● 04.26.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 26/04/2023: Release of Git 2.40.1 and Canonical Pushing Microsoft Clown Computing Again

Posted in News Roundup at 12:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• GNU Linux-libre 6.3 is based on recent Linux kernel 6.3 release but strips out all binary blobs, non-free firmware, and any code subject to a proprietary license.

Instructionals/Technical

• Learn about customizing your system’s look and feel with i3 window manager in this super-detailed guide.

• Fedora Linux 38 has been released a few days ago! If you are a newbie who wants to install and test the latest version of Fedora, then we are here to help you in setting up Fedora 38 desktop operating system. This step by step guide explains how to download the latest Fedora 38 workstation edition, and then how to install Fedora 38 with screenshots.

• Wikit is a free and open-source command-line program for easily viewing Wikipedia summaries of search queries on the Linux command line; it is built using Nodejs.

• The verb Wikit (derived from “wikipedia it“) means looking up something on wikipedia.org, the popular and remarkable open-source encyclopedia on the Internet.

• In my “Capturing text screens on modern operating systems” article published back in 2013, I mentioned finding a very promising program called Qodem. It has since reached maturity and version 1.0 was released in 2017. I have been enjoying it on a regular basis to reminisce about the glorious days of using Terminate and Minicom in the nineties, and even packaged it in both OpenBSD and NetBSD.

• Qodem has built in support for SSH, and also lets you spawn a local shell and SSH from there, which allows authentication using SSH keys.

• For the purpose of this article, I used two Fedora machines and installed the ckermit and lrzsz packages to handle the Kermit and ZMODEM protocols respectively. There is a qodem package as well, but it only bundles the X11 binary. I prefer to use the curses version, so I built it from source.

Games

• The survival game Grounded from Obsidian Entertainment and Xbox Game Studios has now released version 1.2 and it got bumped up to Verified on Steam Deck.

• People have used their Steam Deck to do all sorts of crazy things but this latest is nuts. It seems people in Ukraine are using it to help work an automatic turret. From ТРО Медіа on Facebook, they shared a post giving a few details into it with it translating roughly as: [...]

• Inspired a fair bit by some classics from the 90s like Hexen and Heretic, Lichenvale is a first-person slasher out now. This is the first solo release from developer Filip Zemljak, who was previously a Gameplay Programmer at Ubisoft and it comes with Native Linux support (works on Steam Deck too).

• Victoria 3 from Paradox Interactive is getting it’s first “Immersion Pack” on May 22nd and here’s what to expect from it.

• Valve has put up Steam Puzzle Fest, a big sale on all different kinds of puzzle games along with demos and previews of upcoming games too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Gear is the name of the big bundle of software the KDE team create, and with the KDE Gear 23.04 release there’s new apps and plenty of improvements to making the desktop experience better.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Released over the weekend by Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 6.3 has already landed in Ubuntu’s official Mainline Kenrel Archive and it’s available for all Ubuntu users and supported on amd64 (x86_64), AArch64 (ARM64), ARMhf, PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64el), and IBM System z (s390x) architectures.

• I’ve only tested Linux kernel 6.3 on a fresh Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) installation and everything went smoothly. Of course, you can install it on any supported Ubuntu release, such as Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish).

• We are happy to announce that Ubuntu Pro is now available as a native product on AWS. You can now enjoy premium enhanced security coverage for your Ubuntu machines by launching Ubuntu Pro instances from the EC2 console with no additional requirements, subscriptions or long term commitments.

• On behalf of the Canonical confidential computing team, I am happy to announce the limited preview of Ubuntu Confidential VMs with Intel TDX on Microsoft Azure. As part of the DCev5-series and ECesv5-series VMs, they’re available for you to try today! This exciting development is an important milestone in Ubuntu’s journey to power the confidential public cloud of the future.

• With cloud technology enabling faster and more flexible infrastructure deployment than ever before, security challenges have also become more complex. Traditionally, any vulnerability within the millions of lines of code in the cloud’s privileged system software (such as the operating system, hypervisor, and firmware) would compromise the confidentiality and integrity of the running code and data. Similarly, a malicious cloud administrator could potentially access the VM or its platform, compromising the security of your data.

