● 11.16.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 16/11/2022: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 and GNU Lightning 2.2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 11:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• Designing a production service environment around Apache Kafka that delivers low latency and zero-data loss at scale is non-trivial. Indeed, it’s the holy grail of messaging systems. In this blog post, I’ll outline some of the fundamental service design considerations that you’ll need to take into account in order to get your service architecture to measure up.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Starship is a minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any most shells, including: bash, fish, ion, nushell, powershell and zsh. In this video, I’m going to play around with customizing the prompt by editing the configuration file.

• Welcome to episode 39 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.

• I have wanted to try EC2 as a game server host for a while and running a 7 Days to Die dedicated server seemed like a great way to test! I’ve hosted 7 Days to Die servers before but never modded them. I was surprised at how easy it was!

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re celebrating our 300th episode! Thanks to you the listeners and to the amazing contributors of open source that give us stuff to talk about. Then we will be taking a look at a potential new contender for the Linux laptop championship belt? We might have a perfectly spec’d laptop on our hands. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

Kernel Space

Applications

• A couple of days ago I released Johnnycanencrypt v0.11.0. It is a Python module for OpenPGP written in Rust.

• The most interesting update is for Linux users, now we have pre-built wheels for Python 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 & 3.11. You can just install that via python3 -m pip install johnnycanencrypt. You can also do the same on Intel Macs (for Python 3.10 and 3.11). But, I failed to build for Apple Silicon systems. I will work on it in the coming weeks.

• To know the Yubikey card version we can call get_card_version function written in Rust.

• The Anbox Cloud team is pleased to announce the release of Anbox Cloud 1.16.0.

• Please see the component versions for a list of updated components.

• This series highlights best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.

• Sticky is a note-taking app for the Linux desktop that simulates the traditional “sticky note” style stationery on your desktop. Sticky is written in Python, and uses the GTK3 toolkit.

• This is free and open source software.

Instructionals/Technical

• RedHat is a Linux-based server designed specifically for organizations. It’s a community-supported counterpart that has its multiple variants. But, when it comes to SSL installation, the process is still the same one. For instance, first, you must generate a CSR before installing an SSL certificate on RedHat Linux Server.

• Nonetheless, here is the complete SSL certificate installation process you’ll require to go through before installing the SSL certificate.

• If you are getting a dark preview after recording the screen in Ubuntu, it’s most likely because you’re using the Wayland display server. We tried some of the best screen recorders on Linux recently, but the results were all the same. Only when we switched from Wayland to Xorg (also called X11) on Ubuntu did the recorders start working properly. So if you are having issues with the display server and want to switch between Wayland and Xorg in Ubuntu, we have compiled an easy step-by-step guide for you here. We have included the steps to move to the Xorg windowing system in Ubuntu.

• InfluxDB is an open-source database developed by InfluxData that prioritizes maximum efficiency with limited complexity, unlike relational databases such as MySQL and MariaDB or structured databases such as Redis. Although the software is distributed under an open-source license, the company also offers commercial extensions such as access controls for business customers within its root server and cloud services with graphical data analysis via a web interface. Some of its key features are Specialization in time series; Combination of several sources in one central instance; Very high processing efficiency; Support of Flux as a scripting language for administration and Collection of data from different sources, for example via the third-party API.

• Fedora 37 is here and has an updated kernel, new drivers, Gnome Shell 43, and much more. This guide will cover how to upgrade your Fedora 36 installation to the latest and greatest: Fedora 37.

• Good news for Arch Linux users. Here’s how you can install the awesome Unity desktop in Arch Linux.

• Unity desktop was originally developed by Canonical and introduced earlier for Netbook computers with Ubuntu 10.10. Then it became the default desktop environment for Ubuntu until Ubuntu 16.04. Eventually, it was dropped by Canonical and replaced by GNOME as the default Ubuntu desktop environment from Ubuntu 18.04 onwards. However, in the recent release of Ubuntu 22.10 onwards, Ubuntu Unity became the official flavour as a spin.

• However, installing Unity desktop in Arch Linux was not possible until now. Recently it has been ported to Arch User Repository (AUR), and you can easily install it. Here’s how.

• Have you ever been confronted with the task of looking for a particular string or pattern in a file, yet have no idea where to start looking? Well then, here is grep to the rescue!

• grep is a powerful file pattern searcher that comes equipped on every distribution of Linux. If for whatever reason, it is not installed on your system, you can easily install it via your package manager as shown.

