● 04.25.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 25/04/2023: RapidDisk 9.1.0 and Microsoft Revenue Down in Many Areas

Posted in News Roundup at 4:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we will be visiting Jill’s computer museum to check out The Chumby in Jill’s Treasure Hunt. Then we take a look at some new offering from Pine64.

• Great new releases of Fedora and Ubuntu, growing pains as Red Hat turns 30, Firefox continues to improve, old drive encryption can be cracked, and KDE Korner.

• Join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy in the 54th episode of the WordPress Briefing as she explores the concept of the four freedoms of open source and likens it to today’s Bill of Rights for the open web.

Applications

• RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool.

Instructionals/Technical

• You may not spend much time contemplating the characteristics of the file systems on your Linux system, but the differences between the various file system types can be both interesting and highly relevant. This article explains commands that you can use to verify your file system types and describes their differences.

• Hello, dear friends. In this post, you will learn how to install CyberPanel on Ubuntu 22.04 / 20.04. This is one of the best admin panels that we can find for all Linux and the installation of this is very easy.

• VirtualBox 7 + Fedora 38: The perfect combination for virtualization enthusiasts. Our installation guide has all the details.

• Yarn is a powerful JavaScript package manager that is compatible with npm and helps automate the process of installing, updating, configuring, and removing npm packages. Yarn provides speed and reliability by caching downloaded packages and parallelizing operations. In this tutorial, we will cover how to install both the latest version and classic version of Yarn on Ubuntu, along with an overview of basic Yarn commands and options.

• Whether you are running Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 or any other version of this Linux, here we learn the commands to install XFCE GUI on Ubuntu Linux running on AWS EC2 Instance.

• Redis is a popular and open-source in-memory key-value data store. It supports various data structures such as Hash, Lists, Sets, Strings, and many more. This tutorial will show you how to install and configure Redis on the AlmaLinux 9 server.

• Cacti is an open-source web-based monitoring tool based on PHP and MySQL. This guide will teach you how to install the cacti monitoring tool on the Rocky Linux system.

• Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster, released in April 2023, brings forth many exciting features. Despite intense competition from OSes such as macOS and Windows, Ubuntu has still managed to create a niche for itself in the market.

• If you are an Ubuntu aficionado fascinated by macOS’s layout, you can imbibe the look and feel onto your Ubuntu 23.04 desktop. With these basic but effective methods, you can make Ubuntu look like macOS.

• So let’s start customizing your Ubuntu 23.04 desktop so it looks like macOS.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

Fedora Family / IBM

• Debugging operators can be tricky, especially if the operator needs to be debugged on a live cluster, which is useful for developing Red Hat OpenShift cluster operators. Remotely running delve debugger inside the container helps in this case. This article is about debugging operators live in an OpenShift cluster on the fly by rebuilding the operator container image and using go dlv remotely through the oc port-forward.

• Container image size matters. Let’s look at an experiment that reduced Apache HTTP and NGINX servers to micro container images. This article walks through the process we used to achieve the final result, plus how many megabytes (MB) this approach saved.

• For this experiment, we used Fedora RPMs, but a similar approach should work in other operating systems or container images, as you see in the list of available images (there is an Apache HTTP server image that uses CentOS Stream 8 and 9 RPMs).

• A shortcut: If you are only interested in the result and want to try out the micro variant of Apache HTTP or NGINX server container images, check out the images in the following registries.

• Install Red Hat OpenShift Local on your own machine to test your applications and configurations before deployment.

Debian Family

• The voting period for the Debian Project Leader election has ended, with all of the votes tallied we announce the winner is: Jonathan Carter, who has been elected for the forth time.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Last week, Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 23.04. The latest version of its Linux distribution includes improved Azure Active Directory support, a new desktop installer, and other enterprise-focused features.

Devices/Embedded

• ROS is a software run-time and communication protocol, intended to allow complex software to be designed without specific hardware knowledge. Also available on Windows and MacOS, ROS versions for Ubuntu are linked to the version of Ubuntu.

• “ROS is an open-source robot meta-operating system,” according to iWave. “It performs operating-system-like functions such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message passing between processes, and package management. ROS also includes tools and libraries for acquiring, constructing, writing, and running code across multiple computers.”

Open Hardware/Modding

• When a baby cries, it is almost always due to something that is wrong, which could include, among other things, hunger, thirst, stomach pain, or too much noise.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Latin America is undoubtedly a thriving hub for open source software development. The region boasts a significant number of highly skilled open-source developers, and the community is consistently making remarkable strides towards creating innovative solutions that cater to various industries.

