● 04.08.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 08/04/2023: OpenShot 3.1 and Mesa 23.0.2 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 12:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• We cover user groups that are running in the US state of Idaho. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

Desktop/Laptop

• Built at their Denver, Colorado factory. Which is pretty cool.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• OpenShot 3.1 is primarily a bug-fix update to last year’s OpenShot 3.0 release, which was notable for introducing several major improvements including enhanced real-time video playback, support for multithreaded video codecs, and several significant buffs to the timeline.

• But there are some notable additions to talk about.

• Export options are expanded by the addition of more than 400 export profiles. These profiles cover an array of common resolution/frame rates/aspect ratios and the profiles are fully searchable, making it easy to find the one you’re looking for.

• The OpenShot video editor announced the new 3.1.0 feature release few days ago. Here are the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu users.

• OpenShot 3.1.0 features a new output video profile dialog, with more than 400 profiles support. Which, are also fully searchable.

• Download OpenShot Video Editor 3.1 – now with 400+ video profiles, improved features, bug fixes, and faster performance!

Instructionals/Technical

• Start using various JetBrains tools by installing its Toolbox on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy using the command terminal for developing applications. JetBrains Toolbox is not just limited to Linux only instead it is a cross-platform desktop application that supports Windows and macOS as well.

• Strawberry is a versatile and powerful music player designed for Linux systems. It is an open-source project based on the popular Clementine music player, which is itself a fork of Amarok. Offering a wide range of features and functionality, Strawberry aims to provide users with an enjoyable and seamless audio experience.

• Deadbeef is a versatile and feature-rich audio player that has gained popularity among music enthusiasts for its lightweight design, customizable interface, and support for a wide range of audio formats.

• TeXworks is a versatile and user-friendly LaTeX editor designed specifically for creating high-quality, professional documents using the TeX typesetting system. It offers a clean, intuitive interface that allows beginners to get started quickly while providing advanced features for experienced users.

• Linux Mint, a popular and user-friendly operating system, has become the go-to choice for many users transitioning from other platforms or looking for a more intuitive and customizable environment.

• Pinta and Linux Mint are two powerful tools that, when combined, can provide users with a seamless and efficient experience in graphics editing on a stable and user-friendly operating system. In this introduction, we’ll explore Pinta and Linux Mint’s unique features and explore why users may prefer this combination over other options.

• YARA is a beautiful tool for malware researchers and incident responders. No need to present it again. It became a standard tool to add to your arsenal.

• Today, I’d like to share with you one of my favorite tips: creating home directories for existing users in Linux. This article will explain the purpose of creating home directories, offer tips and tricks to make the process smoother, and provide troubleshooting tips for when things go awry.

• As a Linux user, you’re likely aware of the importance of system updates to keep your operating system running smoothly and securely.

• To find or check the NVIDIA driver version on Linux to troubleshoot GPU and graphics card issue, check the /sys/module/nvidia/version and /proc/driver/nvidia/version files.

• Roblox is one of the most talked-about and played in the gaming community right now. But with only options for Windows & Mac downloads, many Linux users are feeling left out. But till the devs plan to release an official version, there are several workarounds you can do to get it done for now. So today let’s look at how to get, install, and play Roblox on Linux Ubuntu.

• Want to send your application shortcut icons onto desktop, so you can click them to launch the corresponding apps? This simple tutorial is going to show you how to do the job in Ubuntu 23.04. 1. Firstly, launch Ubuntu Software.

• Learn how to select a folder name to extract Tar or Tar.gz compressed archives, so that it automatically saves the files in our desired location while extracting them. What is Untarring?

• Containerization is a revolutionary technology that allows software to be packaged and deployed in a consistent manner across various environments. It resolves challenges such as dependency conflicts and platform discrepancies by encapsulating applications along with their dependencies in lightweight, portable containers. In this article, we will explore two prominent tools in the field of containerization: Kubernetes and Docker. We will delve into their roles, their differences, and how they work in harmony to facilitate containerized application deployments.

