● 06.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 02/06/2023: Elive ‘Retrowave’ Stable and Microsoft’s Half a Billion Dollar Fine for LinkeIn Surveillance in Europe

Posted in News Roundup at 7:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Featuring three variants with 15.6-inch, 16-inch, and 17.3-inch 16:10 LED-Backlight displays with up to an impressive 240 Hz Hz refresh rate and up to 2560×1440 pixels resolution, the 2nd Gen TUXEDO Gemini Linux laptops support Advanced Optimus for automatically driving the display through the NVIDIA GPU for best performance.

• They also feature G-SYNC for synchronizing refresh rates to the graphics card’s rendered frames to avoid screen tearing and nearly full sRGB coverage (95 to 99%). All three display variants of the TUXEDO Gemini series feature non-glare displays that are perfect for gaming.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Leveraging OpenZFS to Build Your Own Storage Appliance, Install OpenBSD as a VM, Set up your own CalDAV and CardDAV servers on OpenBSD, display basic computer information using DMI table decoder, Gpart CheatSheet, Rob Pike on the Origin of Unix Dot File Names, and more

• How the recent XFS bug was squashed, insights into why Microsoft built their own Linux from scratch, and recent attacks on Archive.org.

Applications

• Apple Books is an e-book reading and store application. It primarily receives EPUB content from the Apple Books store, but users can also add their own EPUB and Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

• Apple Books is proprietary software and not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

• As a system administrator, your job involves managing and maintaining the IT infrastructure of an organization. You are responsible for ensuring that the network, servers, and applications are running smoothly, and any issues that arise are resolved promptly. To accomplish this, you need the right set of tools in your arsenal.

• Regulators around the world are hammering out how to regulate artificial intelligence. The fast-moving, nebulous technology is hard to define, presenting a hurdle for lawmakers.

• Alfons reported that the “Update” button in the YouTube downloader (see Internet menu), which downloads the latest ‘youtube-dl’ script, doesn’t work.

• Thanks for reporting that, it is fixed. It is a PET package, in the ‘noarch’ repository, now ‘youtubedl-gui-0.4.3.pet’, not yet uploaded. Anyway, it will be in the next release of Easy.

• Looking for a quick and easy way to turn short snippets of text into large (and undisputedly cool) ASCII banners? Check out Calligraphy, which hit Flathub this week.

• This release comes with dramatic changes, and the most noticeable change is the support for a new kernel mount API in libmount.

• The classic mount(2) system call has been with us since the early days of Linux. This interface is quite simple: you specify the source, target, filesystem options, mount flags, and ask the kernel to do the job. Unfortunately, the interface is too simplistic. These days, attaching a filesystem requires multiple steps, and it’s important for userspace to assist in these steps and receive feedback from the kernel after each one.

• Learn about selecting file managers for Linux operating systems.

• [...]

• Linux file managers facilitate the management of files and folders, allowing users to navigate and access the content of their filesystem. Users can browse directories in the filesystem, view file hierarchies, and perform operations on files and folders.

• Some file manager come with unique features, such as network communication for file transfer or web browsing capabilities.

• To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 11 of the most useful open source web photo gallery software.

• This article spotlights alternative open source tools to sed, a stream editor for filtering and transforming text.

• ccat stands for “colorized cat.” It’s a simple yet powerful tool that, like the traditional cat command, reads files sequentially, writing them to standard output. However, the ccat command adds a visual advantage – color-coding. It makes your command-line experience more user-friendly, improving the readability and understanding of your code.

• Before diving in, you need to ensure you have ccat installed on your system. This process varies based on the Linux distribution you’re using, but here are the most common methods:

• For Ubuntu, Debian, and derivatives, the process begins by downloading the latest .deb package from the official ccat GitHub repository, which can be found at: https://github.com/jingweno/ccat. After downloading the package, you can install it using the dpkg command: [...]

• The cat command is Linux’s most basic way of combining files together. It’s short for conCATenation, but there’s more to this than just copy-pasting one file next to the other.

• This is how you normally use the cat command: [...]

Instructionals/Technical

• Google Earth is a popular mapping and geographical exploration application that allows users to explore the Earth’s surface and various locations using satellite imagery, aerial photography, and 3D models. Although Google Earth is primarily designed for Windows and macOS, it is possible to install and run it on Ubuntu as well.