• Apache Kafka is a distributed data store for processing streaming data in real time.

• MS SQL Server or Microsoft SQL Server is an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) developed by Microsoft.

• Great news for Fedora users! Fedora 37 has been released!! This step by step tutorial explains how to upgrade to Fedora 37 from Fedora 36 and older versions. If you’re already using Fedora 36, you can now safely upgrade to Fedora 37 desktop or server edition for latest features, performance and stability improvements.

• Docker containers are great for many reasons, but one of the biggest advantages is that they can be stopped and started at any time. This means that you can easily remove a container if it’s no longer needed or you want to upgrade or reconfigure your system. And because Docker containers are lightweight and run in their own isolated environment, there’s no need to worry about having too much overhead on your system.

• So when it comes time to clean up after using Docker, it’s important to remove all of the containers first before starting the process of removing Docker itself. Otherwise, you may find yourself with a mess on your hands.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install phpMyAdmin on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, phpMyAdmin is a free software tool written in PHP, intended to handle the administration of MySQL and MariaDB over the Web. It has become one of the most popular MySQL administration tools, especially for web hosting services.

• 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 phpMyAdmin on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

• Pinta is a free, open-source image editing tool for Linux distributions such as Fedora. The user interface is straightforward, making it an excellent choice for novice users. The drawing tools are comprehensive and easy to use, and the wide range of effects makes it easy to add a professional touch to your images. One of the best features of Pinta is the ability to create unlimited layers, which is impossible with other image editing tools. This makes it possible to experiment with different effects and corrections without damaging the original image.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Pinta on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux using the command line terminal and alternative methods using the default DNF package manager or for users that favor the most up-to-date version available with the Flatpak alternative method.

• The journey to speed up running OCI containers took longer than expected, but the effort was worth it.

• Plex Media Server is a powerful software that allows you to store all your digital media content in one place. It is extremely popular with people who have large TV and movie libraries, as it allows them to share their content with friends and family. Plex Media Server organizes your files and content into categories, making it easy to find what you are looking for. It also supports a wide range of client applications to access your content on your TV, NVIDIA Shield, Roku, Mobile App, and many more platforms. Fedora is an excellent platform for running Plex Media Server, providing stable and reliable performance, especially with the six-month release schedule; it suits personal home use perfectly.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Plex Media Server on Fedora Linux 37/36/35 Linux workstation desktop or headless server using the command line terminal, along with some basic guidance on first-time setup.

• Installing Ruby is a bit of a hustle simply because Ruby on Rails has many dependencies. It depends on Sqlite3, node, and yarn which sometimes becomes tiresome to start getting all the dependencies together.

Games

• Between 2022-11-09 and 2022-11-16 there were 25 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 294 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 8.5 % of total released titles.

• Every week the Epic Games Store provides free titles (usually 2) and this week, at the time of writing, you can still grab the very cute title, Alba: The Wild Adventure. It’s aimed at a younger audience but if you have ever liked games like Animal Crossing this may be worth checking out too!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Our previous Goals, Consistency, All about the Apps, and Wayland; are not forgotten! We will continue to focus on them moving forward. However, the selection of the new Goals indicate where the Community wants to go next, and it’s now time for the Champions to leverage the support of the community and the KDE e.V to deliver on those ideas.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• I’ve been using Windows OS for almost my entire life–ever since I first learned about computers. And whenever I needed to do any development work, I would use macOS. But now Linux has changed everything regarding what I think about operating systems and desktop environments.

• While Windows and macOS are both user-friendly systems, they don’t allow users to change things per their own requirements or interests. Both systems prevent me from making my own computer exactly how it should be.

• If you want a system that will allow your creativity to flourish, use Linux. It’s an open source operating system that is smooth, customizable, user-friendly, and, best of all – it’s free! You can tailor it specifically for your needs, whether you’re using it for work or leisure activities.

Screenshots/Screencasts

• MakuluLinux Next Generation Sneak Peak, Enjoy the Video

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• Tokodon is a Mastodon client. It allows you to interact with the Fediverse community. Mastedon has microblogging features similar to the Twitter service, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy options, and moderation policies. Now available for the KDE Plasma Desktop.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• As the end of the year approaches, the YaST team is focusing more and more on evolving D-Installer with the goal to release an incomplete but decent prototype in December. But we also find time to improve (Auto)YaST with small corrections and not-so-small new features incorporated into openSUSE Factory and released as updates for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15-SP4.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Fedora 37 is now available for download by the public and includes the latest software, notably GNOME 43. With GNOME 43, you get a device security panel in Settings that shows information about hardware security and firmware that’s installed on your system. Additionally, there are two new Fedora Editions, Fedora CoreOS and Fedora Cloud – these are designed for specific use cases.

