● 12.26.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 26/12/2022: ‘Linux Phone Apps’ Needs Help

Posted in News Roundup at 12:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Since it’s the holidays, this week only saw a few releases and Linux news. The EndeavourOS and Manjaro Linux folks were kind enough to drop a big release of their Arch Linux-based distros, the privacy-focused Tails OS adopted Wayland, and a new Darktable release brought many goodies for photographers.

• On top of that, Linus Torvalds played Santa and put out for the public testing the first Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel series. Below, you can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for December 25th, 2022.

Audiocasts/Shows

• It’s that time of year where we look back at our 2022 predictions, and make some new ones for 2023.

• Mastodon is a wonderful, nearly utopic experience… but you have to figure out how to join it, first. In this video, we’ll discuss the future of social media and what it will take for Mastodon to realize that future.

• This is a highly customized laptop that I’ve changed everything on down to the operating system and how it interfaces with the function keys on it.

Applications

• 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.

• Zellij is billed as “a workspace aimed at developers, ops-oriented people and anyone who loves the terminal”.

• In our Excellent Utilities series we try not to include similar software. Our personal favorite terminal multiplexer is tmux, although opinion is divided even among our merry group of open source enthusiasts. We also highly recommend Tmuxinator and Byobu.

• Docker is a platform for developing, shipping, and running applications, it allows developers to separate their applications’ infrastructure, so they can deliver software in records time.

• Beyond that, it also allows developers to deploy, run and update multiple containers on one server.

• Dockers runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. And it is the favorite app shipping method for many developers to deploy deliver their apps to the end-users.

• However, Docker management is command-line tools, which is not easy for many users. Therefore, in this article, we offer you a collection of Docker Desktop management apps that makes Docker management easier.

Instructionals/Technical

• When you create a directory and add files to it, any user who has access to your system and knows how to use the ls command may simply list the files in that directory and see what you have added to it.

• You can stop this from happening by taking away the read (r) permission from the directory. This way, you won’t be able to list the directory’s files, but you will still be able to read and write to them.

• If you are working on a web server and you want to prohibit people from accessing certain directories, it makes sense to set this permission to prevent users and bots from crawling the directory content.

• In this article, you will learn how to disable the directory content listing from the command line in Linux.

• Roundcube is a free open-source web-based multilingual IMAP email client written in PHP. It provides the full functionality you expect from an email client, including MIME support, address book, folder manipulation, message searching, and spell checking.

• This tutorial is going to show you how to install Roundcube webmail on Ubuntu 22.04 with Nginx web server and MySQL database server.

• A few years ago, I downsized my personal infrastructure. Until 2018, there were a dozen containers running on a single Hetzner server.1 I migrated my emails to Fastmail and my DNS zones to Gandi. It left me with only my blog to self-host. As of today, my low-scale infrastructure is composed of 4 virtual machines running NixOS on Hetzner Cloud and Vultr, a handful of DNS zones on Gandi and Route 53, and a couple of Cloudfront distributions. It is managed by CDK for Terraform (CDKTF), while NixOS deployments are handled by NixOps.

• As you may already know, when you connect to a wireless network for the first time, the WiFi password is saved in your Linux machine. So you don’t need to enter the password of your wireless network every time. In the subsequent times, the available WiFi network will be automatically connected. Over the time, you might have forgotten the WiFi password. One day you want to add a new device to the same WiFi network, but you don’t remember the password. What are you going to do? No worries! I know a few ways to find WiFi password of connected networks in Linux.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Composer on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, A composer is a command-line tool that is used to manage dependencies in PHP projects. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will automatically manage (install/update) them for you. It functions as some sort of project manager that helps the programmer manage dependencies that will be used on a project-to-project basis.

• 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 Composer on Rocky Linux. 9.

• In Linux, a port is a logical connection point for transmitting data between a client and a server. To ensure the security and functionality of a system, it is important to know which ports are open and listening for incoming connections. Ports are identified by a number, ranging from 0 to 65535.

• If you wish to try out Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster before its stable release in April 2023, you can. Each day, Ubuntu generates a “daily image” for 23.04. These images come with updates, fixes, and feature updates.