Programming/Development

• Next.js is a popular React-based framework for building scalable web apps. It can also be used to build desktop apps using Tauri or Nextron, or mobile apps using Iconic. Although it comes bare-bones, it has a vast ecosystem and strong community support.

• What is a Laravel?

• Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web application framework that has revolutionized the way web development is done. Created in 2011 by Taylor Otwell, Laravel has quickly become one of the most popular PHP frameworks in the world, and for good reason.

• I completed a first startup challenge I set for myself. 24 hours and 30 days to build an MVP and find people to try it. How it went and what’s next?

• In a previous blog post I described the use of virtual postings to track accidental personal/family expenses. I’ve always been uncomfortable with that, and in hledger 1yr I outlined a potential scheme for finally addressing the virtual posting problem.

• Consider these two people, each captured in the midst of delivering a technical talk.

• Based on appearances alone, what do you think of them?

• The person on the left is a woman. She’s also pretty young, one might infer something about her level of experience accordingly. I imagine that she has led a much different life than I have, and may have a much different perspective, worldview, identity, and politics than I. Does she complain about sexism and discrimination in her work? Is she a feminist? Does she lean left or right on the political spectrum?

• The person on the right looks like most of the hackers I’ve met. You’ve met someone who looks like this a thousand times. He is a man, white and middle-aged – that suggests a fair bit of experience. He probably doesn’t experience or concern himself with race or gender discrimination in the course of his work. He just focuses on the software. His life experiences probably map relatively well onto my own, and we may share a similar worldview and identity.

• Making these assumptions is a part of human nature – it’s a useful shortcut in many situations. But they are assumptions based only on appearances. What are the facts?

Perl / Raku

• This week saw a number of remarkable releases: first of all a new version of Rakudo (2023.04), which was released by Justin DeVuyst (with the binary packages for various Linux distributions by Claudio Ramirez, including for the latest Ubuntu and Fedora). This was followed up by the release of Rakudo Star 2023.04 by Anton Oks.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• In this article, we will explore the techniques for detecting keypresses in Bash scripts and how to make your script wait for user input before proceeding. This skill is essential when developing interactive shell applications that require user interaction or confirmation before executing specific actions.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• President López Obrador has tested positive for COVID-19 for a third time, but he says he is fine and will return to work within the week.

• Kristie Dusenberry, a mother and grandmother who lives with her family on a farm in American Falls, Idaho, knows all too well the devastating impacts of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Proprietary

• Microsoft currently occupies most of the space in Millennium Corporate Park. CBRE is marketing 497,193 square feet out of the 537,000 square-foot campus. This plan was followed by Microsoft’s earlier plans to reduce office space by 1.7 million square feet by not renewing leases in Bellevue and Issaquah. Microsoft has also put the development of campus expansion project on hold.

• Microsoft is investigating an ongoing issue preventing some customers from using the search functionality across multiple Microsoft 365 services.

• Microsoft has agreed to stop bundling its Teams remote collaboration software with its Office productivity suite, according to Financial Times.

• Salesforce, the tech giant that owns Seattle-based Tableau, is further contributing to the softening office market in the area by giving up significant amounts of office space in two Tableau buildings located in Seattle and Kirkland, according to a report in the Seattle Times. The company confirmed the news in April, revealing plans to sublease almost 120,000 square feet at the Data 1 building in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, close to Tableau’s headquarters, as well as an additional 92,000 square feet at Kirkland Urban, a mixed-use development.

Security

• New cyber research connects the infamous North Korea-aligned Lazarus Group behind the Linux malware attack called Operation DreamJob to the 3CX supply-chain attack.

• Since launching the Auto-refreshing Official CVE feed as an alpha feature in the 1.25 release, we have made significant improvements and updates. We are excited to announce the release of the beta version of the feed. This blog post will outline the feedback received, the changes made, and talk about how you can help as we prepare to make this a stable feature in a future Kubernetes Release.

• I have lately been trying to learn more about the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) as they are capable of key creation and sealing secrets in a secure manner. They are common hardware these days and make for a reasonable ways to store secrets.

• Mozilla confirmed a rare memory leak in recent versions of its open source web browser Firefox that occurs under rare conditions.

• The organization released Firefox 112.0.1 a few days ago, the latest stable version of the web browser. The update addressed a issue related to cookies in Firefox. Affected Firefox versions would set the last used date of cookies thousands of years in the future, which had the result that users were logged out of web services.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Biden administration has been quietly deploying and expanding programs that surveil what people say on social media, using tools that allow agents and analysts to invisibly monitor the vast amount of protected speech that occurs online. For years, these kinds of tools have been increasingly used for a range of controversial law enforcement and intelligence purposes. But some of the most troubling programs continuously monitor the social media posts of non-citizens to decide who gets to live, study, or stay in the United States.