• Shell scripting commands are used to create scripts that automate tasks on Linux systems. The shell script is a program written in a scripting language that runs on the command line or from within another script.

• The Linux Security command line interface is used to manage security-related tasks on a Linux system. These commands are used to create security features, monitor security on the system, and audit security on the system.

• System administrators use Linux System Administration commands to manage and maintain Linux systems.

• On a Linux system, process management commands are used to manage running processes. The following commands enable users to view information about running processes, to start or stop processes, and to manage the priorities associated with those processes.

• The package management commands in Linux are used to manage software packages. Using these commands, users can install, update, remove, and search for software packages.

• aac is a great format. it uses less space whan wav, while preserving the quality of sound (sound is important) to almost 100%$ (losless). hostnamectl; # tested with Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) [...]

• Recently, I purchased a mini-PC with an embedded Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 wireless chipset and installed Gentoo Linux on it.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how redirect www to non www traffic on Nginx. This is done to avoid duplicate content issue because google sees www and non www as two different domains when you serve same content.

• In this guide, we are going to discuss what is Logrotate, how to install Logrotate and how to manage log files using Logrotate in Linux.

• Today I finally found time to track down a useful radio frequency scanner for my software defined radio. Just for fun I tried to locate the radios used in the areas, and a good start would be to scan all the frequencies to see what is in use. I’ve tried to find a useful program earlier, but ran out of time before I managed to find a useful tool. This time I was more successful, and after a few false leads I found a description ofrtlsdr-scanner over at the Kali site, and was able to track downthe Kali package git repository to build a deb package for the scanner. Sadly the package is missing from the Debian project itself, at least in Debian Bullseye.

• Get started with virtualization on Linux Mint 21 in no time by installing VMware Workstation Player with our step-by-step guide.

• How can I monitor Docker swarm node metrics? In this tutorial, you will learn how to monitor Docker swarm node metrics using Grafana. Prometheus node exporter can be used to collect hardware and OS metrics that are exposed by the kernel.

• If you have a text file with newline characters (\n) and you need to replace them with spaces, you can use the sed command in Linux. In this article, we’ll explore how to use sed to replace newline characters with spaces.

• After a long time, I have decided to change my desktop environment to XFCE.

• Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to enable the SSI module on Nginx. The process is easier than you might think, but it is convenient to know it to avoid headaches in the future.

• Yesterday, one of the Android users emailed me and described his issue. When I launch the application on the emulator, it crashes, and as soon as I checked the logs, it stated that “Cleartext HTTP traffic is * not allowed,” and because of this, I am not able to test the functionality of my app.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WPS Office on Fedora 37.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Percona on Rocky Linux 9. Are you looking for a powerful database management system that can handle complex workloads with ease?

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today, the KDE Project announced the general availability of KDE Frameworks 5.105 as yet another monthly update to the KDE Frameworks 5 open-source collection of more than 80 add-on libraries to Qt providing common functionality to the KDE Plasma desktop environment and KDE Gear software suite.

• Talking about the Breeze icon theme, KDE Frameworks 5.105 comes with beautiful new icons for the Night Color feature (Redshift), which you can see in the screenshots below, as well as a fix for an issue where the icon for the Filelight app was incorrectly shown for the GParted and KwikDisk software. Also, icons have been added for showing and hiding a virtual keyboard.

• Read on

• KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.105.0.

• KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.

• This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

• This week some of your favorite KDE apps got lots of positive changes! Dolphin, Kate, Okular, Elisa, Partition Manager, and Filelight all received some nice improvements.

• In the background, Plasma 6 porting work continues. I’ve now got a working Plasma 6 dev session on my machine. It’s still rough, but it’s usable. Now I can see why more experienced contributors predicted the need to skip a release and give the initial Plasma 6 release at least an 8 month dev cycle, not a 4-month one. But fear not; it’s happening!

