● 04.06.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 06/04/2023: New Stable Kernels, Flatpak in OpenEmbedded, More Layoffs in GAFAM

Posted in News Roundup at 8:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

Applications

• SSH or Secure Shell is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Typical applications include remote command-line, login, and remote command execution, but any network service can be secured with SSH.

• SSH was designed as a replacement for Telnet and for unsecured remote shell protocols such as the Berkeley rsh and the related rlogin and rexec protocols. Those protocols send information, notably passwords, in plaintext, rendering them susceptible to interception and disclosure using packet analysis. The encryption used by SSH is intended to provide confidentiality and integrity of data over an unsecured network, such as the Internet.

Instructionals/Technical

• Are you new to the Linux operating system and wondering what most commands do? Especially the command “sudo apt-get update” is used in almost every tutorial you find online. If that is the case, you are in the right place. This guide will teach you the purpose and use of the sudo apt-get update command in Ubuntu/Linux.

• Boto3 is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided Python software development kit (SDK) for building applications and making them communicate with various AWS services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, and more.

• It helps developers easily create, configure, and manage AWS services for automating tasks and building more complex applications using AWS infrastructure. It further provides a wide range of features and functionality, including easy-to-use APIs, error handling, pagination, and support for both synchronous and asynchronous operations.

• Linux users often take pride in the fact that they don’t need to reboot their system often, unlike Windows. However, sometimes in order for the changes to take place after a major software update, you may need to reboot even a Linux system. In addition to applying changes after an update, rebooting a system is also a highly effective solution to solve various issues. When you reboot the system, all running programs are removed from the primary memory as the Linux system is shutdown, and the initial boot-up process is followed from the scratch. But, rebooting a Linux system is quite different as compared to its counterparts. In this article, we will share command line and GUI methods for how to reboot your Linux system.

• Rack servers are designed to support enterprise-grade systems and operations. Unlike regular servers, rack servers must be resilient and usually contain several physical Ethernet ports or Network Interface Cards (NICs) to be able to connect to several networks at once.

• Apart from rack servers, some industrial or specialized PCs also come with multiple Ethernet ports or NICs.

• Whatever the case, here’s how you can find out the number of Ethernet ports on a Linux server without physically going to the server room to inspect.

• Do you want to optimise the performance of your ROS snap? We reduced the size of the installed Gazebo snap by 95%!

• This is how you can do it for your snap.

• Welcome to Part 1 of the “optimise your ROS snap” blog series. This series of 6 blogs will show the tools and methodologies to measure and improve the performance of a snap. Throughout the series, we will use the Gazebo snap as an example to demonstrate how to optimise ROS snap.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Buttons are a fundamental element in user interfaces, but it’s easy to make some accessibility mistakes when using icon-only buttons in QML.

• First, please avoid icon-only buttons and only use then, when the icon is very well known (e.g. arrows, delete or favorite icons) and the space is limited.

• In case you still want to use an icon-only button. Make sure to set the text: property and that it is also translatable. Otherwise, a screen reader won’t know that to say about the button. This is because the text: property is used as default value for the Accessible.name: property, so when it is not set Accessible.name is empty and the screen reader can only say that the currently focused control is a button. The trick to have both the text: property set and an icon-only button is to use the display: property and assign it to the AbstractButton.IconOnly.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Snapshots of openSUSE Tumbleweed are continuously rolling forward.

• Several medium sized snapshots this week provided an array of system component updates for rolling release users.

• Snapshot 20230404 provided an update of systemd 253.2; this update moved the file system checker logic systemd-fsck items to a udev userspace sub-package. The spec file also added files coredump. Mozilla Firefox squashed 13 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. One of those was CVE-2023-28176 that has important severity and was described as a memory safety bug. The Web Service Discovery host daemon updated to version 0.7.1. This wsdd new version fixes regression due to changed Application Programming Interfaces in Python 3.10 and it also makes a point to force the use of this Python version for openSUSE Leap. The hardware identification and configuration data package hwdata updates Peripheral Component Interconnect, USB and vendor identities in its 0.369 version.The yast2-storage-ng 4.6.4 version exports thin Logical Volume Manage volumes when being cloned. A few more YaST packages had updates in the snapshot.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Developers as well as casual grep users are accustomed to using ranges in regular expressions, such as [a-zA-Z] or [0-9]. However, they often don’t realize that these regular expressions harbor problems that can lead to unexpected behavior.