• Most users will want Fedora Workstation, this is the edition designed for normal desktop computing.

• [...]

• Fedora now officially supports the Raspberry Pi 4 with accelerated graphics, unfortunately, Fedora 37 also drops support for the ARMv7 architecture. For developers, Fedora has included some of the latest updates for various programming languages, packages include Python 3.11, Golang 1.19, glibc 2.36, and LLVM 15. You can download Fedora now or use these upgrade instructions.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 brings new features and enhancements that deliver a more secure and consistent foundation for open, hybrid cloud environments and allow organizations to deliver workloads, applications, and services faster and more efficiently. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 can be downloaded at no cost as a part of the Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals.

• This article summarizes some of the ways Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 further improves the developer experience.

• Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. Along with the recently announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7, these minor versions add and refine capabilities for a wide range of enterprise IT needs, from helping to streamline complex infrastructure environments to improving the security stance of containerized applications.

• Kubernetes has been admired by cutting-edge technology enthusiasts and engineers since its initial release in 2014. Container orchestration was still a relatively new concept at that time. As more software development teams began adopting containers, the demand for Kubernetes grew. Kubernetes is now revolutionizing the way companies of all sizes do business. According to Red Hat’s State of Enterprise Open Source 2022 report, 70 percent of IT leaders say their organizations are using Kubernetes.

• Whether your organization is an early adopter or you’re just getting started, the possibilities for automation, optimization, and innovation are endless with Kubernetes. But time is not endless. That’s why The Enterprisers Project put together a Kubernetes primer that you can read in less than 15 minutes.

• Over the past few decades, application development has been evolving from bare metal hosting to virtualization to containers, leading to the adoption of the Kubernetes orchestration platform. This article traces these developments and explains how Red Hat OpenShift provides the next level of application support.

• There has been an explosion in the modernization of application development and deployment over the past few years. Several publications such as Forbes and Business Wire quoted IDC’s prediction that between 2018 to 2023 more than 500 million logical applications will be developed, which is equal to the number of applications built over the previous 40 years. In addition, businesses expect faster changes to applications.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Ubuntu is already the first choice for many enterprises, with no signs of this changing any time soon.

• Now, Canonical is taking it a step further by launching optimized Ubuntu images for Intel IoT platforms.

• How do you uninstall apt packages in Ubuntu using the terminal? It’s quite simple, actually.

• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is building the popular Steam game platform as Snap package!

• The Ubuntu developer team is going to improve gaming experience on this popular Linux distribution. The first step is to simplify the process of setting up gaming environment. As the number 1 game platform, Steam to be first one they focus on.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 761 for the week of November 6 – 12, 2022.

Devices/Embedded

• HIGOLE introduced the GOLE1 mini PC with a touchscreen display in 2015 mostly to get a free and legal Windows 10 license, but over the years the company launched more Intel models inspired by the original design. However, their latest model, the GOLE 1 R, is based on Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Arm Cortex-A76/A55 SoC instead and running Android 12 by default.

• The GOLE 1 R is equipped with 8GB RAM, 128GB eMMC flash, a 5.5-inch touchscreen display, Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi connectivity, a microphone, speaker, a gravity sensor, and a 2,500 mAh battery. The company also sells the GOLE 1 RN mini PC without a display, a microphone, a speaker, or a battery for power.

Open Hardware/Modding

• This week’s show kicks off with a discussion of the lawsuit between Arm and Qualcomm amid accusations that Arm is changing its licensing model. We cover what has been said, and what it might mean for the IoT before heading into some industrial news. Arduino has announced a programmable logic controller (PLC) in conjunction with Finder called the Arduino Opta.

• Everybody loves a good BBQ. Getting your family and friends together on a long summer day and evening, cooking delicious food and having a great time as smoke drifts through the air — it’s the perfect weekend activity.

• BBQs can also be stressful, however. Anyone who has ever tried to host one will know the challenges of managing multiple meats at once, trying to avoid any overcooking (or undercooking) disasters, and keeping track of all that equipment.

• Automation can help run your BBQ much more smoothly, minimizing any mishaps and making sure everyone has the best experience possible. In this article, we’ll look at how home automation can improve the BBQ experience and share some examples from Arduino’s Project Hub.