Distributions and Operating Systems

• About a week ago, posted about package manager consolidation:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202304/package-manager-consolidation.html

• There are now four package managers, and I have added the fourth to the wrapper:

• [...]

• I also fixed it so when click on the “pkg” icon in a container, only “PKGget” will be available.

• I fixed buglet-1 and buglet-2 reported at the release of Easy 5.2.1:

• When doing an update of an AppImage, there may be some indecision what latest AppImage file to download, for example: [...]

SUSE/OpenSUSE

Dominique Leuenberger ☛ openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2023/14Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,Despite some people celebrating Easter, and a typical tradition is to hide stuff around, we don’t do that to you: we publish the 7 snapshots this week all at the same place – exactly where you know how to find them.The 7 snapshots were numbered 0330…0405 and contained these changes:Mesa-demo 9.0.0Ruby 3.2.2Coreutils 9.2Samba 4.18.1libnvme 1.4 / nvme-cli 2.4Mozilla Firefox 111.0.1KDE Plasma 5.27.4Qt 6.5.0

Fedora Family / IBM

• Flathub has gained popularity among Linux users as a one-stop shop for discovering, installing, and updating Flatpak applications. It is a containerized software distribution model that provides an easy and secure way to install desktop applications on Linux systems.

• The store offers 2,000 apps from over 1,500 collaborators, averaging 700,000 app downloads daily from different categories, including productivity, gaming, education, and multimedia.

• The graph below, publicly available on Flathub beta, clearly shows the project’s growing importance for the Linux community. The use of Flathub’s software has seen a dramatic jump in the last six months, proving the Flatpak format’s popularity among Linux users.

• Learn Gawk by playing a fun word game

• The new configurations fit in standard 19-inch data center racks and reduce energy consumption while using AI and quantum-safe tech.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• A few weeks back Canonical/Ubuntu developers confirmed the introduction of an official minimal installer for Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster. This was great news for those who have been waiting for an official minimal ISO image of Ubuntu Linux, as Canonical/Ubuntu never officially supported any minimal ISO images.

• As announced, Canonical has now unveiled an official minimal installer (currently in Beta) for its Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster release, ending the wait for those looking to install a lightweight version of Ubuntu Linux.

• I ran a test drive on this BETA iso and this is what I found.

Devices/Embedded

• The one catch: Linux might not actually boot when you first get it. (I want one anyway.)

• Antmicro has designed an open hardware AMD Xilinx Kintex-7 K410T FPGA development board in KiCad 6 mostly to synthesize custom RISC-V-based processing platforms and work on the OpenTitan Root of Trust project.

• HIGOLE PC STICK is a mini PC that looks like a large flash drive, is smaller than a regular mini PC, and is easier to carry around. You can connect it directly to a monitor or TV with an HDMI input, and use it like any computer right away. In part 1 of the HIGOLE PC STICK review, we will go through the specifications, unbox the design, check its hardware design with a teardown, and go through the first boot.

• AMD Alveo MA35D media accelerator PCIe card is based on a 5nm ASIC capable of transcoding up to 32 Full HD (1080p60) AV1 streams in real-time and designed for low-latency, high-volume interactive streaming applications such as watch parties, live shopping, online auctions, and social streaming.

• Beelink EQ12 is a mini PC powered by an Intel Processor N100 “Alder Lake-N” quad-core processor offered with 8GB or 16GB DDR5 memory, a 512GB NVMe SSD for storage, as well as two 2.5GbE ports, and a WiFi 6- Bluetooth 5.2 wireless module. The actively cooled computer also comes with two 4K capable HDMI ports, three USB 3.2 ports, and a 10Gbps USB Type-C that also supports DisplayPort Alternate Mode enabling the EQ12 to drive up to three 4K displays.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• If you’re looking to build a SaaS application, Melonify can save you time and effort by providing a solid foundation for your project. With its full-stack React boilerplate and cutting-edge technology stack, you can easily create a high-performance web application that will delight your users.

