● 04.24.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 24/04/2023: Qt Resorting to ‘Analytics’

Posted in News Roundup at 1:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

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

Audiocasts/Shows

• Why Fedora 38 might Sway you to try it; and how it runs on the MacBook M1 Max.

Kernel Space

• A new version of the Linux kernel is out with an assortment of hardware, performance, and security improvements.

• With Linux Kernel 6.2 being released just a few months prior, a new release is here in the form of Linux Kernel 6.3.

• This release offers plenty of things, such as better AMD support, initial enablement work for Intel’s Arrow Lake, networking improvements, and more.

• It may not be a significant, meaningful upgrade for most, but it caters to a specific group of people while adding support for future tech.

Applications

• Arca Noae is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our ACPI Driver Package for ArcaOS, OS/2, and eComStation version 3.23.17. This release contains the following changes: Enhanced fixup logic for some rare BIOS problems. Enhanced some diagnostic options. Updated ACPICA. Please see the ACPI Driver ReadMe for details about this update.

Instructionals/Technical

• See the step-by-step guide for creating an Ubuntu AWS Ec2 instance and then installing Docker on it to create a virtual container for running various App Images.

• FFmpeg is a versatile, open-source software suite that has gained widespread popularity due to its extensive capabilities for handling multimedia files. It is a powerful tool for working with audio, video, and image formats, and it is particularly well-suited for use on Debian desktops and server environments.

• One of the visible changes in Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster is the new font for the texts in system menus, documents, and app windows. The new font is slim.

Games

• There have been discussions about a picture circulating on some social networks (apparently from China in the first place, based on the kanji in the below picture) and while there is no official report as to where they came from…

• Between 2023-04-16 and 2023-04-23 there were 122 new games validated for the Steam Deck.

• After a few months of beta testing, valuable feedback from our community of play-testers, and relentless bug squashing, our ScummVM Android port is back on the Google Play Store with a fresh stable release! All the latest features of ScummVM 2.7.0 as well as Android-specific improvements are included in ScummVM 2.7.0.5!

• A quick summary of the new features for this release: [...]

• F38 just released and seeing a bunch of people complain that TF2 dies on AMD or other platforms when lavapipe is installed. Who’s at fault? I’ve no real idea. How to fix it? I’ve no real idea.

• AMD OpenGL drivers use LLVM as the backend compiler. Fedora 38 updated to LLVM 16. LLVM 16 is built with c++17 by default. C++17 introduces new “operator new/delete” interfaces[1].

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE’s Kdenlive video editor has released version 23.04, here are the new features and how to install guide for (K)Ubuntu 22.04 & (K)Ubuntu 22.10 via PPA. According to the KDE Gear 23.04 release note, Kdenlive 23.04 features new nested timelines.

• Kdenlive is an acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor. It works on GNU/Linux, Windows and BSD. Through the MLT framework, Kdenlive integrates many plugin effects for video and sound processing or creation. Furthermore Kdenlive brings a powerful titling tool, a DVD authoring (menus) solution, and can then be used as a complete studio for video creation.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• I usually post OpenEmbedded-related posts in the “easy” category, not in the “oe” category, so here is a summary, going back in time to April 29, 2022: [...]

• After updating Easy to 5.2.2, a few people reported icons getting lost, and changes to “default applications” getting lost. For example:

• https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=87197#p87197

• I also experienced this. The problem has existed before, but has become more prevalent as we are creating icons on the desktop for installed AppImages and Flatpaks. [...]

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Week highlights: new releases of BeeRef’s fork, Armory3D, and topologicpy, new features in GIMP and FreeCAD, Inkscape is looking for an experienced GTK4 developer.

• We shouldn’t be expecting lots of new features at this stage of development, but CmykStudent squeezed a few things in anyway. GIMP now loads indexed ILBM, Amiga PBM, and ACBM images.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

• If you use Google Chrome (or Chromium, before anyone hisses) you may have noticed that websites you visit in it don’t respect your dark mode preference on Linux. The window chrome totally matches, but the content of web pages and chrome://urls which otherwise do support dark mode don’t change.

Programming/Development

Rust

• In this chapter of the Rust Basics series, learn to use functions and return values from them with the help of examples.