• A recent national survey conducted by Qvik, a Finnish mobile app development company, has found that over half (53%) of Finnish people are worried about the security of their bank or credit card information when saving their details on mobile apps for payments. However, despite these concerns, people of almost all ages still prefer to pay for applications on their smartphones or tablets using a bank or credit card.

Defence/Aggression

• Susan Rice, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, is stepping down from her post, President Biden announced Monday.

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

• The bombshell 911 news this past week, is that a freshly-published court filing from Jul 2021, has revealed at least two of the 19 alleged “hijackers” may have been recruited by the CIA.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• If the bill passes Congress, it will mandate the nation’s energy ministry to research the feasibility of a state-owned hydrogen company.

Finance

• (This was originally written last week, but I didn’t get around to posting. I’ve set the publish date to today).

• A recent TV ad in Japan for the world’s largest online retailer was supposed to highlight its impressive automated warehouses and logistics, but instead it served to connect the dots for me on something I’ve been thinking about for years.

• BuzzFeed, Lyft, Whole Foods and Deloitte all recently announced layoffs affecting thousands of US workers. They join a growing list of companies cutting back on their workforce this year amid concerns about economic uncertainty, as well as the need to rightsize after going on a hiring spree during the pandemic.

• Rapid (previously known as RapidAPI), a startup that built out an API marketplace valued at $1 billion last year, is cutting 50% of its staff TechCrunch has learned.

• According to an email to employees from CEO Marc Friend viewed by TechCrunch, the move is part of “a significant restructuring” in an effort to “right-size the company.”

• A slew of shocking media firings, all occurring in less than 24 hours for different reasons, has thrown the cable news industry into a tailspin.

• Why it matters: Cable news is already under extraordinary pressure to survive. But the drama engulfing some of the industry’s top personnel is putting a spotlight on how chaotic the industry has become.

• South Africa’s commercial capital, Johannesburg, remains Africa’s wealthiest city.

• According to government statistics released Monday, inflation hasn’t been lower since October 2021, although interest rates remain high.

• With the IRS Files, Propublica ripped away the veil of performative complexity disguising the scams that the ultra-rich use to amass billions and billions (and billions and billions) of dollars, paying next to no tax, or even no tax at all.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Musk trolled and punished people by forcing them to have blue checks, which were meant to be a sought-after status symbol that would drive revenue.

• Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch said that the former host had been “rendered obsolete by swift advances in lying technology.”

• Primetime host Tucker Carlson’s abrupt firing from Fox News has sent shock waves throughout the political and media ecosystem, driving a wedge between the conservative movement and the biggest platform in cable news.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Ahead of Rishi Sunak’s first event on LinkedIn, the British prime minister invited members of the public to submit questions that he would answer live.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Was Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” a rip-off of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On”?

• Today, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Apple’s favor in the ongoing Epic v. Apple litigation over Apple’s App Store rules that force developers like Epic to pay Apple up to 30% of the revenue they earn from digital transactions in apps. Its litigation against Google is ongoing.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Suppose we wish to convert strings to numbers. There are various reasons for this; a trivial one is to colorize IRC nicknames or by a hostname according to some algorithm. Lagrange apparently does this to colorize gemini capsules, so you might cheat and look at how it does that. Hostnames are already numbers, sequences of them, though we may want to color particular hosts in particular ways, maybe hosts under .com should be similar to one another. Another and more typical way would be to feed the sequence of numbers into a hash function, a digital equivalent of sausage.

• Well, I’ve got a rub or two that I’d love to discuss. Not as dramatic as death, only as dramatic as taxes. The rubs in question have to do with sustainable living, and the so-called Green Movement. The former concept I really appreciate, the latter I view as a form of societal cancer.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• My capsule currently uses Jetforce, a Python-based Gemini server. I’ve been quite happy with its versatility and ease of setup, and I think it works well for anyone who wants a no-nonsense hosting solution.

• The invocation for Jetforce includes an “–index-file FILE” flag, which tells the server to check if a given directory contains a file named “FILE”, and if so, serve that file instead of listing the directory’s contents. I have enabled this flag on my server, as I suspect most others have. If the index file is not present, the server still lists the directory’s contents. I did not take this fact into mind–I simply assumed the server would give a resource-not-found error.

• 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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