• Next.js is a React framework that enables server-side rendering and other performance optimizations for web applications.

Leftovers

Science

• Look on the bright side.

Education

• Stanford Postdocs United, a group of postdocs concerned with improving working and material conditions, writes: “As postdocs at Stanford, we know firsthand how critical the work of graduate student workers is to the core research and teaching missions of the University.”

Hardware

• In case you haven’t noticed, I’m somewhat obsessed with my Am386 motherboard of late. It was dead for years, but thanks to a modern ISA POST card I was able to diagnose and fix it. Since then, I’ve been on a mission to kit it out, both with parts I find in other boxes, and from eBay on a budget.

• [...]

• The board originally didn’t boot thanks to some faulty RAM, or so I thought. As I wrote in that first post, I liberally applied some de-oxidising spray in the sockets, and brushed some liquid DeoxIT to the individual pins on the SIMM modules.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Today, a Texas judge’s decision declared unlawful the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of mifepristone, an essential medication used in medication abortions.

• The United Kingdom regulator has fined the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform TikTok almost USD 16 million for a number of ‘data protection law’ breaching, including misusing children’s personal data, according to CNN.

• UK’s information commissioner’s office fined TikTok USD 15.9 million and estimated that the video-sharing platform allowed over 1 million children under 13 to use its platform in violation of its own rules in 2020.

• Drought profiteers – financial industry executives buying up public freshwater resources in a time of increasing drought – are pushing the US water supply to the brink of collapse, reports Lee Camp.

• Cannabis regulators have halted operations at several outdoor pot farms and processing facilities on a stretch of former fruit orchards in north-central Washington state. Testing found high levels of chemicals related to a dangerous pesticide used decades ago. The sweeping action announced Thursday night has renewed concerns about pesticides in marijuana. It also has put dozens of people at least temporarily out of work. The businesses are in an area where fruit growers used the cancer-causing pesticide DDT before the U.S. banned it in 1972. Officials are working to identify any products the tainted marijuana was used in. They have asked the affected companies to issue recalls.

Security

• Sometimes, people’s most intimate information gets dumped for the world to see. Other times it’s “just” used for identity theft, extortion, and other crimes. In the least worst case, the attacker gets cold feet, but people suffer stress and inconvenience from having to replace identity documents.

• A great way to protect information from being leaked is to encrypt it. We encrypt data while it’s being sent over the Internet (with TLS), and we encrypt it when it’s “at rest” (with disk or volume encryption). Yet, everyone’s data seems to still get stolen on a regular basis. Why?

• Because the data is kept online in an unencrypted form, sitting in the database while its being used. This means that attackers can just connect to the database, or trick the application into dumping the database, and all the data is just lying there, waiting to be misused.

• Welcome to the March 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project.

• In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, the motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no malicious flaws have been introduced during compilation and distributing processes. It does this by ensuring identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

• Open-source software is gaining a lot of traction in the tech world. Developers, organizations, and even government entities are leveraging their collective power to innovate faster and to create better solutions at a lower cost. But while open source has its advantages, it also has its vulnerabilities.

• Secret documents that reportedly provide details of US and NATO plans to help prepare Ukraine for a spring offensive against Russia have spilled onto social media platforms.

• Microsoft, Fortra and Health-ISAC have taken legal and technical action to prevent the abuse of the Cobalt Strike exploitation tool and Microsoft software.

• The post Ransomware gang releases new data stolen from the City of Oakland appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

• Kali Linux turns 10 this year, and to celebrate, the Linux penetration testing distribution has added defensive security tools to its arsenal of open-source security tools.

• It remains to be seen if Kali Purple will do for defensive open source security tools what Kali Linux has done for open source pentesting, but the addition of more than 100 open source tools for SIEM, incident response, intrusion detection and more should raise the profile of those defensive tools.