Leftovers

Science

• Cedric Preston McCoy’s life is filled with music. The School of Music, Theatre & Dance senior said he loves playing, listening to and studying all forms of music.

Hardware

• How I mounted my mirrorless camera to an Uppababy Cruz V2 pram/stroller with a cheap clamp and ball mount.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Metro Manila’s trains service over 500,000 passengers a day.

• After abortion rights supporters swept six ballot measures last year, Republican legislatures seek to make it harder to get on the ballot, and harder to win if there is a vote.

• A proposal to make New York the third state to ban menthol cigarettes has created a furious and expensive lobbying war, and has divided Black leaders.

• “…Mifepristone remains available and approved…”

• More than $50 million will be spent on research into long COVID, as a parliamentary committee examining the condition called for a national database into the virus.

Security

• I was the challenge author for a handful of challenges for this year’s BSidesSF CTF. One of those challenges was lastpwned, inspired by a recent high-profile data breach. This challenge provided a web-based password manager with client-side encryption.

• The challenge description read:

• It’s 2023, so it’s finally time that people use a password manager. We’ve got our zero-knowledge solution ready to go. To prove our trust in it, the admin is even using it for their passwords too!

• Visiting the challenge website, players are presented with a page to login or register. Registering gives us an account, and presents a UI with several pages, including passwords and history. In the passwords page, we can add and view our encrypted passwords. On the history page, we see a list of historical versions of our encrypted passwords, and clicking on one loads the historical “keybag”.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• There is a cybersecurity risk inherent to the human being that we will not be able to eliminate completely and it is the implicit need to “click” on links that come to us, especially through email, which may be the prelude to the materialization of a cyber attack through an APT.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Are you a Marketeer and you love nailing the targeting of your messages?

Defence/Aggression

• On April 14, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arrived in Beijing for talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Since their meeting, the leader of the largest economy and most powerful country in Latin America’s statements, both with XI and alone, have surprised and angered the US.

• Russian troops are forcibly relocating residents near the southern city of Kherson as fighting there intensifies, a Ukrainian official said Sunday.

• Anti-Kremlin protesters staged a rally in Paris on April 23, urging the EU to slap sanctions on the socialite wife of the Russian deputy defense minister, who they accuse of bypassing sanctions.

• Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. What has America learned from the colossal failure of the Iraq War? Not what it should have learned, notes historian (and retired U.S. Army colonel) Greg Daddis at War on the Rocks.

• With hopes fading that two warring generals will end their battle anytime soon, diplomats and other foreigners began heading for Sudan’s doors.

• On visit to Manila, China’s top diplomat meets with counterpart as well as President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

• I was born on July 20, 1944, amid a vast global conflict already known as World War II. Though it ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 before I could say much more than “Mama” or “Dada,” in some strange fashion, I grew up at war.

• Ukrainian defenders continue to hold their strategic positions in Bakhmut, a senior military commander has said after Russia claimed it had made advances in the city that has been the epicenter of a fierce monthslong battle for the control of the eastern Donetsk region.

• “…the presence of Egyptian citizens within Sudan, numbering over 10,000…”

• Wagner has offered powerful weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, to R.S.F. paramilitaries, American officials said.

• The UK government Sunday announced the successful evacuation of British embassy staff and their families from Khartoum, Sudan. The military operation was carried out as a response to “significant escalation in violence and threats” to British diplomats in Sudan as fighting in the country continues.

• As a rabbi, I can’t prevent anti-Semitic acts in America, but I can work to alleviate the fear that threats create.

• Military spending worldwide rose 3.7 percent in 2022 to a record $2.24 trillion, with Central and Western Europe experiencing the largest year-on-year increase since the Cold War and Ukraine boosting its outlays to unprecedented levels as it battled invading Russian forces.

• Russia has not only stolen territory in Ukraine, but also peace in Europe and stability in the world, according to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.

• Voices raised against the Kremlin are increasingly being silenced as Russia this week handed jail sentences to two prominent opponents of the current regime: Russian-British national Vladimir Kara-Murza was handed a 25-year prison sentence on Monday and a Moscow court on Wednesday dismissed Ilya Yashin’s appeal.