• In the next releases, we plan to continue to update BSP parts, as well as the layers, in order to stick as close as possible to the mainline. In addition, we are working to improve CI/CD in order to increase the quality and the tests coverage.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• RocketChat is another Slack alternative messaging platform that you can self-host at your server. It supports audio and video calls, file attachments, full-text search, and many other features.

• RocketChat offers mobile and desktop clients alongside a web version which supports mobile as well. Like Slack, Users can create groups, use hashtags in messages, pin and bookmark messages, and allows a high level customization.

• RocketChat comes with a desktop clients, web self-hosted server/ client, and mobile apps. It supports webhooks, embedded chat widget, and features a rich real-time API.

• One possible answer is the corporate research lab. More long-term focused than most company product development efforts, corporate labs have a long history, going back to Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey. Perhaps most famous is Bell Labs’ invention of the transistor—although software folks may associate it more with Unix and the C programming language.

• But corporate laboratories have tended to be more associated with dominant firms that could afford to let large staffs work on very forward-looking and speculative research projects. After all, Bell Labs was born of the AT&T telephone monopoly. Corporate labs also aren’t known for playing with their counterparts elsewhere in industry. Even if their focus is long-term, they’re looking to profit from their IP eventually, which also means that their research is often rooted in technologies commercially relevant to their business.

• There’s way too much drama with Twitter nowadays, so the alternatives are looking more attractive than ever. Setting up your own Mastodon server is a fun project, and also a potential alternative to Twitter. In this video, Jay walks you through the entire process of setting up your own Mastodon server on a Debian-based VPS.

• The previous two articles in this series looked at open source community health and the metrics used to understand it. They showed examples of how open source communities have measured at their health through metrics. This final article brings those ideas together, discussing the challenges of implementing community health metrics for your own community.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• So far, 203 sticker packs have been awarded in the Month of LibreOffice, November 2022. But we’re only half of the way through – so if your name (or username) isn’t on the list, join in, help to make LibreOffice even better, and get some cool swag! We’ll have 10 bonus pieces of merchandise to give away, to 10 lucky people…

GNU Projects

Programming/Development

• At this point, only the client side of the system has been released; the company “hopes to” release the rest later.

• Google has recently announced the 2023 edition of Google Summer of Code.

• The 2022 changes in the program’s format have been successful and are continuing for 2023, with just a small adjustment around eligibility (described in the link above).

• GNOME is certainly going to apply to be a mentoring organization, and we hope to once again be part of the program.

• Qt Design Studio offers a comprehensive set of resources to help UI designers bring digital experiences to life. Any 2D and 3D graphics content can be seamlessly imported into Qt Design Studio via Qt Bridge technology and transformed into a real UI application. This blog post looks at some of the features we love the most.

• We are proud to announce the release of Qt Design Studio 3.8.

Leftovers

Linux Foundation

• The present and the future of 5G belong to open-source and cloud-native software. The proof can be seen in the One Summit trade show halls and on your 5G-enabled phone in your pocket.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (grub2, nginx, and wordpress), Red Hat (389-ds-base, bind, buildah, curl, device-mapper-multipath, dnsmasq, dotnet7.0, dpdk, e2fsprogs, grafana-pcp, harfbuzz, ignition, Image Builder, kernel, keylime, libguestfs, libldb, libtiff, libvirt, logrotate, mingw-zlib, mutt, openjpeg2, podman, poppler, python-lxml, qt5, rsync, runc, samba, skopeo, toolbox, unbound, virt-v2v, wavpack, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and yajl), SUSE (389-ds, bluez, dhcp, freerdp, jackson-databind, kernel, LibVNCServer, libX11, nodejs12, nodejs16, php7, php8, python-Mako, python-Twisted, python310, sudo, systemd, and xen), and Ubuntu (mako).

• Today, CISA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) published a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), Iranian Government-Sponsored APT Actors Compromise Federal Network, Deploy Crypto Miner, Credential Harvester.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Ten months ago, in January 2022, Access Now and the Citizen Lab confirmed that several journalists were targeted with the use of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware on a massive scale in El Salvador. At least, the mobile phones of 35 journalists from six media outlets (El Faro, GatoEncerrado, La Prensa Grafica, Revista Digital Disruptiva and El Diario de Hoy) were infected by this spyware between July 2020 and November 2021.