• In this guide, we’ll show you how you can download, and install Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster to try it out early. However, be warned, this version of Ubuntu is highly unstable. Only download and install it if you are an expert, or if you’re confident you have your data backed up.

• Linux Mint 21.1 is out, and with it comes a brand new version of the Cinnamon desktop, updated drivers, and much more. This guide will show you how you can get Linux Mint 21.1 working on your PC.

Games

• That said, some players may wonder about the hero shooter’s compatibility with the Steam Deck. The popular hand-held device has already garnered a massive fan base with its portability and high software flexibility. It runs on SteamOS, a Linux-based system created by Valve for the device.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• 2022 is at its very end. This is usually a time to reflect on the year that has passed. As an online media covering everything significant in the Linux world and the Open Source software, we presented you with the Linux releases that stood out above the others in the desktop niche in 2022.

• We will consider factors such as predictability, user-friendliness, reliability, and software support. But first, let me go into detail about the criteria we used to determine our final ranking.

New Releases

• From How-To Geek I learn that Haiku OS R1/beta4 — the open-source continuation of BeOS — has been released.

• Be Inc created BeOS in the mid-1990s as a super-modern operating system, but it failed to catch on. Over 20 years later, the open-source Haiku OS project is picking up where it left off, and there’s a new beta release available.

• The Haiku project has been developing an open-source continuation of BeOS for years, based partially on some BeOS code, but much of it has been built from scratch. Haiku R1 Beta 4 is now available, as the first major release in a year and a half. It might be the most significant upgrade yet, as it makes Haiku much more viable as a typical desktop operating system.

Arch Family

• Manjaro Linux is a rolling release distro based on Arch Linux that focuses on providing a user-friendly and accessible experience.

• Since the release of ‘Ruah’ in June, Manjaro’s development has continued and has paved the way for the latest release, which is called ‘Sikaris’.

• This is one of the last distro releases (among the popular options) for 2022; let’s see what it offers.

Red Hat / IBM

• The Enable Sysadmin community continues to answer key questions about OpenShift and Kubernetes.

• Hybrid cloud is a technical and architectural strategy, to be sure. But the term also reflects a philosophical shift and the modern reality for CIOs: Delivering strategic business value requires much more agility and flexibility in your technology stack than ever.

• That principle will be on full display in 2023 as more and more organizations and their IT leaders lean into that reality – and recognize how and why a hybrid cloud strategy enables that agility and flexibility. One-environment-fits-all approaches to running workloads typically don’t.

• [...]

• As Haff notes, hybrid cloud is widely applicable across various industries. Expect those different sectors to gain a ton of momentum in 2023 in terms of identifying the tangible value of the hybrid cloud architecture – and the hybrid-edge pairing – for their specific industries.

• That might be most apparent in the telecommunications space, where Ian Hood, chief strategist for global industries, Red Hat, expects to see accelerating deployment of hybrid edge application clouds – both to pursue their own business goals and to better support their enterprise customers’ cloud and edge strategies.

• Taking your business to the edge requires careful planning. Is edge the right answer for your business problem? How will you address security concerns? As organizations increasingly adopt edge computing, related career opportunities are taking off. Check out this year’s top articles from our community of experts if you’re planning an edge strategy in 2023.

• At Red Hat, we are often asked what consoles and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can be used with our Kafka products, Red Hat AMQ Streams and Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka. Because our products are fully based on the upstream Apache Kafka project, most available consoles and GUIs designed to work with Kafka also work with our Kafka products. This article illustrates the ease of integration through a look at AKHQ, an open source GUI for Apache Kafka.

• [...]

• At a high level, Apache Kafka’s architecture is quite simple. It’s based on a few concepts such as brokers, topics, partitions, producers, and consumers. However—as with any system—when you deploy, operate, manage, and monitor a production Kafka cluster, things can quickly become complex. To use and manage Kafka clusters in both development and production environments, there are numerous tools on the market, both commercial and open source. These tools range from scripts, GUIs, and powerful command-line interfaces (CLIs) to full monitoring, management, and governance platforms. Each type of tool offers value in specific parts of the software development cycle.

