how odo, a developer-focused command-line interface (CLI) for Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes, simplifies cloud-native development.

• odo supports fast, iterative development and lets developers focus on what’s most important to them—code. The odo 3.0 GA release provides new and improved user experience and security. This new release also allows developers to automatically detect bindable resources, making it easier to connect applications to services.

• The concept of platform engineering and the end-to-end developer experience is a burgeoning topic industry wide. Building an IdP (Internal Developer Portal) is extremely complex. This topic is new for many, and there are still a lot of unknowns regarding how to evolve an organization that has no, or a low, concept of internal platforms.

• Enter Backstage. Backstage is an open source framework for building developer portals donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation by Spotify. Backstage has a vibrant ecosystem that development teams successfully use to streamline and rapidly onboard applications. It provides a portal into an internal developer platform by delivering an application catalog that can aggregate several sources of information regarding applications.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Let’s face it: Some Linux distributions are far more exciting than others. Even among those exciting distributions, not every release is all that noteworthy.

• With Ubuntu, we’ve grown accustomed to boring releases. It’s been a very long time since I remember a Ubuntu release that was truly exciting. That’s probably a good thing.

• Jack Wallen offers up his take on why Ubuntu 22.10 is as important a non-LTS release as you’ll experience with Ubuntu.

• OTA is a term commonly used when working with any type of device. Simply, the abbreviation OTA means ‘over-the-air’, and refers to the distribution of information wirelessly. In the context of IoT, you will often hear it used in combination with “updates”. Let’s explore in more detail what OTA is.

• The web is incredibly important. That’s why today, you will learn how to install Jekyll on Ubuntu 22.04. This tool is a static website generator with which you will be able to create websites quickly.

• Jack Wallen shows you how easy it is to enable unattended upgrades for both Ubuntu and Debian Linux so you can be sure to keep ahead of software updates.

Devices/Embedded

• Mirek Folejewski’s (aka Mirko Electronics) PicoBerry is an open-source hardware, miniature Raspberry Pi CM4 carrier board with just a USB Type-C port for power, a 40-pin Raspberry Pi GPIO header, and barely anything else.

• At just 70x20mm, the 2-layer board only adds a few LEDs, namely the ACT/PWR LEDS and two user LEDs, and supports any Raspberry Pi CM4 module with eMMC flash, but not the Raspberry Pi CM4 Lite since the board does not include a microSD card slot.

• Pimoroni Automation 2040 W is an industrial/automation controller based on the Raspberry Pi Pico W board that supports I/Os from 6V up to 40V and offers 2.4GHz WiFi 4 connectivity.

• The board offers plenty of interfaces including the ADC inputs, four digital inputs, three digital outputs, and three relays whose signals are all available through screw terminals, as well as two Qwiic/STEMMA QT connectors for further expansion.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Almost all Android smartphones released by Samsung and other giant handset makers are integrated with advanced security features. Some of them are already automatically activated by the installed Android system. There are also USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) codes or secret codes that allow you to access your Android phone’s features, especially the security and safety functions, without the need of going through your settings. Let’s take a look at the best Android security codes.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Events

• AnsibleFest 2022 delivered the automation experience to attendees at our Chicago event, but have no fear if you could not make the two-day event. There is a way to experience automation online and it is available now.

• Every week, free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on Libera.Chat to help improve the FSD, which is a catalog of useful free software that runs under free GNU-like systems (not limited to the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants) and a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, October 21, 2022 meeting, where we saw a a new program added, several entries updated, and several conversations, one of which was on the role of binaries in the FSD (hint: the FSD only deals with source code).

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• W3C TPAC 2022 in Vancouver is over. It was strange to meet after these 3 years away. There would be a lot more to say about this. During the CSS WG meetings, participants are talking about all kind of CSS values. It’s quickly confusing.

• As long as a fuzzer is uncovering a steady stream of bugs, we can have confidence it’s serving its purpose. But a silent fuzzer is harder to interpret: is our program finally free of bugs, or is the fuzzer simply unable to reach the code in which they are hidden?

• Code coverage reports can help here: we can manually check which functions and blocks of code the fuzzer has executed. We can see what coverage is missing that we want or expected to be covered, and then figure out ways to help the fuzzer explore that code. We implement those changes, run the fuzzer again, check the coverage reports again, and can verify our changes had the desired effect.