• Yesterday I posted about generating the gnupg signed-key-pair required by Flatpak:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202304/gnupg-signed-key-pair-created-in-initrd.html

• …though, it didn’t really have to be done in the initrd. That’s how I did it in 2018, so left it like that, maybe there was a reason. But later on will probably generate the signed-key-pair after switch_root to the main filesystem.

• An in-person and online event, the FOSSASIA Summit aims to bring together businesses, developers and tech communities from around the world to learn the latest developments surrounding open source. benny Vasquez, AlmaLinux OS Foundation chair, and other AlmaLinux representatives will be available in the event’s expo to discuss the latest AlmaLinux updates. Vasquez is also set to speak on open source both from a community and business perspective.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical’s latest release of its Ubuntu Linux desktop is so close we can hear its claws clacking. So that you know what to expect when it arrives on April 20, 2023, we gave the Lunar Lobster the once over.

• Canonical has published the release schedule for Ubuntu 23.10, which doesn’t yet have a codename but will utilize the letter M for the adjective and noun, for example, Mellow Manatee. The two most important dates on the schedule are the beta release date and the date of the final stable release.

• On September 18, Canonical will institute a beta freeze on Ubuntu 23.10 so that hardly anything changes in the run-up to September 21 when the beta is issued. The public will be invited to try out the beta release and supply feedback on issues encountered so they can be addressed before the final release a few weeks later on October 12.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The art of cave exploration, or spelunking, can get its practitioners far closer to nature and the land we inhabit, but it also comes with a host of potential dangers. Some include extreme environmental conditions, lack of oxygen/toxic gases, and simply having their path closed off due to rock falls.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Events

• Canonical, the publishers of Ubuntu, will have a strong presence at this year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe as a platinum sponsor. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship will once again bring together adopters and technologists from leading open-source and cloud-native communities worldwide to meet in Amsterdam, Netherlands, from April 18th – 21st.

Programming/Development

Python

• My son has been learning Python and wanted to know how many rounds does it take, on average, for someone to win the game of war. If you are not familar with the game, it is a two player game where each player gets half a deck of cards (26).

Leftovers

• Spring is officially here, and the weather calls for some gardening, provided your garden is not still under snow or a meter of water. Maybe you want to plant some flower bulbs? If you do, it may come as a slight surprise that the Baltic states are among the European Union’s larger bulb exporters.

• Data published on April 5 by the Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia (CSB) show that due to COVID-19 restrictions, people participated in cultural life, i.e., attended live performances and sports events, visited cultural sites, or went to cinema, notably less in 2022.

• Some six million people are either in temporary shelters or have migrated to regions outside of the earthquake zone following devastating February earthquakes.

• Chamber of City Planners İstanbul branch joined the Urban Planning Department of İstanbul Technical University in speaking up about the settlements and reconstruction after the February 6 earthquakes while the university branch of the Eğitim-Sen union called for a gathering on campus today.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• >

• Tanzania’s controller and auditor general has found irregularities of more than $1.6 billion in the funds allotted for the country’s covid-19 socioeconomic recovery and response (TCRP) plan. The money was found bilked from the government’s coffers and mismanaged.

• The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed new rules for monitoring and limiting harmful emissions from chemical plants. The agency said it would significantly reduce cancer risk for residents who live near these facilities. The proposal would affect about 200 chemical plants that would have to monitor emissions at their fence line and make fixes if their emissions are too high. EPA Administrator Michael Regan made the announcement in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, in a majority-Black community that is home to a synthetic rubber plant that emits chloroprene, one of the compounds targeted in the proposal.

Proprietary

• The bitcoin whitepaper has been discreetly included in every Mac operating system since 2017—and Apple won’t say why.

• Hundreds of Google workers stage a protest at the company’s London offices today over layoffs.

• In January, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced a decision to lay off 12,000 employees, which accounts for 6% of the total workforce globally. The move comes as many IT companies are facing financial challenges, leading to layoffs of over 290,000 people in the sector this year, according to Layoffs.

• The organization Unite, representing many Google workers in the UK, accuses the company of disregarding worker concerns and failing to engage in the consultation process appropriately. They demand that Google recognize full employee union representation, participate properly in the consultation process, and show employees the respect and dignity they deserve.

• Last week, employees at Google parent Alphabet Inc. called for better treatment of staff during the layoff process in an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai, after the company announced it was cutting a further 12,000 jobs. The kinds of consideration workers asked for included freezing new hires, seeking voluntary redundancies before compulsory ones, giving priority to laid-off workers for job vacancies, and letting workers finish scheduled periods of paid time off, such as parental and bereavement leave.