• Evolution is a powerful and feature-rich email client for Linux systems, providing a comprehensive set of tools for managing your email, calendar, tasks, and contacts.

• In this article, we’ll explain how to use Ansible to build and deploy a Quarkus application. Quarkus is an exciting, lightweight Java development framework designed for cloud and Kubernetes deployments, and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform  is one of the most popular automation tools and a star product from Red Hat.

• Before discussing how to automate a Quarkus application deployment using Ansible, we need to ensure the prerequisites are in place. First, you have to install Ansible on your development environment. On a Fedora or a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine, this is achieved easily utilizing the dnf package manager: [...]

• Clementine is a popular and versatile music player for Linux systems, offering a range of features and a user-friendly interface.

• Pitivi is a popular open-source non-linear video editor that provides users with a user-friendly and intuitive interface to create and edit videos.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Co-Developed by Apple, with Linux running as a user-mode task. Seriously.

New Releases

• The Elive Team is pleased to announce the special stable release, featuring a synthwave-inspired appearance. This special version of Elive has undergone rigorous testing for months to ensure a strong stability and updated drivers. Many optimizations and improvements have been made to keep the system lightweight and efficient. The installer also includes an option to switch back to the default designs if you prefer them.

Debian Family

• I’ve just uploaded developers-reference 12.19, bringing the German translation status back to 100% complete, thanks to Carsten Schoenert. Some other translations however could use some updates: [...]

• Currently the smaller and cheaper USB-C docks start at about $25 and Dell has a new Vostro with 8G of RAM and 2*USB-C ports for $788. That gives a bit over $800 for a laptop and dock vs $795 for the cheapest Dell desktop which also has 8G of RAM. For every way of buying laptops and desktops (EG buying from Officeworks, buying on ebay, etc) the prices for laptops and desktops seem very similar. For all those comparisons the desktop will typically have a faster CPU and more options for PCIe cards, larger storage, etc. But if you don’t want to expand storage beyond the affordable 4TB NVMe/SSD devices, don’t need to add PCIe cards, and don’t need much CPU power then a laptop will do well. For the vast majority of the computer work I do my Thinkpad Carbon X1 Gen1 (from 2012) had plenty of CPU power.

• If someone who’s not an expert in PC hardware was to buy a computer of a given age then laptops probably aren’t more expensive than desktops even disregarding the fact that a laptop works without the need to purchase a monitor, a keyboard, or a mouse. I can get regular desktop PCs for almost nothing and get parts to upgrade them very cheaply but most people can’t do that. I can also get a decent second-hand laptop and USB-C dock for well under $400.

• For people doing serious programming or other compute or IO intensive tasks some variation on the server theme is the best option. That may be something more like the servers used by the r/homelab people than the corporate servers, or it might be something in the cloud, but a server is a server. If you are going to have a home server that’s a tower PC then it makes sense to put a monitor on it and use it as a workstation. If your server makes so much noise that you can’t spend much time in the same room or if it’s hosted elsewhere then using a laptop to access it makes sense.

• Desktop computers for PC gaming makes sense as no-one seems to be making laptops with moderately powerful GPUs. The most powerful GPUs draw 150W which is more than most laptop PSUs can supply and even if a laptop PSU could supply that much there would be the issue of cooling. The Steam Deck [1] and the Nintendo Switch [2] can both work with USB-C docks. The PlayStation 5 [3] has a 350W PSU and doesn’t support video over USB-C. The Steam Deck can do 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K at 120Hz but presumably the newer Steam games will need a desktop PC with a more powerful GPU to properly use such resolutions.

• The 5th monthly Sparky project and donate report of the 2023…

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Well, you’re in luck.

• Gesture support is coming to Cinnamon 5.8, Linux Mint says its latest monthly update. They don’t say an awful lot more about it than that, explaining…

Open Hardware/Modding

• Video: Handy scripts for the MiSTer FPGA

• I posted about Kirkstone 4.0.8 compile on March 23:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202303/openembedded-version-408-revision-1-compile.html

• In May this year, 4.0.10 was released, see OE/Yocto releases schedule:

• https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Releases

• So downloaded 4.0.10 and did a complete OE recompile. Didn’t time it this time, as was asleep when it finished, but it took roughly 1 day (24 hours) and 15 hours. Hardly worth the trouble, as not much has changed since 4.0.8: [...]