• But how can we be sure that the fuzzer will continue exercising these code paths — especially in evolving code bases with many developers collaborating together? Imagine this scenario: we have a generator that creates test cases that are guaranteed to be syntactically correct, but aren’t guaranteed to type check even if they do in practice 99% of the time. Therefore, our try-and-compile-the-input fuzz target intentionally ignores type errors so it can skip to the next probably-well-typed input, hoping that compiling that next input will trigger an internal compiler assertion or find some other bug. However, some change in one of the generator’s dependencies perturbed the generator so that now it only generates ill-typed programs. After this change, the fuzzer will never exercise our compiler’s mid-end optimizations and backend code generation because it always bounces off the type checker. This is a huge reduction in code exercised by the fuzzer and nothing alerted us to this regression!

• The latest release of Firefox is out, and it adds two important new features to the open source browser.

• The popular open source web browser has been updated to version 106 and includes a pair of features that should excite many users…with a caveat. But first, the features.

• With the release of Firefox 106, users will be greeted with the ability to use trackpad gestures (two-finger swipes left and right) to go backward and forward in the browser. Although this feature has bounced in and out of the browser, previously it required using the Alt key to make it work. Now, the Alt key isn’t necessary.

• However, the caveat is that this feature only works with Wayland, so X11 users are out of luck. If, however, Wayland is your X server of choice, the feature works flawlessly.

• By the time a kid turns 13, more than 72 million pieces of personal data have been collected about them on the internet, according to a 2018 report. These can include name, date of birth, address, family members, where they hang out, the people they interact with, what they do in the classroom, and which websites they visit. In other words, TMI.

• As a product manager working on Total Cookie Protection, which Firefox rolled out by default to all users in June, I wanted to learn more about how this privacy feature could benefit families. So I designed a family cookie experiment. While it wasn’t as yummy as it sounds, the experience reminded me of why online privacy is so important, especially for kids and teens.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• As enterprises generate more unstructured data, NoSQL databases are gaining popularity. Unlike relational databases that store data in tables or relations (intersections of rows and columns), NoSQL databases can accommodate the structureless nature of some types of data.

• Some people needed a Database that could store lots of unstructured data. So Dwight Merriman, Eliot Horowitz, and Kevin Ryan created MongoDB. It is an open-source document-oriented database. What makes MongoDB stand out is its horizontal scalability and load-balancing capabilities which provide users with unmatched levels of flexibility.

• In this article, we will learn everything about MongoDB, its key features, and some of the best MongoDB GUI Tools available in the market.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• EasyHacks are good starting points for the newcomers. If you want to contribute to LibreOffice code by working on this improvement, but you need to know how to get started with LibreOffice development, you can see our video tutorial…

Licensing / Legal

• The IPFire Project has been fighting a legal battle against someone who plagiarised our work and sold it as their own. This post is a summary about a fight in front of courts of law over the last couple of years and the lessons learned from it.

• IPFire is free software. That means that we, the people who contribute to it, grant people the right to use, study, share, and modify our software free of charge. What we, however, do not give you, is to do whatever you want – that includes giving you copyright to our work.

Programming/Development

• We are pleased to announce a new release of Valgrind, version 3.20.0, available from http://valgrind.org/downloads/current.html.

• This is mostly a bug fix release to make sure valgrind works well against the latest gcc, glibc and linux kernel, but also contains a lot of work to make valgrind work better on FreeBSD.

• Generations of vendors and developers have attempted to create technology that enables organizations to build an application that can run anywhere.

• The promise of WebAssembly, which is a nascent open-source technology, is just that. With WebAssembly, developers can potentially write code in the programming language of their choice and then have it run, in a highly optimized approach, in any environment. The promise of WebAssembly has the potential to upend multiple areas of the technology market — including the cloud — which recently has increasingly shifted to a container model that doesn’t always serve every organization’s needs.

• Docker, Inc. today announced at the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon North America conference that developers will be able to use their Docker Desktop environments to build applications using Web Assembly (Wasm) software artifacts.

• For many reasons, Linux has always been a programming mainstay, but most PC users are on Windows. This leaves programmers who need to test on the Windows platform with a dilemma: switching between platforms is near impossible. That’s where CMake comes in.

• The myth of the lone genius is long gone – if you want to innovate and discover something truly new, you need there to be collaboration between a diverse group of people. This was the starting point for Tuomo Ryynänen, a teacher at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences when planning a course about innovation and project work.

• Recently, I was working with an employee file where first and last name were concatenated with a comma separator. A requirement of the project was to parse the name and populate a different table where first and last name are separate columns. I won’t address the design of the employee file, but I will show how I completed the request.

• The guijs program is an amazing open-source free multi-platform program that built to aid JavaScript developers manage their JavaScript page projects easily and effectively.

Perl / Raku

• Oleksander Kiryuhin and Jonathan Worthington announced the release of version 0.8.8 of Cro, the set of libraries for building reactive distributed systems. Coming with many fixes and additions (also by Cro community members), the most notable new features are found in the templating syntax: structural tags in conditions, else and elsif constructs, and inline comments.