• In the US, companies can announce widespread job cuts and let go of hundreds if not thousands of workers within months — and many have.

• Tech layoffs and hiring freezes continue to impact the commercial real estate market in and around Seattle, according to a new report from Kidder Mathews.

• “The regional office market is clearly struggling and highly volatile at present, particularly in Seattle,” the report said. “Looking forward, future office demand remains a big question.”

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (cairosvg, ghostscript, grunt, tomcat9, and trafficserver), Fedora (golang, podman, xen, and zchunk), Red Hat (kpatch-patch), SUSE (systemd), and Ubuntu (apache-log4j1.2, liblouis, linux-aws, and linux-bluefield).

• Guest Post: Measuring the globally coordinated disruption of DDoS services.

• The recent CircleCI breach highlights the risk of storing secrets in places like private code repositories (GitHub), scripts, configuration files, files encrypted at rest, CI/CD pipeline code or even Kubernetes Secrets where they cannot easily be rotated, audited, authenticated and secured.

• There is a silent eBPF revolution reshaping platforms and the cloud-native world in its image, and this is its story.

Privacy/Surveillance

• On 6 April 2023, EDRi and 8 partners sent an open letter to the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Vice President Margrethe Vestager, as well Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Through the letter, the organisations called out the clear and deliberate plans to disregard international human rights standards in the EU-US approaches to security in the digitalised society, in particular in regards to end-to-end-encryption.

Defence/Aggression

• Manufactured fear over ‘foreign interference’ could bolster anti-Chinese racism, chill dissent, and expand policing powers

• The main task of the State Defense Service is to strengthen Latvia’s defense capabilities, but at the same time, the service is a lesson of patriotism, the President of Latvia Egils Levits told Latvian Television on April 6.

• House Democrats who attended a GOP-led meeting with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen believe it bodes well for the possibility of bipartisan work in the coming months.

• Why it matters: It’s a rare moment of cross-party praise for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as he prepares for efforts to fund the government, avert default on U.S. debt and potentially provide more aid to Ukraine.

• A bipartisan delegation of American lawmakers arrived in Taiwan on Wednesday (April 5), embarking on a trip that is likely to further enflame escalating tensions between China and the US.

• In an extraordinary act of political retaliation, Tennessee Republicans expelled a Democratic lawmaker from the state Legislature for his role in a protest that called for more gun control in the aftermath of a deadly school shooting in Nashville. The GOP supermajority in the House declined by a single vote to expel a second Democrat. A vote against a third Democratic lawmaker was upcoming. The 72-25 vote to banish Rep. Justin Jones was a move the chamber has used only a handful times since the Civil War.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• The pandemic provoked a lot of experimentation in Philippine urban transport policy. Some were sensible, like rationalizing bus stops along EDSA. Some were, uh, destined to be hallmarks of the time. One of the more forward-thinking was the elevation of bicycles as a bona fide mode of transport.

Wildlife/Nature

• For the second year in a row, the Nature Conservation Agency (DAP) has declared toad traffic regulators wanted. In a campaign “Mission Toad. Save a prince” the agency is asking people to help the amphibians cross roads on their migration paths, DAP said April 5.

Finance

• By law, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) has to hold the equivalent of 1.35% of all insured deposits in its deposit insurance fund (DIF). Lately, that’s means keeping $128 billion on hand.

• Latvijas Banka (LB), the Latvian central bank, has published its annual report for 2022, the bank said April 6.

• The number of Americans seeking unemployment aid was higher over the past few months than the government had initially reported, reflecting a modest rise in layoffs as the economy has slowed in the face of higher interest rates

• IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, Twitter and DoorDash have all announced layoffs in recent months.

• Google’s chief financial officer Ruth Porat announced that the company would be cutting employee perks in a memo sent to staff last week, as its parent company Alphabet looks to tighten its belt.

• The ruble has broken through to a new low this year, as sanctions and foreign firms leaving the country continue to put pressure on the Russian economy.

• Street homelessness in the U.S. has increased by 25% since 2017, and most major metros don’t have enough or the right kind of shelter to accommodate people living outside.