Open Hardware/Modding

• In a list of things I thought I’d ever read about alongside Raspberry Pi, “coffee tables” and “sand” were not near the top. Sisyphus started life as an art installation for museums, but Raspberry Pi has allowed the company behind this mesmerising creation to scale up and offer you “museum-quality kinetic sculpture” for your own living room. They’re named “Sisyphus”, of course, because they never finish pushing the ball bearing across the sand, leaving patterns behind it.

• The changes are largely the same as for the new pi3hat: [...]

• This infrared sensor module works by emitting infrared light from an LED and monitoring the reflection. When one of the wheel’s spokes passes in front of the sensor, the reflection becomes strong and easy to detect. An Arduino Nano board measures the time between those events and multiplies the result by the number of spokes to determine the total time for a complete revolution. Divide 60 by that number and you get the RPM. The Arduino continuously calculates that value and displays the number on a small OLED screen. Power comes from a 9V battery.

• The premise of the arm project was to utilize a total of five servo motors for manipulating each degree of freedom, as well as an Arduino Leonardo and a PCA9685 driver for controlling them. Once the components had been selected, Build Some Stuff then moved onto the next step of creating 3D models of each of the robot arm’s joints in Fusion 360 before 3D printing them. He also made a scaled-down version of the larger arm assembly and replaced the servo motors with potentiometers, therefore allowing him to translate the model’s position into degrees for the motors.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• This feature isn’t even only in the Qualcomm 630 chipset, it’s in practically all Qualcomm devices. Some third party Android roms go as far as to obscure the IP address of your phone by proxying this http request with another server. The rom they have tested obviously didn’t.

• This feature is not even limited to Qualcomm devices, this practice happens in practically all devices that have both GPS and [Internet] because people don’t like waiting very long for their position when launching their navigation software. The NitroPhone has their GPS provided by Broadcom chips instead of Qualcomm ones so obviously it won’t make the same HTTP requests, doesn’t make it any more or less secure though.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Node.js is used to build fast, highly scalable network applications based on an event-driven non-blocking input/output model, and single-threaded asynchronous programming.

• A web application framework is a combination of libraries, helpers, and tools that provide a way to effortlessly build and run web applications. A web framework lays out a foundation for building a website/app.

• Part 2 of The Tanenbaum–Torvalds Debates. 16 generalized software development lessons from the debate of microkernels vs. monolithic kernels, and two computer science visionaries — Andrew Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds.

• There is a new stable Git release containing fixes for three separate security vulnerabilities. The fixes have also been backported to the older v2.39.3, v2.38.5, v2.37.7, v2.36.6, v2.35.8, v2.34.8, v2.33.8, v2.32.7, v2.31.8, and v2.30.9 releases. Sites using Git in untrusted environments — or with untrusted input — should probably upgrade soon.

• The first official GCC 13 release is just around the corner, and you may be a bit surprised to find out that gccrs will not be included in it. The aim of this blogpost is to go into a little bit more detail as to why this was done and how you can still try out our compiler if you’d like to.

• Back in 2022, we started investigating the process of merging our code upstream with GCC. Quickly after that, our frontend was accepted for the merge, which was a great moment for us – it demonstrated people’s faith in the gccrs community and in the project’s goal of having an alternative GCC toolchain implementation of the Rust Programming Language. Given that the compiler is still not ready, we decided to go through that process with some limitations.

• The expectation we had was that by making it clear the compiler was still not ready for real Rust code, we could get valuable feedback from early users as well as more engagement from two different communities – the Rust one as well as the GCC one. We would continue to push as hard as possible right up until the release’s deadline to get as much working as we could, but now that the GCC 13.1 release is upon us, we are still not there in terms of completeness.

• What this means is that when using gccrs, you are still not able to do “easy Rust things” – examples like “Hello World!”, or using the standard library in general, will not work. Similarly, even more complex concepts which are essential to the Rust Programming Language like borrow-checking are not implemented yet, and gccrs will not be considered complete without such features. We believe that this would cause a lot of confusion for unsuspecting users, who might see gccrs as part of an official GCC release and expect a working compiler.

• Philip Herron and Arthur Cohen have posted an update on the status of gccrs — the GCC frontend for the Rust language — and why it will not be a part of the upcoming GCC 13 release.

Leftovers

• It’s been a long time coming, but this is my 100th post as part of 100 Days To Offload. 100 Days To Offload was created by Kev Quirk to get people to publish 100 posts on their personal blog in a year. “The point is to just write”.