Python

• Python 3.11 is finally released. In the CPython release team, we have put a lot of effort into making 3.11 the best version of Python possible. Better tracebacks, faster Python, exception groups and except*, typing improvements and much more.

• Version 3.11.0 of the Python language has been released. “In the CPython release team, we have put a lot of effort into making 3.11 the best version of Python possible. Better tracebacks, faster Python, exception groups and except*, typing improvements and much more.” Among other things, this release claims a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite thanks to the Faster CPython work.

• Therefore, the regrettable solution is that, right now, there is no way to have all three of: efficiency, interoperability, and soundness.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Tired of an Ugly prompt with no features? Fix it with this guide!

Rust

• Version 0.19 of the GStreamer Rust bindings was released. Together with the bindings, also version 0.9 of the GStreamer Rust plugins was released.

• As usual this release follows the latest gtk-rs 0.16 release and the corresponding API changes.

• This release includes optional support for the latest new GStreamer 1.22 APIs. As GStreamer 1.22 was not released yet, these new APIs might still change. The minimum supported version of the bindings was updated to GStreamer 1.14 and the targetted GStreamer API version can be selected by applications/plugins via feature flags.

Leftovers

Security

• The breach of LA Unified School District (LAUSD) highlights the prevalence of password vulnerabilities, as criminal hackers continue to use breached credentials in increasingly frequent ransomware attacks on education.

• One of those attacks was aimed at OakBend Medical Center on September 1, 2022, with the group claiming to have siphoned roughly 3.5GB of data, including over one million records with patient and employee information.

• The shellcode then decrypts and loads Beacon, the default malware payload used by Cobalt Strike to establish a connection to its command-and-control server.

• More than a month after it announced a major data breach, telco Singtel Optus is yet to pay a single dollar towards the costs of replacing the passports of users whose data was leaked. iTWire understands that close to 100,000 passports have been listed for protection.

• The telco confirmed that replacement costs had yet to be paid, responding to a query from iTWire by saying the process for reimbursing users the cost of replaced passports was still being finalised and customers would be updated as soon as possible.

• On 14 October, Optus said in a statement to the Singapore Stock Exchange that customers, whose passport numbers were exposed in the catastrophic breach suffered by the telco, did not need to get the documents replaced.

• It said this advice was being issued after discussions with the Federal Government. The government has been mum about the change of tack; Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on 28 September, six days after the breach announcement, that he had told Optus it must pay the costs for customers who want to replace their passports if their data was caught up in the breach.

• Two days later, Albanese tweeted: “After actions taken by myself, @SenatorWong and @ClareONeilMP, Optus has agreed to pay for replacement passports for those affected by the data breach.”

• Medical insurer Medibank Group says the individual who attacked the company’s network stole data that includes Medibank customer data and the public should expect to see an increase in the number of customers affected.

• Trading of the company’s shares remains suspended. A spokesperson said in a statement: “For the avoidance of doubt, the voluntary suspension continues until the earlier of a release of a further announcement by Medibank and commencement of normal trading on 26 October.”

• The spokesperson added: “We have received a series of additional files from the criminal. We have been able to determine that this includes:

• “A copy of the file received last week containing 100 ahm policy records – including personal and health claims data;

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (bluez, kernel, and lava), Fedora (ckeditor, drupal7, moby-engine, php-Smarty, and wavpack), Mageia (bind, e2fsprogs, epiphany, freerdp, kernel, kernel-linus, libconfuse, libosip2, ntfs-3g, perl-Image-ExifTool, and poppler), Oracle (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-container, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, and java-11-openjdk), SUSE (bluez, firefox, kernel, libxml2, and tiff), and Ubuntu (linux-gcp).

• Security researcher Alvaro Muñoz recently warned of a critical vulnerability in versions 1.5 through 1.9 of Apache Commons Text. The flaw, dubbed “Text4Shell” and identified as CVE-2022-42889, can enable remote code execution via the StringSubstitutor API. In response, version 1.10 was released, which disables script interpolation by default.

• CISA has added six vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow in the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.

• Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities established the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog as a living list of known CVEs that carry significant risk to the federal enterprise. BOD 22-01 requires FCEB agencies to remediate identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect FCEB networks against active threats. See the BOD 22-01 Fact Sheet for more information.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Enabling ADGUARD DNS in Chrome OS is done through the settings area. To start, click on the clock on the right-hand part of the Chrome OS dash. After selecting it, choose the gear icon to open Chrome OS settings.