• State of play: Only 181,786 emergency shelter beds were available for an estimated 421,392 individuals experiencing homelessness nationwide as of January 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

• Employers in Michigan shed 11,570 jobs in March, according to a report Thursday showing U.S. companies planned to lay off nearly 90,000 workers for the period, a sharp increase from February and an astronomical increase from the same time a year ago.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• KONDA researcher Erman Bakırcı replied bianet’s questions on what the surveys of the opinion poll company reveal for the coming May 14 elections.

• By his own admission, Israel’s new Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is a “fascist homophobe.” This declaration, which he made on January 16, should be enough to accentuate the violent nature of the new political concoction created by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last December.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• US non-profit media organization NPR, an acronym for National Public Radio, was given the label of “US state-affiliated media” on its main Twitter account of 8.8 million followers on Apr. 5. Other NPR-affiliated accounts remain label-free at the time of writing.

Civil Rights/Policing

• An HDP deputy has brought two separate cases of rights violations into the parliamentary agenda.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Writing. It sucks. For me. I’ve done it profusely (right word, yes!) since age 8. My relationship is tattered with it.

• What I like though, as I’ve discovered, is that the “voice”, the words/thoughts of things that “must” be said, “need/must” not be said. What matters is that *I* know that *I* matter – that *my thoughts* and *my voice* (and my perceptions of the world therein), are mine and I want to have them. And that I appreciate THAT I have them.

• I’m at the library. The Daniel Boone Regional Library, in Columbia MO. It’s been a while since I’ve been here, primarily because they adopted very protracted and heavy-handed covid policies that made it pointless for me to come here. But that was then, and this is today. The library is, after these few years, back to normal.

• “So, as I often do, I went for a drive. I went past the airport and continued on surface streets in St. Louis. Urban decay is most of what I saw as I drove. Buildings in disrepair, most of the windows in entire neighborhoods boarded up. Then I hit downtown and the smell of money was around.” gemini://1436.ninja/gemlog/20230406.gmi

• So, as I often do, I went for a drive. I went past the airport and continued on surface streets in St. Louis. Urban decay is most of what I saw as I drove. Buildings in disrepair, most of the windows in entire neighborhoods boarded up. Then I hit downtown and the smell of money was around.

Politics

• The governor of Mississippi just declared April to be “Confederate Heritage Month”.

Technical

• As a compulsive hitter of M-q when I’m too lazy to start auto-fill-mode (and even then a li’l manual triggering is sometimes needed to reflow an overly edited para), that compulsion has an unfortunate habit of crossing over even when I’m on visual-line-mode. I know, I know, set-fill-column FTW, but…

• I wonder how well runit shortcomings could be patched with a package of additional utilities.

• If there is one thing that will get nerds talking, it’s Systemd. And with the percentage of geminispace being populated by us nerds, the recent resurgence of the systemd hate train / apologetics has this place buzzing.

• I was going to write earlier today, but I kept fussing with this device. That happens to me often these days where I am supposed to do something but get distracted doing something else to prep for doing the something.

• This time, the AlphaSmart dana had lost power a few months ago and the digitizer needed re-calibration. Unfortunately, the digitizer has been intermittently faulty and now it has been finally unusable.

• My Proton Mail email account was configured to automatically send my PGP publickey and sign outgoing messages. So recipients would receive my publickey and signature as attachments to the email.

• This helps verify my identity online. Unless the recipient has absolutely no idea what PGP is nor what those files mean, then it’s utterly confusing when they try to open them and their PC doesn’t have a default program configured for opening .asc files. Also, if they do manage to open them with notepad or something and are greeted by the huge block of alphanumeric characters that makes up the publickey, the uncertainty and novelty of what they’re looking at might terrify them and they might think it’s a virus or something. So I have now configured Proton Mail to not attach those automatically.

• [...]

• I’ve recently begun thinking about something to contribute to the Gemini/Smolnet community. Like making some kind of web content accessible via Gemini, or even contribute to already-existing projects.

Internet/Gemini

• The fewer categories you have, the easier it is to keep things sorted.

• If you have one shelf for plates and another for cutlery, it’s gonna be easier to stick to that than if you have one for forks, one for tablespoons, one for teaspoons etc.

• Too few categories, and it’s not useful; it’s not sorting at all. It’s just one big silo. Arguably that’s how I keep a lot of my files, both digitally and physically, and I can still find stuff… most of the time.

• I forgot how to post on this thing. I made some sort of stupid script to take a markdown file and generate gopher and gemini pages.

• I have been absent from the tildeverse lately. I have had so many other things going on in life that I got distracted. I think I’ll go make some popcorn.

• Unix makes automating things pretty easy.

• 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

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.