• Sixty people were killed in Burkina Faso by attackers wearing military uniforms, a prosecutor said late Sunday, announcing an investigation into the latest attack in the insurgency-hit country.

• Kenyan police said Sunday they had found the bodies of another 26 suspected cult members in the east of the country, bringing to 47 the number of corpses linked to the movement.

• The government has accepted sweeping recommendations in a review of Australia’s strategic position and the military capabilities it needs to defend itself…

Environment

• Thousands of protesters Friday descended on Westminster to join the biggest protest tackling the climate crisis ever held in the UK. The unprecedented action was co-ordinated by Extinction Rebellion (XR), a UK-based global environmental movement which aims to use mass nonviolent civil disobedience to challenge government inaction over climate change.

Energy/Transportation

• Most Australians are keen to switch from gas to renewable electricity because of climate change and rising bills, but the federal government will keep the fossil fuel flowing.

Finance

• In a brief statement, Shell said Sunday would be his last day after what he called “an inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company.”

• A company that sold junk funeral policies to Indigenous people received more than 95 per cent of its payments through Centrelink’s billing system, Centrepay.

• Comcast, the company’s owner, said he was leaving after an investigation into “an inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company.”

• Asset freezes under the national security law and falling property prices make the rich nervous

• It’s one of the original big box retailers, and is known for its seemingly endless offerings of sheets, towels and kitchen gadgets.

• RecruitGyan Founder and CEO Neha Naik joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss tech layoffs, what they mean for upcoming Big Tech earnings, investor sentiment, how AI is impacting the labor market, and the outlook for tech’s diversity gap.

• Disney (DIS) will lay off thousands of more workers this week as it looks to slash 7,000 jobs by the summer.

• This week marks the second round of job cuts following a first round that began the week of March 27. Disney officials said Monday that at the completion of this second wave, 4,000 jobs will be eliminated.

• The eliminations will occur across the company’s business segments, including Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and Disney Parks, Experiences and Products. They will also happen across the country, from Burbank to New York and Connecticut.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Peru former president Alejandro Toledo was jailed on Sunday, hours after arriving back in his homeland following extradition from the United States to face charges of money laundering and corruption during his mandate.

• Rached Ghannouchi has been a voice for democracy in his nation and across the Muslim world.

• Elon Musk told Twitter users he would remove the old legacy verificed Blue Checks on April 20. Chaos ensued.  When Thursday arrived, everyone who hadn’t paid the $8 entry fee for Twitter Blue no longer had a blue checkmark on the platform.

• Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world.

• Former President Alejandro Toledo has arrived in Lima after being extradited from the United States to face charges he allegedly received millions of dollars in bribes in a giant corruption scandal that has ensnared four of Peru’s ex-presidents. Toledo, who was Peru’s president from 2001 to 2006, surrendered to U.S. authorities on Friday, ending a yearslong legal battle against his extradition, which started in 2019 when he was arrested at his home in Menlo Park, California. Police and officials from Peru’s prosecutor’s office received Toledo, 77, at Lima’s airport early Friday. Peru’s former president will serve 18 months of preventative detention while he is investigated for allegedly taking at least $20 million in bribes from Odebrecht.

• Myanmar media gave no details of Mr Ban’s visit, but he is seen waving for the cameras as he arrived at the airport.

• Since World War II, Japan had long chosen not to possess long-range strike capabilities that could be used against enemy bases.

• Go forth and buy The Shadow Docket by Steve Vladeck.

• It is not necessary for Hong Kong to hold elections to appoint district-level administrators, former chief executive Leung Chun-ying has said.

• Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said Sunday his government had opened dialogue with a rebel group active in the Oromia region, the country’s largest and most populous region, surrounding the capital Addis Ababa.

• The final chapter of the Proud Boys seditious conspiracy trial featured several days of heated, often bitter testimony from two of the defendants: Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola.

• It aligns with Washington’s efforts to create a global supply chain less reliant on China.

• A review of Australia’s defence capabilities recommended purchasing more long-range missiles and military drones.

• Reports that the Ukrainian military has crossed the Dnieper River and established positions on the eastern side heightened expectations on April 23 that Kyiv is on the verge of its long-awaited counteroffensive.