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Seems like Ubuntu is gearing up for an immutable desktop variant in 2024. Other than that, stream full HD with Netflix on Linux.

Programming/Development

• I was messing around with some code that implements a widget hierarchy today, and bumped into some interesting edge cases of virtual functions. Parameters with a default value behave in an unexpected way.

• Here is a vastly simplified code snippet: [...]

Python

Leftovers

• Clara and I are going through a bit of a Dutch obsession at the moment, from art, infrastructure, language, history, and food. This has only been reinforced from watching channels like Not Just Bikes, and from conversing with the few lovely Dutch readers among you who’ve found my ramblings and have reached out to say hallo. It’s a shame that my last name is just as unfortunate in Dutch as it is in German, though arguably it’s just as fitting.

Science

• Florida teen Dev Shah has won the 95th Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday night after a nail-biting final with 11 other spellers.

• Driving the news: The 14-year-old from Largo’s winning word was “psammophile,” a noun defined as an organism that prefers or thrives in sandy areas.

• The prize: $50,000 cash, a commemorative medal, the coveted Scripps Cup and a lifetime of bragging rights.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A new report published by the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition (SHCC) documents 1,989 attacks and threats against health care facilities and personnel across 32 countries and territories in armed conflict and situations of political violence throughout 2022.

• South Carolina will now only require a certificate of need for long-term care facilities, opening the health care market to smaller providers.

• Nothing is healthier or more happy-making than loving attachment. Don’t deprive yourself.

• The 25th Undergraduate Senate had their fourth and last meeting of the 2022-2023 academic year on Tuesday. The senators discussed eliminating fees associated with physical wellness courses and reforming campus healthcare to better meet student needs.

• On June 1st, World Milk Day is celebrated worldwide. In terms of the vitality of Finnish rural areas, the country’s 4,500 dairy farms play a significant role. Last year, dairy sales revenue on these farms exceeded the one-billion-euro mark. The dairy industry considers responsibility as a long-term key factor for success, with animal welfare being one of its most important components. As an example of implemented responsibility initiatives, the globally unique cattle healthcare monitoring system, Naseva, covers over 95% of dairy farms.

• Helsinki is soon hosting the Radical Health Festival Helsinki, an entirely new event for those interested in shaping the future of healthcare. The event aims to inspire radical steps for a healthy future with thought-provoking and interdisciplinary ideas.

• Radical Health Festival Helsinki 2023 will be held from June 12th to June 14th at the Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre, bringing together policymakers, health professionals, innovators, and health enthusiasts from around the world.

• Since launching in 2016, U-M Health’s food-composting initiative has not only steadily increased over time to avoid landfill wastes, but also benefited the broader community through local partnerships.

• Doctors at the Allina Health System, a wealthy nonprofit in the Midwest, aren’t allowed to see poor patients or children with too many unpaid medical bills.

• The issue would be one way, according to the paper, for the Christian Democrats to gain a foothold in an eventual government programme.

Proprietary

• Big Tech is struggling to evolve beyond a flawed model, and generative AI isn’t helping.

Pseudo-Open Source

Lock-in

• If you are a Samsung Galaxy owner looking to upgrade your device’s firmware, you can easily do that using the Odin Flash Tool. But wait, are you a Linux user and feeling left out of the loop because Odin is not available for Linux?

Linux Foundation

• The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is considering rules that will help patent trolls, raise patent litigation expenses, and increase the volume of patent litigation overall. We have seen open source targeting by patent trolls many times, including a direct lawsuit against the Gnome Foundation in 2019. You can help support our open source ecosystem, reduce wasteful litigation by non-practicing entities (NPEs), and stop the assertion of bad patents. All it takes is a few minutes of your time. The volume of comments is important – please share this with your friends and colleagues who want to protect open source software from patent attacks.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Latvians resident in Canada will be able to take advantage of a ‘mobile passport station’ in June for the issuance of passports and eID cards.

• A new report outlines Chinese efforts to mine public information from the Pentagon, think tanks and private companies to gain insight on the American military.

• Microsoft may have to pay a pretty hefty fine to settle a case involving its Linkedin subsidiary. The company said this week that the fine could be as much as $425 million which will be noted in the current second quarter of 2023.

• Reuters reports that in a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson said the charge is due to an investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commission (IDPC). That inquiry was started way back in 2018, as the Ireland-based regulator looked into reports that the Linkedin business social network violated Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with targeted advertising.