• For now, Kali is primarily known for its roughly 600 open source pentesting tools, allowing pentesters to easily install a full range of offensive security tools.

• Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs (CRIL) discovered a new ransomware group called Money Message. Both Windows and Linux operating systems are targeted by this ransomware, which can encrypt network shares. Experts believe that threat actors may use stealer logs in their operations.

• The international police takedown the “most dangerous marketplace” which used to sell “stolen account credentials” to hackers worldwide, Europol said in a statement.

• The law enforcement agency, carrying out the operation, involving 17 countries, on Tuesday, shut down the Genesis Market and its infrastructure seized.

• The newest iOS 16.4.1 and iPadOS 16.4.1 patches a pair of code execution flaws that have already been exploited in the wild.

• Apple today released updates for iOS and macOS (as well as Safari). The update fixes two vulnerabilities that are already being exploited:

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Washington Post reported last month on a conservative Catholic group that spent millions of dollars to buy location data from a private-sector data broker in order to identify gay priests and report them to their bishops. This is a story every American should be aware of — and not just because of how it affected those priests.

Defence/Aggression

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• FINLAND joining Nato is expected to not only enhance security, but also prop up the national economy, writes YLE.

• Antti Aumo, the director of investment at Business Finland, on Wednesday stated to the Finnish public broadcasting company that the membership could increase inbound corporate investment by strengthening the image of a safe and secure operating environment.

• The Kiev Independent reported

• Responding to the Kyiv Independent at a news conference, Stoltenberg said that “NATO’s position remains unchanged and that Ukraine will become a member of the alliance.”

• The earliest version of the leaked Pentagon documents online seem to come from a small gaming community forum.

• Secret documents that appear to detail American national security secrets on Ukraine, the Middle East and China have surfaced online.

• Beijing’s recent assertiveness has given cause for Japan to drastically overhaul its defence strategy.

• The challenge for South-east Asian countries, however, is balancing economic trade-offs with military spending.

• It is the latest action in a show of force against the US and South Korea.

• Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen met US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

• Two Lithuanian nationals have been injured while fighting in the Ukrainian army, the Foreign Ministry has confirmed to LRT.lt.

• Andrey Shevlyakov was charged in the US for helping the Russian government and military purchase US-made electronics and hacking tools.

• Emmanuel Macron, accompanied by top French business executives, concluded his trip to China on Friday with a visit to the southern city of Canton, where he met with more Chinese investors. With trade talks on the agenda, several deals between companies from both countries have already been sealed during the French president’s first visit to China since the Covid-19 pandemic. A French economist shares with FRANCE 24 her insight on the concerns surrounding trade ties between Paris and Beijing.

• French President Emmanuel Macron was greeted by a huge crowd at a university in southern China on Friday on the last day of a visit in which he repeatedly pushed his counterpart Xi Jinping to help end the Ukraine conflict.

• South Korea, the U.S. and Japan have called for stronger international support of efforts to ban North Korea from sending workers abroad and curb the North’s cybercrime. They say such steps are necessary to block the country’s means to fund its nuclear program. The top South Korean, U.S. and Japanese nuclear envoys met in Seoul on Friday to discuss how to cope with North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal. The North’s recent weapons tests show it is intent on acquiring more advanced missiles designed to attack the U.S. and its allies, rather than returning to talks.

• North Korea claims it tested this week a second known type of nuclear-capable underwater attack drone designed to destroy naval vessels and ports, adding to a flurry of weapons demonstrations this year that have heightened tensions with rivals. The report on Saturday of the four-day test came a day after the nuclear envoys of the United States, South Korea and Japan met in Seoul to discuss the growing North Korean nuclear threat and called for stronger international efforts to crack down on illicit North Korean activities funding its weapons program. State media said the drone, named “Haeil-2” after a Korean word meaning tsunamis or tidal waves, traveled underwater for more than 71 hours before successfully detonating a mock warhead.

