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● 11.19.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 19/11/2021: Ubuntu Touch OTA-20, Wine 6.22, and PureOS 10 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:51 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ A German State Is Saying Goodbye Windows, Hello Linux

• The state parliament of Schleswig-Holstein in Northern Germany has already produced plans to make the state government almost 100% open source by the end of 2026.

• Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state in Germany, has plans to move almost entirely open source. By the time the dust settles, the regional government will have all but dropped Windows, Microsoft Office, Zoom and other proprietary software for Linux, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, and Jitzi.

• FOSS Force first learned of the plans from a post by Mike Saunders, a marketing assistant for the The Document Foundation, the organization behind the open source office suite LibreOffice.

=> ↺ Change Desktop Environments on… iOS?

• While Apple’s modern operating systems may seem like they exist independently of the rest of the computing world, they are actually close cousins of modern versions of Linux. The primary link between the two is that Apple’s offerings are Unix-based and even though Linux isn’t Unix in the strict sense, it’s built to be extremely Unix-like. Plenty of Linux software is POSIX-compliant, meaning it is effectively compatible with true Unix. But what can we do with that information? Well, to start, we can run Linux desktop environments on top of an iOS install on your favorite iPhone or iPad.

• To be sure, we will be filing this hack in the “because you can” category. [Torrekie], the creator of this project, has plenty of builds (Google translate from Chinese) where the boundaries between things like Linux and Unix are either blurred or nonexistant. In this particular project, a jailbroken iOS device is essentially gifted a ported version of XFCE which is able to run fairly well on iOS thanks to its compatibility with Unix environments. Details on how this was accomplished are sparse without a full investigation of the source code right now, but you can head over to the repository if you are curious enough to try this for yourself. [Torrekie] does note that this will only work with iOS devices that have been jailbroken using the “unc0ver” jailbreak only though.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ KDE Floating Panels: ALMOST THERE! – Kockatoo Tube

=> ↺ Pi Server Upgrade | Self-Hosted 58

• This week we unlock the Pitential of the Compute Module 4 and turn it into a dual gigabit router and Jellyfin server.

• How far can we push it?

• Plus, Alex shares his thoughts on the state of mobile operating systems and the challenges they are imposing on DIYers.

=> ↺ Emacs Is A Gaming Platform for Windows, Mac and Linux – Invidious

• Emacs is much more than a text editor. It is its own complete environment

=> ↺ Hackaday Podcast 145: Remoticon is On, Movie FX, Cold Plasma, and The Purest Silicon

• With literally just hours to go before the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon kicks off, editors Tom Nardi and Elliot Williams still managed to find time to talk about some of the must-see stories from the last week. There’s fairly heavyweight topics on the docket this time around, from alternate methods of multiplying large numbers to the incredible engineering that goes into producing high purity silicon. But we’ll also talk about the movie making magic of Stan Winston and some Pokemon-themed environmental sensors, so it should all balance out nicely. So long as the Russian’s haven’t kicked off the Kessler effect by the time you tune in, we should be good.

=> ↺ How to install Lubuntu 21.10 – Invidious

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Lubuntu 21.10.

=> ↺ How Apple’s self-service repair program reveals that they’ve lost their way. – Invidious

• Apple revealed their Self Service Repair program allowing their i̶n̶m̶a̶t̶e̶s̶ users to purchase replacement parts for their iPhones and (eventually) their M1-based Macs. I hope they prove me wrong on this, but I find this to be a cynical step on their part. But what I really want to talk about is the design of the artwork on their announcement post. It follows the “Big Tech” art style called “Corporate Memphis” (also referred to as “globohomo,” among other terms). Apple’s now chasing design trends rather than progressing them. If I didn’t know any better I would think this was just another phone manufacturer’s website.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Collabora Brings Flicker-Free Multi GPU Boot and Rockchip H.264 Decoder to Linux 5.15

• Linux kernel 5.15 arrived on Halloween with many great new features, such as a brand new NTFS file system implementation contributed by Parangon Software to finally provide Linux users with fully functional NTFS support, realtime preemption locking, in-kernel SMB3 server, as well as DAMON (Data Access MONitor).

• On top of all that, Linux 5.15 is an LTS (Long-Term Support) kernel branch, which will be supported for at least a couple of years. As usual, Collabora have made some important contributions themselves to the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series.