• Sometimes it pays to voice your displeasure with something. In Zimbabwe, that is rarely the case and so when we see it happen, we just have to take a minute to celebrate. So, this is what having a voice feels like huh? Insurance is one of the bedrocks of a functioning economy.

Science

• A pair of anthropologists demonstrated that multiples of this number sync up with the rhythms of planets in the solar system that are visible to the naked eye, which underscores the astronomical sophistication of these ancient Pre-Columbian peoples.

• “They include Danish, Arab and Germanic coins as well as pieces of jewellery of Scottish and Irish origins,” according to The Viking Herald. It is being said that the coins are from King Harald “Bluetooth” (Blåtand) Gormsson’s time.

• For this test flight, the two main experiments were government-sponsored: the UAE’s 22-pound (10-kilogram) rover Rashid, named after Dubai’s royal family, and the Japanese Space Agency’s orange-sized sphere designed to transform into a wheeled robot on the moon. With a science satellite already around Mars and an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, the UAE was seeking to extend its presence to the moon.

• Shortly after landing, Swedish and Norweigan authorities were notified, the SSC confirmed later on Tuesday. The rocket and its payload were found to be in good condition and were transported back to Esrange Space Center in Sweden by helicopter.

Education

• Having reached no agreement with the government on systematically raising teachers’ salaries and balancing their loads, the Latvian Education and Science Workers’ Trade Union (LIZDA) starts a three-day strike on Monday, April 24, with more than 19,000 teachers participating, and goes on a protest march in Rīga from the trade union building to the Saeima.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• European Commission Speech Brussels, 24 Apr 2023 Chair, Honourable Members

• At our last structured dialogue, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine…

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 24 Apr 2023 As part of Global Gateway, the EU is announcing a new contribution of €70 million for two Team Europe Initiatives (TEIs) to boost agri-businesses, energy and connectivity in Togo in line with the country’s 2025-development plan, in partnership with France and Germany and the European Investment Bank

• In solidarity with teachers, around 1,000 health workers participated in the protest on Monday, April 24. Ilze Aizsilniece, head of the Latvian Medical Society, has repeated her readiness to organize a strike in the autumn. The industry ministry hopes to prevent this with a clear plan for predictable additional funding for the health sector.

• Over 1 million children in the WHO European Region have missed all or some routine vaccinations since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

• Take for instance, hanging out with friends, in person. Since 1976, the number of times per week teens go out with friends — and without their parents — held basically steady for nearly 30 years. In 2004, it slid a bit. Then in 2010, it nosedived.

• “It was just like a Black Diamond ski slope straight down,” Twenge tells NPR. “So these really big changes occur.”

• At the same time, around 2012, time on social media began to soar. In 2009, only about half of teens used social media every day, Twenge reports. In 2017, 85% used it daily. By 2022, 95% of teens said they use some social media, and about a third say they use it constantly, a poll from Pew Research Center found.

• “Now, in the most recent data, 22% of 10th grade girls spend seven or more hours a day on social media,” Twenge says, which means many teenage girls are doing little else than sleeping, going to school and engaging with social media.

Proprietary

• 3M has become one of the corporate firms impacted by the turbulent economic period as it announced significant layoffs due to the recession and a slump in demand for goods.

• More than 183,000 global technology-sector employees have been laid off since the beginning of 2023

• Meta is the latest big-name tech company in the layoffs spotlight, joining Electronic Arts, Amazon, Palantir Technologies, Twilio, Zoom, eBay, Okta, Splunk, PayPal, IBM, SAP, Spotify, Alphabet, Intel, Microsoft, Coinbase, Cisco, Salesforce, HP, Roku, Beyond Meat and Twitter in making job cuts.

• More than 183,000 global technology-sector employees have been laid off since the start of 2023, according to data compiled by the website Layoffs.fyi.

• Here’s a look at the list of big names across a number of sectors that have been cutting back their workforces.

• Microsoft is investigating ongoing Microsoft 365 issues preventing some Exchange Online customers from accessing their mailboxes.

• “We’ve identified an issue affecting Exchange Online connectivity for users in North America and are investigating further,” the company tweeted earlier.

• “More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX546390.”