• Is it time to put Freedom Fries back on the menu? Back in 2003, french fries became freedom fries in the US in disgust with “our so-called ally, France” who took an independent “self-serving” course and refused to support US policy on Iraq.

Finance

• Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. early today released preliminary financial results for the first quarter, disclosing that its operating profit likely dropped by 96% to a 14-year low. It’s believed that the drop is partly the result of losses in the company’s semiconductor unit.

• Even if you weren’t one of the thousands laid off this year, you’ve probably watched a few layoff vlogs from your FYP.

• Inheritance tax debt in Finland is increasingly going into collection.

• The Nordic country sets an example that Lithuania seeks to emulate.

• In March, the unemployment rate for Black Americans fell to 5.0%, the lowest it’s ever been, bringing it closer to the 3.2% unemployment rate for white Americans.

• Australians are being told they should be optimistic about the nation’s economic prospects despite a gloomy global forecast, but have also been advised to manage their expectations.

• The US labor market grew at its slowest pace in two years in March, but it’s not signaling a recession. The US added 236,000 jobs in March, almost right in line with expectations of economists polled by FactSet for 240,000 jobs added.

• The Jorge Newbery International Airport in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has become a makeshift homeless shelter as poverty rates rise with the country’s high inflation. Many people, including senior citizens, have lived in the airport for years.

• Thousands of Australians have started tucking into their seafood feast as the long weekend kicks off, but for many the cost of living crisis has changed the layout of their Easter banquets.

• Despite its historic reputation as a centre of education, power and wealth, Cambridge is the UK’s most unequal city. Like the rest of the country, many of its residents are suffering greatly from the nation’s cost-of-living crisis but none more so than women and children. This as the number of food banks in the country now outnumber McDonald’s outlets, with a fast-growing number of working women becoming regular customers seeking donated food. In a special edition, Annette Young meets a cross-section of women whose lives have been dramatically impacted by a rapidly declining economy.

• The prime minister joined the hordes at Sydney’s Easter show while other Australians have taken a more traditional approach to the start of the long weekend with a church service or escape from the city.

• The recent bust of a Sydney money laundering syndicate and the story of a charming Chinese criminal brought down by New Zealand authorities highlight the need for Australia to catch up on global anti-money laundering regulations

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Friday acknowledged allegations that he had failed to properly disclose luxury trips he had received from an influential GOP donor, saying in a statement that he has “always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”

• Driving the news: An explosive ProPublica investigation alleged that over the span over more than two decades, Thomas accepted lavish vacations paid for by a major Republican donor virtually every year.

• In a Florence Pan opinion that Justin Walker largely joined, the DC Circuit rejected an interpretation of 18 USC 1512(c)(2) that Carl Nichols had singularly adopted on January 6 cases. But even where Walker and Pan differ, both would uphold the majority of obstruction cases currently or potentially charged.

• A national watchdog will examine whether Australian Federal Police officers attempted to pervert the course of justice in the rape case of former parliamentary staffer Bruce Lehrmann.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Some days I convince myself that nothing is actually happening and all we have is a whole bunch of people convincing us that things are happening. I mean I’m sitting here on the 13th of March wondering who has won the battle of Bakhmut in the Ukraine….

• Organisation for Propaganda Studies On 7 April 2018 reports emerged from a suburb of Damascus, Douma, claiming that a chemical weapons attack had occurred. Images of dead women and children inside an apartment building were circulated over the internet along with hospital scenes showing alleged victims being hosed down with water.

• Taibbi’s false claims about the Election Integrity Project have little tie to actual mis- or disinformation flagged during the election. Rather, his false claims serve to discredit a systematic measure of how central Trump is to disinformation in the US.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Charged with “insulting the president” and “disrupting the electoral order,” Mahir Akkoyun was released after giving a statement to the police.

Civil Rights/Policing

• French union strikes have been destroying the streets of Paris for over a month now. Why doesn’t the U.S. ever see union protests of this scale?