• The century-old, pro-democracy Belarusian exile group Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic has awarded its inaugural Order of Pahonya to the relatives of imprisoned “political prisoners” Ihar Losik, his wife, Darya Losik, and Eduard Palchys.

• Around 250,000 foreign visitors will have a shot at winning the voucher this year.

• Polls have closed following a paltry turnout in extraordinary local elections in four municipalities in northern Kosovo with ethnic Serb majorities where local mayors resigned in November 2022 to protest a cross-border dispute over vehicle registrations.

• Azerbaijan and Armenia exchanged accusations on April 23 over alleged military supplies and the appearance of checkpoints in a sensitive region around the Caucasus foes’ shared border.

• Azerbaijan on Sunday set up a checkpoint on the only land link between Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, sparking an angry response from its arch-rival Yerevan.

• The Baltic states, as well as France, have expressed dismay after the Chinese ambassador in Paris questioned the sovereignty not only of Ukraine, but all the former Soviet republics.

• By Adam Plowright China’s ambassador to France has sparked anger in eastern Europe and Ukraine while drawing a rebuke in Paris after questioning the sovereignty of post-Soviet countries.

• French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China and his subsequent comment that Europe should not get dragged into a confrontation over Taiwan made clear that his vision of strategic autonomy involves concentrating …

• Comcast has agreed to mutually part ways with NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell over “inappropriate conduct,” the company said Sunday. In a joint statement, Shell admitted to having an “inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company.”

• Why it matters: Shell had been CEO of NBCU since 2020, but had been with the company since 2013 and worked for its parent Comcast since 2009. Comcast acquired NBCU in 2011.

• Jeff Shell, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, is departing the company after an investigation into inappropriate conduct, parent company Comcast announced Sunday. In a brief statement, Shell said Sunday would be his last day after what he called “an inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company.” Shell was named CEO of NBCUniversal in January 2020. According to the company website, he oversaw of the company’s portfolio of news and entertainment television networks, significant television and sports production operations, among other ventures. He previously served as chairman of NBCUniversal Film and Entertainment. Comcast did not say who will succeed Shell.

`hip/Free Speech

• The European Union is considering placing sanctions on Russian state-controlled media Russia Today (RT) Balkans, which broadcasts programs in the Serbian language, diplomatic sources told RFE/RL.

• “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” George Washington

• What the police state wants is a silent, compliant, oblivious citizenry.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has expressed anger after he claimed the United States had not issued visas to journalists seeking to accompany him to the United Nations, with Russian officials vowing to retaliate against U.S. journalists in Russia.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The former Wilbur housing supervisor appeared in court for the first time after being charged in March by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office for falsifying stories of on-campus rape.

• The organisers of a planned Labour Day march have said that the Hong Kong police interrogated them on where they got their funding for the proposed demonstration and how they would guard against violent groups “hijacking” the event. I

• Since April 2022, 141 one-off childbirth allowances have been paid to Ukrainian refugees in Latvia, which means at least 141 childbirths, Rus.LSM.lv reported on April 23.

• Around 3,000 migrants have begun what they call a mass protest procession through southern Mexico to demand the end of detention centers like the one that caught fire last month, killing 40 people. The migrants set out early Sunday from the city of Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border. They say their aim is to reach Mexico City. But in the past many participants have continued on to the U.S. border. The migrants are mainly from Central America, Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia. Organizer Irineo Mújica said they are demanding the dissolution of the country’s immigration agency, whose officials have been blamed in the March 27 fire.

• A Mexican judge Saturday ordered the immigration director of Mexico’s northern border state Chihuahua to stand trial for his failure to manage a deadly fire at an immigration detention centre which caused the death of 40 refugees.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Foo Fighters recently released a new song called “Rescued” without their original drummer, Taylor Hawkins, which is great to see. Kudos to Dave for having the strength to carry on. I know how it is to lose a friend and band member, it is extremely sad and painful. When you lose a brother, friend, a band member, there are two outcomes for the band: Outcome 1: You can retire the band, by starting a new band, or retire from music. Outcome 2: Carry on, but with a replacement.

Technical

• There’s retro and then there’s retro; Void Pyramid is an RPG harks back to the days of the 8-bits.

• 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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