Security

• Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox, java-11-openjdk, and thunderbird), Debian (apache2), Fedora (kernel), Oracle (emacs), Red Hat (emacs, haproxy, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, pcs, pki-core:10.6, and qatzip), and SUSE (avahi, cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, giflib, kernel, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-tools- container, virt-operator-container, ovmf, and protobuf-c).

• There’s an update to a case announced in November 2022 in which five former Methodist Hospital employees in Memphis Tennessee were charged with criminal violations of HIPAA.

• According to the indictment, between November 2017 and December 2020, the five were charged with conspiring with Roderick Harvey to unlawfully disclose patient information in violation HIPAA. Harvey paid Kirby Dandridge, Sylvia Taylor, Kara Thompson, Melanie Russell, and Adrianna Taber to provide him with names and phone numbers of Methodist patients who had been involved in motor vehicle accidents.

• Harvey then sold the information to third parties that included personal injury attorneys and chiropractors.

• The Elk Grove Unified School District confirmed Monday it is investigating tax filing issues for some of its employees.

• KCRA 3 first received a tip about the potential identity theft two weeks ago but heard about official action from the district on Friday when we obtained a survey sent to some district employees.

Privacy/Surveillance

• In an open letter, seven secure messaging apps—including Signal and WhatsApp—point out that the UK’s Online Safety Bill could destroy end-to-end encryption: [...]

Defence/Aggression

• President of Latvia Egils Levits, said Monday after meeting with Estonian President Alar Karis that both countries were in favor of a faster accession of Ukraine to NATO.

• Latvia has responded to Ukraine’s request for anti-aircraft missiles and has made a decision to donate all the remaining Stinger systems the Latvian army has, said Latvian Defense Minister Ināra Mūrniece (National Alliance) at the Ukraine defense contact group meeting in Ramstein, Germany on April 21.

• The killing and deportation of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces in the early 1900s is being remembered in Southern California. Only recently has its enormous Armenian American community been able to celebrate U.S. recognition that the systematic oppression was genocide. Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day has long been marked in the Los Angeles region by big rallies and marches. In 2021, Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to use the word “genocide” to describe the violence, over the objections of Turkey, successor to the empire. More than 200,000 people of Armenian descent are estimated to live in Los Angeles County, where April is celebrated as Armenian History Month.

• Nevada’s Department of Corrections has agreed to pay $1.6 million to the family of a handcuffed inmate who was shot and killed in 2014 by a prison guard trainee armed with a shotgun. The deal was reached Monday in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by relatives of Carlos Perez. The settlement still needs to be approved by the state’s Board of Examiners. A Department of Corrections spokesman declined to comment. Perez’s death at High Desert State Prison raised questions about the use of shotguns by prison guards. The Department of Corrections removed shotguns from all its facilities less than two years after the shooting.

• Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr., near the very beginning of his April 19 announcement to run for President in the Democratic Party spoke these words: “Fifty-five years ago last month, I sat as a 14-year-old boy behind my father as he now announced in a Senate caucus room in Washington, DC, his campaign for President of [...]”

• There has been a recent flurry of proposals to have the U.S. military launch a full-scale war against Mexican drug cartels – primarily to stem the alleged fentanyl crisis. Former Attorney General William P. Barr initiated the latest campaign with an op-ed in the March 2, 2023, Wall Street Journal.

• Dmitri S. Peskov’s comments highlighted the Moscow elite’s uneven participation in a war that has cost the lives of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers.

• Juan Guaidó said he crossed the border into Colombia and hours later was put on a plane to the United States.

• A prosecutor opened an investigation into the killing of about 60 people by men in uniforms of the national military. Days earlier, the authorities said they would investigate the killing of seven boys.

• The principle of territorial integrity would be affirmed if Ukraine wins U.N. support for a special court to deal with Russia’s invasion – a “war of aggression.”

• Some officials said the explosions, which killed at least 15, were caused by an accident. But a rise in militant attacks has put the region on edge.

• A grain deal that got Ukrainian exports moving and eased a global food crisis is now fueling protests in Romania and among other staunch supporters of Kyiv.

• Latvia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) said April 24 it had summoned the senior Chinese diplomat in the country in response to statements made by the Ambassador of China to France, Lu Shaye, during a TV interview on April 21.