• Once inside the Chrome OS settings, find “Network” in the sidebar, and click on it with the mouse. Then, choose the network connection you are currently using. Finally, click the arrow next to the connection to view advanced settings.

• The Federal Government appears to be unwilling to say anything negative about the ABC’s blanket collection of user data from its iview application, preferring instead to offer noncommittal replies.

• In response to queries from iTWire about the data collection which was begun earlier this year, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said, in part: “The Albanese Government takes the privacy of all Australians very seriously and Australians have a right to expect their data will be protected.”

Defence/Aggression

• In a sure sign that the US is losing its ability to spread believable propaganda — something at which it has excelled in the past — a senior US naval commander has warned that China could invade Taiwan “as soon as this year”.

• Admiral Mike Gilday, chief of US naval operations, might as well have said, “by the end of this week” and expected it to make sense. His comment was made during a discussion hosted by the Atlantic Council, a think-tank that is entrenched Democrat supporter, and which has been described as the marketing arm of the US military/security complex.

• Asked about official US assessments that China was building the capability to seize Taiwan by 2027, Gilday responded: ““When we talk about the 2027 window … that has to be a 2022 window or potentially a 2023 window. I can’t rule that out. I don’t mean at all to be alarmist by saying that. It’s just that we can’t wish that away.”

• Yeah, I cannot rule out that by the end of this month I will be the emperor of Japan.

• The U.S. government has taken aggressive steps in recent weeks to choke China’s efforts to move ahead in AI while also boosting the domestic computing infrastructure for supercomputing and artificial intelligence.

• The U.S. government has banned the export of cutting-edge chips, including specific GPUs from companies like AMD and Nvidia, to China.

• The ban cuts off China’s access to artificial intelligence chips and software originating in the U.S. The U.S. government hopes the ban will stall China’s quick advances in AI, which is a national priority.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Rishi Sunak will become Britain’s next prime minister after he won the race to lead the Conservative Party, leaving him with the task of steering a deeply divided country through an economic downturn set to leave millions of people poorer.

• Sunak, one of the wealthiest politicians in Westminster and set to be the country’s first leader of colour, will be asked to form a government by King Charles, replacing Liz Truss, the outgoing leader who only lasted 44 days in the job before she resigned.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Meta, the parent company of social media giant Facebook, has threatened to block the sharing of news feeds in Canada — similar to what it did in Australia — if Ottawa legislates to force it to pay news outlets for their content.

• Meta Canada Media Partnerships chief Marc Dinsdale said in a blog post on Friday that Canada’s Online News Act did not properly represent the relationship between platforms and news publishers.

• “…we call on the government to rethink its approach to help create a more fair and sustainable news industry in the long term,” he said.

• Dinsdale claimed the company had not been given an “invitation to participate” in discussions on the bill, “particularly given public comments by lawmakers that this law is targeted at Facebook”.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The most populous black country, Nigeria, saw the sharpest drop in internet freedom in 2021, while other African countries: Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, and Zimbabwe are in the worst conditions for fettered online access and speech.

• A global longitudinal study conducted by Surfshark, an Amsterdam-based cybersecurity firm revealed that Africa has had 88 internet restriction cases since 2015, the most censored region worldwide in 2020 and 2021. 38 cases happened because of protests.

• Internet disruption is a weapon by the government to silence citizens’ unrest which remains worryingly high, DAILY POST reports. These cases are of national or local magnitude where the internet is slowed or completely shut down, leaving billions of people without most of their communication means. The most common reasons for censorship were political turmoil and protests.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Earlier this year I had to commit to a time for our yearly trip to Brevard [1] and due to some deadlines at The Enterprise, the last week of October appeared to be the best time to go. Yet I was aprehensive about it because I had already used an unplanned week for my own mental health at the insistence of my second line manager (who I thought was my new manager [2] but turned out not to be the case [3], which I still have to write about) because of the increasing amounts of stupidity [4] and this would leave me less time to take off in Debtember (first world problems, I know).

• The realisation that I hadn’t remembered my dreams for years had been with me for some time and was slowly chugging its way to the surface, to the things I actually want to address.

• I remembered with some surprise, as sometimes happens when we don’t think about something for a long time, that in my experience, after all, it is enough to want to change it for the situation to change. In fact, there is no other effective way. Remembering dreams is the clearest example I know of how the proverb “to want is to be able to” (it’s a Polish proverb, the closest anglophone one that I know is “where there’s a will, there’s a way”) works in life. You only have to want it, just a little bit of effort and a lot changes.

• In my case, all it took was for me to consciously realise that I wanted to remember dreams (I thought about it a total of maybe two or three times for a few minutes at a time), so that within ten days I had memorised snippets of dreams from the night three times. How emotionally charged and pregnant with meaning excerpts. To remember more would perhaps even be too much.