• Amnesty International Security Lab reviewed the report and verified forensic evidence on the use of Pegasus spyware against Salvadoran journalists. Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, said that “the use of Pegasus for the surveillance of communications in El Salvador reveals a new threat to human rights in the country. The authorities must stop any efforts to restrict freedom of expression, and conduct a thorough and impartial investigation to identify those responsible.” But president Nayib Bukele’s government has denied its responsibility and showed not results or signs of a full investigation of this case of espionage.

Defence/Aggression

• Computer code developed by a company called Pushwoosh is in about 8,000 Apple and Google smartphone apps. The company pretends to be American when it is actually Russian.

• Thousands of smartphone applications in Apple (AAPL.O) and Google’s (GOOGL.O) online stores contain computer code developed by a technology company, Pushwoosh, that presents itself as based in the United States, but is actually Russian, Reuters has found.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United States’ main agency for fighting major health threats, said it had been deceived into believing Pushwoosh was based in the U.S. capital. After learning about its Russian roots from Reuters, it removed Pushwoosh software from seven public-facing apps, citing security concerns.

Finance

• I am sharing a story about volunteering and supporting the things I believe in to show you that there is something you could do with your skills or financial assets to turn the world in a better direction.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Until last Saturday, it was Melissa Ingle’s job to help keep Twitter safe.

• As a member of the company’s “civic integrity” team, the data scientist monitored the platform for political misinformation about elections from Brazil to the US, and she wrote algorithms to automatically detect similar content.

• “We wanted to make sure Twitter was a healthy platform,” Ingle told DW.

• Then, on November 12, a notification popped up on her phone, telling her she no longer had access to her work emails. When she realized that she had also been logged out of her Slack account, the 48-year-old knew she had been fired. She wasn’t alone. Thousands of other contract workers had their contracts terminated last weekend, in addition to about 3,700 employees Twitter had already fired earlier this month.

• “The cuts didn’t really seem to be targeted,” Ingle told DW. “It seems to be huge swaths of people who were just fired.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• This is the third in a series of blog posts from Public Knowledge examining the public policy implications of algorithmic decision-making. A first post clarified what algorithms are and aren’t and identified some basic principles for attempting to regulate algorithmic decision-making, especially as it relates to content distribution. The second post cataloged the harms that can arise from algorithmic decision-making, including (1) harms to safety and well-being; (2) harms to economic justice; and (3) harms to democratic participation. (We’ve also written in other forums about the harmful consequences of unregulated, unproven AI.)

• In this post and the accompanying policy framework, we seek to assess various theories of change and related policy frameworks for creating accountability for algorithmic decision-making. We describe each approach’s drawbacks and benefits and put forward Public Knowledge’s perspective.

• Spoiler alert: There is no single or simple solution for the complex questions our exploration has raised. As you’ll see in our framework, there are several potential approaches for trying to mitigate the myriad harms algorithmic decision-making about content can create through direct regulation of algorithms. But most of them face substantial hurdles, particularly those that entail or even approach the regulation of user-generated content – most of which is protected speech. The hurdles include constitutional challenges, patterns of Supreme Court jurisprudence, or narrow or ambiguous definitions that would compound the challenges of content moderation for both platforms and users. As a Federal Trade Commission report on combating online harms noted, “governments, platforms, and others must exercise great caution” and focus attention on a broad array of considerations before turning to regulation to mitigate online harms.

• This framework was created to accompany the third post in our “Should Algorithms Be Regulated?” series examining the public policy implications of algorithmic decision-making.

Monopolies

• Today, Public Knowledge joined 45 public interest and civil society groups in a letter urging Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to pass the “American Innovation and Choice Online Act” and “Open App Markets Act” to rein in Big Tech. The groups call on Congress to pass these widely supported, bipartisan antitrust bills this year before the current congressional session closes.

• [...]

• “The bills are also incredibly popular with the American people and people around the world who depend on digital platforms. Poll after poll has shown the public [is] fed up with Big Tech’s unchecked power and eager to support members getting tough with them. In a recent poll, 77 percent of voters agreed Big Tech was too powerful and 65 percent were more likely to support their representative [for voting] for greater Big Tech regulation.

• “As history writes the final chapters of the 117th Congress, you face a consequential choice on how it concludes. Passing the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets Act would mark a triumphant, bipartisan and politically popular win. The choice is yours.”

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• It can sometimes be weird or unintuitive how time passes in the dungeon so let’s break it down in simple terms, as a complement to the terse DM reference version.

• And expert sources have confirmed that I’m great inside.

• 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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