• Remarks by China’s ambassador to France questioning the sovereignty of ex-Soviet states threatened to upset China’s efforts to balance courting Europe with supporting Russia.

• The U.S. and European members of the Security Council had declined to send their foreign ministers to the meeting chaired by Sergey V. Lavrov, which was a key event for Russia’s rotating presidency.

• Reporter Martin Kuz sees potential for Ukraine to find a kind of positive transformation known as post-traumatic growth on the other side of the war.

• Foreign governments are evacuating their citizens from Sudan amid a battle for power between two rival generals. While foreign evacuations continue, many Sudanese are risking their lives to escape the violence by driving to the border with Egypt.

• Russia’s government allows public opinion polls, but some say the surveys are skewed by the reluctance of opposition supporters to express themselves.

Environment

• “…the earthquake had a depth of 84 km beneath the seabed…”

Energy/Transportation

• A Nevada Democratic U.S. senator wants Congress to step in to ensure mining companies can use established mineral claims to dump waste on neighboring federal lands. Federal agencies had allowed that before a U.S. appeals court adopted a stricter ruling of a 150-year-old mining law. The 2022 ruling from the 9th Circuit said companies must prove minerals exist under federal land where they dump tailings and other waste. Environmentalists largely praised it, though it’s worrisome for President Joe Biden’s clean energy agenda. Nevada U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s office tells The Associated Press she’ll introduce a bill Tuesday that essentially would counteract the 9th Circuit ruling in an Arizona copper mining case.

• “She is our hero, and we are thrilled that she is receiving this well-deserved recognition,” CODEPINK said in a press release.

• “…a bold vision that encompasses the generation of a minimum of 120 gigawatts of offshore wind power…”

Finance

• Housing developers are converting empty office towers into housing as part of an effort to revive struggling downtown business districts that emptied during the pandemic. Conversion projects are underway in New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Dallas.

• The answer depends on how you measure success.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• An open thread on Tucker Carlson’s firing.

• The host’s abrupt dismissal upends Fox News’s prime-time lineup — and the carefully honed impression that the ratings star was all but untouchable.

• Fox News is parting ways with Tucker Carlson, less than a week after settling a lawsuit over the network’s 2020 election reporting. The network said in a press release Monday that the popular and controversial prime-time host’s last program aired on Friday.

• A battery and defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump, starting tomorrow, piles atop other legal challenges facing the former president.

• NEPAC serves as a platform for Nato and allies to plan programmes aimed at achieving the alliance’s training and exercise goals.

• The city suspended activities with its twin city Yaroslavl last spring, after Russia first attacked Ukraine.

• Finland needs to realise how much work must still be done to entice workers from abroad, according to political scientist Pasi Saukkonen.

• Four faculty members applaud the university for prohibiting caste-based harassment and discrimination under its non-discrimination policy, and say caste also should be a protected category in the Standard Practice Guide.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Die Aktuelle promoted an interview as the first with the retired Formula 1 driver since a 2013 accident. But artificial intelligence had generated the responses.

• Dong Yuyu was a longtime writer and editor at a top Chinese Communist Party newspaper who had frequently met with foreign diplomats and journalists.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• A draft law that aims to criminalize and prosecute those who “create conditions for online piracy” has been approved by Bulgaria’s Council of Ministers. The proposed amendments are Bulgaria’s response to heavy criticism from the United States, most publicly via the USTR’s Special 301 Reports. It’s hoped that prison sentences of up to six years will send a deterrent message.

• 1337x.to, one of the world’s most-visited torrent sites, has trouble finding recent torrents. While uploaders continue to add new content to the site, the broken search function only shows files that were uploaded on or before April 10th. Thus far, the site’s operator has yet to comment on the technical problem.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• It has been forever since the Player and I have worked on this story. Time to change that! I have a lot of ideas for Lantashi, and the adventures that take place after the campaign the story is based on.

Technical

• I’ve been extatic with the suckless tiling desktop manager dwm on my notebook. Feeling all cocky I decided to switch my main machine to dwm as well. The result is great, but it took more time than I imagined.

Internet/Gemini

• for setting me straight on an Antenna detail or two critical to my gemlog entries showing on Antenna!

• In related news, I was very happy to receive some nearly immediate email after relaunching my capsule. I don’t need a lot of attention, but I generally need more than zero to feel effort is worthwhile.

• 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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