• Sorry I haven’t really been keeping up with my Gemlog lately. Life’s been complicated. And the time I would have spent with Gemini, I’ve been digging into IndieWeb and working on a minimalist website template for Eleventy that I’m calling Indie’s Eleven.

• I don’t fear death, for some time now I’ve accepted that one day sooner or later I’m going to kick the proverbial bucket and there’s nothing I can do about it. Now this doesn’t mean I want to die, or that I’d put myself in a position that will greatly increase the likelihood of me dying, but the fact I’ll be dead some day doesn’t haunt me. Maybe this fear will come back one day when I am significantly closer to death, I’m in my 20s after all, my frontal cortex hasn’t fully developed so that could be playing a factor. It’s also not a profound position to hold, there are plenty of reasons to fear death, but you can’t let things you can’t control eat you up inside, you’ll be a very unhappy person if you do so.

• I never feared about my skills, because I put in the work. Work ethics eliminates fear. — Michael Jordan on pressure situations

Politics

• Living by one’s principles is similar going through life interacting with a universe of human life forms that are figments of one’s own mind. It is a form of solipsism. Instead of seeing one’s brother or step-mother or next-door neighbour as an incrementally changing, dynamic human life form, in place of that realism, one interacts with what I call an eidolon. An eidolon is a construct formed by these aforementioned principles. Thus, one’s principles, or I could say *traditional family values* or *traditional neighbourly values*, state that a *brother* has **this** particular template. A *step-mother* has **this** sort of template. A next-door neighbour has **this** one. The templates are the scaffolding of the eidolons. They are filled in by various cues from one’s upbringing, one’s peers and one’s experience with media, be it social media, television or even … literature.

Technical

• When you are working on the Vim command line, you can press the Tab key to complete the current command. Vim will fill in a complete file name or option depending on what letters you’ve typed so far. Then, each press of Tab will cycle through the possible completions. Each time the command will be fully typed. And each possible completion is based on only what the user typed.

• One way to preview possible completions is by using Ctrl-D. To see this, type as much of your command as you want. Then press Ctrl-D. This prints all the options above the command line. But none of these can be selected. They’re just visual aids for you.

• there is a new high in teaching methods from the top down: authority teaching. inspired by parents who do it the old school way. currently this is applied for all things security. recently an app (behind a vpn that only 4 people have access to) still had the default password. this lead to the cio opening a ticket that can be summed up by “default password bad!” and slapping a very high priority stamp on the ticket.

• Here is a quick way to send a line of text from vim into your favorite REPL. Normal mode only.

• The title is gonna make people reading this from Gemini mad. Saw that a mile away. But hear me out.

• I just came back from g0v hackathon and decentralizing and Web3 has been a huge topic there. Heck even the Ministry of Digital Affairs joined discussion. That got me thinking. What can Web3 really do better than existing architectures? What is the value proposition? That led me thinking about my recent dive into GNUNet and rethinking about it’s capabilities.

• [...]

• Being general, GNUNet is like Tor. It’s another kind of darknet. But to be very specific, GNUNet is special. It’s not just another anonymization layer for TCP. GNUNet comes with a lot of decentralized subsystems that one can take advantage of to build applications – an all-in-one package. GNUNet has it’s own distributed hash table, file sharing, network messaging, etc.. I want to put up a idea of how we developers can use GNUNet to build decentralized applications. Under all the practical limitations we face today. Be aware that I’ll be using Web3 and decentralized services interchangeably. I understand the the difference between the Web and the Internet. But everyone uses them the same these days..

Science

• The industry executives were anxious. Their company manufactured precision card-shuffling machines for casinos. Thousands of their mechanical shufflers were in operation in Las Vegas and around the world. The rental fees brought in millions of dollars each year, and the company was listed on the New Stock Exchange.

Programming

• I think the unit that you test with a unit test was always supposed to be something abstract. It is some logical unit of something that I want to test. It might or might not be conveniently confined to something more concrete like a specific file or function, but that is not important. And what was a function yesterday may be a class now and an entire module next month, even if logically it is still the same “unit”.

• I finally met my new manager [1]! It’s been … what? 3½ months? … since it was announced. I decided to ask a VP (Vice President) of the Corporate Overlords who was my actual manager, M1 [2] (who was promoted) or M2 (who is to replace the promoted manager). The VP said M2, and that since I have yet to meet him, I should invite him to the next department meeting. Why it should be up to me to invite M2 to our daily meeting and not M1 is apparently beyond my pay grade, but I invited him.

• 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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