• This article shows how to connect AKHQ to a Kafka instance in Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, a managed cloud service. Using our no-cost, 48-hour trial of OpenShift Streams, you can follow along with the steps. By the end of the article, you will be able to use AKHQ to manage your Kafka instance.

Devices/Embedded

• Geniatech provides Debian10 and Android 11 operating systems for the board and claims to provide resources and technical datasheets for custom development. Besides digital signage, the Rockchip RK3566 board can also be used for touch-enabled HMIs, conference room monitors, cash registers, self-service terminals, automotive infotainment solutions, and so on.

• Geniatech did not provide pricing information for the DS-3566 SBC. More details may be found on the product page.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The automotive industry is rapidly transitioning to software-defined vehicle (SDV) platforms using open-sourced solutions such as automotive grade Linux and Android automotive OS to give a smart-phone like user experience. It’s an interesting opportunity for automotive OEMs to open new revenue streams after the initial vehicle purchase through app stores and subscriptions.

• I know you missed our kernel reports lately but even if you can’t believe it, we haven’t forgotten about them. I just took a break for a few weeks but now the desperate wait is over: Following up on our report for Linux 5.18.

• Summary of the progress on mainline support for the Librem 5 phone and its development kit during the 5.19, 6.0 and 6.1 development cycles. This summary is only about code flowing upstream – a never ending stream of changes.

• [...]

• Have a look at our Linux tree to see what is currently being worked on and tested or help if you feel like joining the fun. The ‘debian/README.source’ document describes our workflow.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• With the festive season upon us, and the end of 2022 approaching, we have a big ask: Help us keep app listings up to date by working with upstream projects!

• In the past months, not many apps were evaluated or added to LinuxPhoneApps.org. But still, things were done: The technical stack was much improved. While most of this work is not directly user-facing, as it’s about restructuring the underlying .csv files and adding more and more automatic content checkers, we’ve now arrived at a stage where we can update listings without a lot of the time-intense churn this was.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• The next version of the C++ standard coming up next year won’t have a key feature that makes it easier to write code for execution in parallel computing environments.

• The C++ 2023 standard won’t have an asynchronous algorithm feature called senders and receivers, which will allow for simultaneous execution of code on a system with multiple chips such as CPUs and GPUs.

• “The goal there is maybe to try to get it into the working draft next year — the [C++ 26] working draft — so once it’s there, then people will take it a lot more seriously,” said Nevin Liber, a computer scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Leadership Facility, and a C++ committee member, during a break-out session at last month’s Supercomputing 2022 conference in Dallas.

• Achronix Semiconductor has recently announced the general availability of the Speedster7t AC7t1500 FPGA designed for networking, storage, and compute (AI/ML) acceleration applications.

• The 7nm Speedster7t FPGA family offers PCIe Gen5 ports and GDRR6 and DDR5/DDR4 memory interfaces, delivers up to 400 Gbps on the Ethernet ports, and includes a 2D network on chip (2D NoC) that can handle 20 Tbps of total bandwidth.

Perl / Raku

• As always you can install it from CPAN and you will need WxPerl even if I should probably switch to Prima. The usage is a simplified version of the Harmonograph and well documented o let me just present the basic idea: we have just a row of cellular automata – like described by Stephen Wolfram in “A new kind of science”. These are simplest possible function, that take their state (integer between 0 and M [default 1]) and the states of their neighbouring cells (N) as input and produce a new state in the next round. The interaction of functionally independent cells can result in surprising complexity. And that is what fascinated Stephen and that is what we employ here to draw images.

• To get maximal result you can set the number for M and the size of the neighbourhood. (Even size do not include the cell itself). You can defined the starting values and if the cell build a ring (first and last are connected). Another option are the action rules, which are also described in the book. These determine if the is even allowed to change its value this round. This adds another layer complexity on top.

• Hi Everyone, especially Web-Casting Programmers !!