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Almost 500 leading academics, industry researchers, and security practitioners from around the world gathered in San Diego, California in February for the 30th edition of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) to discuss the latest research and developments in Internet security research.

Monopolies

• From March 29-31 of this year, antitrust practitioners, government officials, academics, and economists from around the world convened in Washington….

Patents

• On April 4, 2023, the Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Office’s final decision, in a summary Rule 36 affirmance, confirmed that U.S. Patent 8,548,645, owned by Engle Grange, LLC, was unpatentable. The ‘645 patent, generally directed towards a two-step key fob authentication system for an automobile, had been asserted in district court litigation against Ford in early 2020.

Trademarks

• The CAFC overturned the TTAB’s decision [TTABlogged here] dismissing Charles Bertini’s Section 2(d) opposition to registration of APPLE MUSIC for a host of services, including the production and distribution of sound recordings and presentation of live music performances. The court ruled that the Board had erred in awarding priority to Apple (via tacking) over Bertini’s use of the common law mark APPLE JAZZ for live musical performances. On a question of first impression, it held that a trademark applicant cannot establish priority for every good or service in its application merely because it has priority through tacking in a single good or service listed in its application . Charles Bertini v. Apple, Inc., Appeal No. 2021-2301 (Fed. Cir. April 4, 2023) [precedential].

Copyrights

• Artificial intelligence is having a moment. We’ve gone from AI tools playing chess and Go to solving novel problems in competitive programming, proving math theorems, and predicting the structure of protein folds.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Since I’ve gotten the job at the store, I’ve not been cooking as much as I was prior.

• Last week I bought a bag of brussels sprouts in order to force myself to cook them before they went bad. I love brussels sprouts, probably my favorite vegetable along with collard greens, which is funny because they are derived from the same plant, wild mustard, and have been bread for thousands of years to select for different qualities. This was a sort of motivation treat for me to get back in the swing of cooking more. I also needed to make room in the freezer, and the package of chicken thighs, which has been there since October, was fairly large. I diced up an onion, chopped a few cloves of garlic, pan fried them along with the chicken thighs, and threw in a handful of spices along the way.

• I recently learned that in late 2021 Penguin Books released a “Green Ideas” series of twenty very affordably priced small books on environmental issues. Supposedly the chosen texts represent “classics that define the environmental movement today”. There are some pretty big names amongst the list of authors, some of whom I have read before and enjoyed, others whom I haven’t but have long wanted to. They are easily found for purchase online from non-Amazon bookstores for around the 5 EUR mark per book.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• Gemini is a new technology and attracts people interested in technology. It does not allure anyone else and the way it’s going right now, it never will.

• Gemini is an island of purebred bleakness. Go to any public feed aggregator, like Antenna[1] or CAPCOM[2] and you’ll find blog entries about why systemd sucks, who needs to try OpenBSD or Emacs, why plain text is the divine interface or how to set up a Gemini server.

• I’ve spent a few months rewriting Trantor’s TLS infrastructure. The old one was purely based on OpenSSL and messy. It’s hacked together and not very well documented. Over time we added more and more features to it. And it’s getting harder and harder to even understand what’s going on. This and my need of ALPN pushed me to rewrite entire damn thing.

• I know from the get-go that it’s going to be a huge undertaking. But I didn’t realize how complicated and surprisingly straight forward OpenSSL made things. Here I’ll be talking about the new features added as the result of this rewrite. And the bugs that I found and fixed.

• And the circle is complete! There are two types of posts on gemini – tech posts, and people complaining about gemini!

• I kid, but it’s sorta true sometimes. I am not here to rag on the post, it’s a very true post. Gemini is more than just smol hackernews! But I do feel there is something to say about how one uses gemini and what they get out of it.

Programming

• I was working yesterday on sbn and accidentally fixed digit subtraction (and consequently sbn subtraction).

• 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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