• Meta is making further cuts to its workforce. The tech giant plans to cut approximately 1,200 jobs across California.

• Facebook parent Meta is ordering most of its employees to work on site at least three days per week beginning this fall.

• Meta announced it is requiring employees to come back to the office at least three days a week starting on September 5. The company clarified that employees working in remote positions are exempt from the hybrid work requirement.

Defence/Aggression

• A federal grand jury indicted former New Mexico House candidate Solomon Peña for his alleged involvement in shootings from December 2022 to January 2023 which targeted four elected officials’ homes in documents unsealed Wednesday.

• The Secretary General of NATO has announced that he will be visiting Turkey and said that he is sure that Sweden’s NATO membership will be ratified soon.

• Africa is often portrayed as a continent ravaged by war, terrorism, poverty and political instability. But over the past five decades few violent conflicts have occurred between states. In Europe, for comparison, there have been more than 25 inter-state conflicts since 1945.

• East Africa’s leaders have agreed to extend until September the mandate of a regional military force deployed to quell violence in the strife-torn east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

• In April, French President Emmanuel Macron emerged from three days of meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing sounding as comfortable talking to Beijing as he does talking to Washington.

• Party reviews their diary entries every week and punishes those deemed ‘insincere’

• South Korea says the hacking group, Kimsuky, was involved in the North’s latest satellite launch attempt.

• A satellite launch by North Korea failed, with the booster and payload plunging into the sea.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• The volcano’s activity level has lessened compared to last week, although the alert level remains at Yellow Phase 3.

• In the next three days, most of southern China is expected to be hit by temperatures of more than 35 deg C.

• In the reported deal, the government will extend a different concession’s lifespan and the company will end a suit over a Maya Train contract.

Wildlife/Nature

• A woman taking a Memorial Day weekend stroll on a California beach found something unusual sticking out of the sand: a tooth from an ancient mastodon. Jennifer Schuh found the foot-long tooth on Friday on Rio Del Mar State Beach on California’s central coast. But Schuh wasn’t sure what she had found so she posted photos on Facebook, hoping someone could identify the strange object. Wayne Thompson of the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History determined it was a mastodon tooth and went to the beach but couldn’t find it. On Tuesday, Jim Smith of Aptos heard about the missing tooth. He told the museum he had picked it up while jogging and has donated it to the museum.

• The largest wildfires ever recorded in Canada’s Atlantic Coast province of Nova Scotia continued to grow Thursday, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of more people and prompting air quality warnings in U.S. regions as far south as Virginia and Maryland.

• “…we will take all the support we can get”

• We almost didn’t recognise you!

Finance

• Elon Musk is facing fresh accusations of insider trading in a lawsuit filed by cryptocurrency investors, who say the Tesla CEO and Twitter owner used his influence to manipulate the price of Dogecoin.

• The prices of food and non-alcoholic beverages increased the most last month, according to the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices published by Statistics Finland on Thursday.

• Rey Flemings has become one of the premiere fixers for the global elite. More than that, though, he gives the rich a place to admit what they can’t say publicly: that they need help finding happiness.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Jordan’s crown prince has married the scion of a prominent Saudi family in a palace celebration attended by royals and other VIPs from around the world. Massive crowds gathered in a mood of excitement across the kingdom, as the young Hashemite royal was presented to a global audience. The marriage of Crown Prince Hussein and Saudi architect Rajwa Alseif has drawn a star-studded list headlined by Britain’s Prince William and his wife Kate. But it also holds deep significance for the region. It emphasizes continuity in an Arab state prized for its stability and refreshes the monarchy’s image after a bitter palace feud. It also could even help Jordan forge a strategic bond with its oil-rich neighbor, Saudi Arabia.

• Jordan’s crown prince married the scion of a prominent Saudi family on Thursday in a palace ceremony attended by royals and other VIPs from around the world, as massive crowds gathered across the kingdom to celebrate the region’s newest power couple.

• The measures came a day after Sudan’s military pulled out of peace talks in the Saudi city of Jeddah that aimed to stop the fighting.

• The photographer Ofir Berman captures two entangled realities.

• Canadian MPs passed a non-binding motion Wednesday calling on special rapporteur David Johnston to step aside from his role investigating allegations of foreign interference in Canadian elections, which Johnston quickly rejected.