• Naturally I encountered various problems. When I moved from an old computer platform Compaq-Evo with Fedora Core 7 (2007 Red Hat LINUX) to a newer Ubuntu and Rocky 9.1 (2022) as Web-Casting, Web codes encounters various errors and weird displays on the screen. I have to fix all the problems one by one. O.K. let me start one question. Will you help me if you have similar experience. In my case this is a big jump from 2007 -> to 2022.

• Here is my first question . HELP me !

• When I tested PERL script at Rocky 9.1, I needed to have the command “perl” in front of excitable script filename.

Python

• MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database that is widely used for storing and manipulating large amounts of data. It is known for its flexibility, scalability, and performance, making it a great choice for a variety of applications.

• In this article, we will look at how to connect to a MongoDB database in Python using the `pymongo` library, which is a MongoDB driver for Python. We will also cover some basic operations such as inserting data, querying the database, and updating documents.

• Python is an increasingly popular programming language that offers a high degree of flexibility and power. It’s become a staple language for software developers, data scientists, machine learning experts, and more. But what makes Python such an appealing choice when it comes to developing software?

• In this article, we’ll take a look at why Python programming language is the right choice when it comes to learning to program.

Java

• You’ve found a great place for Java programming 101 content. In this article, we’ve gathered the highest-performing articles from the past year on this topic on Red Hat Developer. This article introduces you to all things related to Java, from its essential business benefits to the most modern frameworks and tools.

Rust

• Rust was designed to make it easy to develop fast and safe system-level software. Here’s what’s new.

Leftovers

Science

• A cutting-edge U.S. Steel mill in Arkansas is using AI tools in production, but implementing that tech know-how in century-old plants hasn’t been easy

• [...]

• At a U.S. Steel Corp. mill on the Mississippi River, an automated crane lifts and lowers 1,000-degree hot steel coils into open squares, using a machine-learning algorithm to calculate the optimal spot for each coil to quickly cool down before it is shipped off.

• This automated steel-coil yard, laid out like a giant chess board, is one of many advanced-technology operations at Big River Steel, a six-year-old plant in Osceola, Ark., that was built with the goal of harnessing cutting-edge tech to save energy, time and money.

• When U.S. Steel took full ownership of Big River last year, it also gained the plant’s artificial intelligence know-how and was a signal of the 120-year-old manufacturing giant’s commitment to advancing technology in its mills. But implementing the type of technology in use at Big River in the steelmaker’s other mills, some of which are over 100 years old, has proven a difficult task, according to the company’s chief information officer.

• Ben Nyberg stood on a knife-edge ridge along Hawaii’s Na Pali Coast, his eyes scouring the leafy recesses of the neighboring red-rock ridges. It was quiet, if not for a faint buzzing of a drone flying among flocks of curious white-tailed tropicbirds.

• Nyberg steered the drone closer toward the opposing ridge, scanning the iPad in his hands, which acted as a viewfinder. Then, he saw it: Wilkesia hobdyi.

• Entitled “Empirical Optimization with Divergent Fixed Point Algorithm – When All Else Fails”, the full version in PDF format is accessible in the “Free Books and Articles” section, here. Also discussed in details with Python code in my book “Synthetic Data”, available here.

• While the technique discussed here is a last resort solution when all else fails, it is actually more powerful than it seems at first glance. First, it also works in standard cases with “nice” functions. However, there are better methods when the function behaves nicely, taking advantage of the differentiability of the function in question, such as the Newton algorithm (itself a fixed-point iteration). It can be generalized to higher dimensions, though I focus on univariate functions here.

Hardware

• Quantum computers are powerful computational devices that rely on quantum mechanics, or the science of how particles like electrons and atoms interact with the world around them. These devices could potentially be used to solve certain kinds of computational problems in a much shorter amount of time. Scientists have long hoped that quantum computing could be the next great advance in computing; however, existing limitations have prevented the technology from hitting its true potential. For these computers to work, the basic unit of information integral to their operation, known as quantum bits, or qubits, need to be stable and fast.

• Qubits are represented both by simple binary quantum states and by various physical implementations. One promising candidate is a trapped electron that levitates in a vacuum. However, controlling the quantum states, especially the vibrational motions, of trapped electrons can be difficult.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Psilocybin is being studied for use in treatment-resistant depression.

Linux Foundation

• Linux Foundation (LF) Europe recently announced Project Sylva as a European extension of the global push toward telecom network cloudification. Sylva aims to develop an open-source framework for operating telecom functions in the cloud while adhering to EU regulations and recommendations.

Security

• Last August, LastPass reported a security breach, saying that no customer information—or passwords—were compromised. Turns out the full story is worse…

• This follows a previous update issued last month when the company’s CEO, Karim Toubba, only said that the threat actor gained access to “certain elements” of customer information. Today, Toubba added that the cloud storage service is used by LastPass to store archived backups of production data. The attacker gained access to Lastpass’ cloud storage using “cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys” stolen from its developer environment.

• LastPass revealed today that attackers stole customer vault data after breaching its cloud storage earlier this year using information stolen during an August 2022 incident.

• This follows a previous update issued last month when the company’s CEO, Karim Toubba, only said that the threat actor gained access to “certain elements” of customer information.

• Today, Toubba added that the cloud storage service is used by LastPass to store archived backups of production data.

• The attacker gained access to Lastpass’ cloud storage using “cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys” stolen from its developer environment.

• The threat actor may attempt to use brute force to guess your master password and decrypt the copies of vault data they took. Because of the hashing and encryption methods we use to protect our customers, it would be extremely difficult to attempt to brute force guess master passwords for those customers who follow our password best practices. We routinely test the latest password cracking technologies against our algorithms to keep pace with and improve upon our cryptographic controls.

• Right before the holiday season, LastPass published an update on their breach. As people have speculated, this timing was likely not coincidental but rather intentional to keep the news coverage low. Security professionals weren’t amused, this holiday season became a very busy time for them. LastPass likely could have prevented this if they were more concerned about keeping their users secure than about saving their face.

• Their statement is also full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies. As I know that not everyone can see through all of it, I thought that I would pick out a bunch of sentences from this statement and give some context that LastPass didn’t want to mention.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, libksba, and mbedtls), Fedora (containerd, curl, firefox, kernel, mod_auth_openidc, and xorg-x11-server), and Mageia (chromium-browser-stable).

• A critical Linux kernel vulnerability exposed the server message block protocol to remote hacking with highest privileges.

• Did you know that during 2022, businesses will have experienced an average of 130 cybersecurity attacks? Cybersecurity is an essential investment for any business looking to maintain GDPR compliance and the trust of its clients and stakeholders.

• But, your physical security strategy is essential to your cybersecurity health.

• Want to find out why? Keep reading as we discuss the main methods of blending cyber and physical security, the critical role that open-source intelligence (OSINT) plays in facilitating the convergence of physical security and cybersecurity, and why a cyber-physical security approach is essential in the modern climate.

Finance

• Algorithms are being unleashed on the crypto markets.

• [...]

• Algorithmic trading is used across most capital markets. According to a 2020 report from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 78% of market trades were performed by “trading centers [that] depend on automated systems and algorithms.” Other commentators peg the volume of stock trades coming from bots at 60% to 70%.

• Institutional traders rent or create their own bots that activate when the market hits certain conditions. These algorithms constantly search markets for the right trade setups, such as finding oversold stocks or trading a breakout. When they find the right conditions bots run scripts that determine the position size, execute the trade, employ stop-losses and exit automatically.

• The bots are not perfect because they are created using past data, but the latest artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology are already being employed – making them faster and more efficient than ever. Further, bots take the emotion out of trading (helping to stymie some of the emotional burden of investing in volatile markets).

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Me, my place, the things I do. Plans, the thoughts, those nightmares too. Friends, the days, the one who’s boo. Games, my dreams, what was true.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• This is a write-up about an experiment from a few months ago, in how to find websites that are similar to each other. Website similarity is useful for many things, including discovering new websites to crawl, as well as suggesting similar websites in the Marginalia Search random exploration mode.

• 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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