• Among other things, the participants are expected to deal with operational aspects of the BRICS presidential summit that will take place in August.

• At least one person died in clashes after Ousmane Sonko, a strong rival to the president, was sentenced in absentia to two years in a trial that many Senegalese considered politically motivated.

• Adamantly progressive, openly gay and politically fearless, he cast a sharp eye on the country’s post-apartheid politics and culture.

• Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, told Reuters on Thursday that she has resigned from the social media company, which has faced criticism for lax protections against harmful content since billionaire Elon Musk acquired it in October.

• Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, says she’s resigned from the company.

• Irwin confirmed the news to Reuters after Fortune’s Kylie Robison reported that Irwin’s Slack had been deactivated, citing a screenshot. Musk, who was recently in China for his first visit to the country in three years, has not posted about the news.

• A private jet belonging to Tesla CEO Elon Musk departed Shanghai on Thursday, Chinese flight-tracking data showed, as the tycoon wraps up a visit to China that has seen him express hopes to expand business in the world’s largest market for electric vehicles.

• Lavish meals, gushing praise and memes about “Comrade Musk” — China showered the Tesla CEO with admiration during his whistlestop tour of the country this week. The mercurial magnate is a controversial figure in the West but widely admired in China, where Tesla’s electric vehicles have become a staple of middle-class urban life.

• Mr Gandhi also criticised Mr Modi over India’s religious polarisation.

• China has pushed to set the terms of its re-engagement with the Biden administration, rebuffing a request for a defense meeting while urging Washington to drop sanctions.

• Residents of the area, mostly fishermen, say their livelihoods will be wiped out.

• The current drills also follow an announcement by Manila and Tokyo that they would boost defense ties.

• Malaysia said Sam Rainsy didn’t visit the prime minister during a stopover on his way back to France.

• The Associated Press has obtained more than 4,000 pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein’s jail suicide from the federal Bureau of Prisons under the Freedom of Information Act. They include a detailed psychological reconstruction of the events leading to Epstein’s suicide, as well as his health history, internal agency reports, emails and memos and other records. The documents obtained Thursday provide the most complete accounting of Epstein’s detention and death, and its chaotic aftermath. The records help to dispel the many conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein’s suicide, underscoring how fundamental failings at the Bureau of Prisons — including severe staffing shortages and employees cutting corners — contributed to Epstein’s death.

• There will be a national referendum in Australia later this year, for a change to the Australian Constitution, to formerly recognize the prior inhabitants of this land.

• They used to be known as Aboriginals, now they are “First Nations” people in the media. The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) is pro-Voice, despite supposing to be impartial, at least that’s how they come across to me. The current Australian Federal Government is putting up information that is also pro-Voice, again, that’s how it seems to me. Here is the Govt info site: [...]

Censorship/Free Speech

• Zimbabwe’s parliament approved a controversial law that ostensibly promotes patriotism but has been condemned by the opposition as a “draconian” attempt to stifle dissent ahead of national elections.

• Xu Zhiyong, who called on Communist Party leader Xi Jinping to step down, issues the plea from his prison cell.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Turkey was included for the first time in the Nanny State Index announced each year by the European Policy Information Center (EPICENTER) and has been rated as the worst country in alcohol, tobacco, e-cigarette, fast-food, and soft drink categories. The basic reason is the high taxes.

• During the last day of marathon hearings involving 70 students participating in last year’s Boğaziçi Pride, İstanbul’s Police Chief faced again allegations of employing excessive violence.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• When we moved to the Lake District, I bought myself a Scott Scale hardtail mountain bike. It was the tail-end of Covid; bikes were rare because of broken supply chains and in demand because we all got fat during lockdown. It cost a bloody fortune. Penrith’s local bike shop, Aragon, had nothing in with no new supplies in sight, and a grand seemed like a hell of a lot of money to drop on a hobby I wasn’t sure I’d stick with. But I did stick with it, and now I’m generally out once or twice a week, whatever the weather.

• This is a short write-up of a mini ‘game’ I play on my bike every day. Game might be pushing the word too far. I guess it’s more like a challenge or diversion. I also didn’t invent this but I unfortunately don’t remember where I learned it, possibly in an old bike zine or on a blog or something.

• CircaDian means, approximately, “approximately daily”, which is only approximately correct so far, because I’ve been posting exactly daily.

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