=> ↺ Linux ITMT Patch Fixes Intel “Alder Lake” Hybrid Handling For Some Systems – Phoronix

• There is a patch pending that improves the Linux kernel’s dealing with the hybrid P and E cores found with Intel’s new Alder Lake processors that will benefit some systems/motherboards.

• For those with Intel 12th Gen Core “Alder Lake” systems, one of the important tidbits of information I recently learned is that while Thread Director is hardware-based, the hybrid P/E core selection under Linux does depend upon the working Intel TurboBoost Max 3.0 / ITMT code path working. The CPU selection within Linux for Alder Lake relies on that ITMT (Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology) scheduling.

=> ↺ Updated AMD P-State Driver Posted For Improving Linux Power Efficiency – Phoronix

• A fourth iteration of the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver patches for Linux have been sent out for review and testing.

• This is the amd-pstate driver aiming for better power efficiency on Linux by leveraging ACPI CPPC found with Zen 2 and newer processors. Valve collaborated with AMD on the creation of this new driver that aims to be superior to the generic ACPI CPUFreq driver currently used by AMD processors. This driver has been undergoing public review since September with aims to make it to the mainline kernel.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Mike Blumenkrantz: The Finale

• It’s been a wild year for zink. Does anybody even remember how many times I finished the project? I don’t, but it’s been at least a couple. Somehow there’s still more to do though.

• I’ll be updating zink-wip one final time later today with the latest Copper snapshot. This is going to be crashier than the usual zink-wip, but that’s because zink-wip doesn’t have nearly as much cool future-zink stuff as it used to these days. Nearly everything is already merged into mainline, or at least everything that’s likely to help with general use, so just use that if you aren’t specifically trying to test out Copper.

• One of those things that’s been a thorn in zink’s side for a long time is PBO handling, specifically for unsupported formats like ARGB/ABGR, ALPHA, LUMINANCE, and InTeNsItY. Vulkan has no analogs for any of these, and any app/game which tries to do texture upload or download from them with zink is going to have a very, very bad time, as has been the case with CS:GO, which would take literal days to reach menus due to performing fullscreen GL_LUMINANCE texture downloads.

• This is now fixed in the course of landing compute PBO download support, which I blogged about forever ago since it also yields a 2-10x performance improvement for a number of other cases in all Gallium drivers. Or at least the ones that enable it.

• CS:GO should now run out of the box in Mesa 22.0, and things like PCSX3 which do a lot of PBO downloading should also see huge improvements.

Applications

=> ↺ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft To Do

• Microsoft’s stance for decades was that community creation and sharing of communal code (later to be known as free and open source software) represented a direct attack on their business. Their battle with Linux stretches back many years. Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously tarnished Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”. Microsoft also initiated its “Get the Facts” marketing campaign from mid-2003, which specifically criticized Linux server usage, total cost of ownership, security, indemnification and reliability. The campaign was widely criticized for spreading misinformation.

=> ↺ vifm: A Terminal File Browser for Hardcore Vim Lovers

• When it comes to navigating through the Linux directory structure in the command line, people often rely on the cd command.

• And nothing wrong with it because you’ll get the cd command on any Linux system you log in.

• However, if the system is maintained by you and you want to have a better view of the directories, a file manager does a lot better than the cd or tree command.

• Yes, you can get file managers in the terminal as well. They may not be as good as the GUI ones like Nautilus but still better than the plain old commands.

=> ↺ Ubuntu PPA for Annotator – Elementary OS Image Annotation Tool | UbuntuHandbook

• Linux has quite a few image annotation tools. “Annotator” is the one designed for Elementary OS with specific features. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.10, Ubuntu 22.04 via PPA.

• Without using GIMP image editor, I sometimes uses Shutter to annotate image quickly. As well, Ksnip has some useful tools (e.g., drop shadow, invert color and add border) that I use regularly.

• Annotator is an app looks kinda like MacOS Preview. Like other tools, it allows to add text, rectangle, ellipse, sequence number, line, arrow, blur effect, crop and resize image. What makes it different is the “Magnifier” tool. It adds a circle on your image and enlarge the area inside. By right-clicking on the circle, it offers option to change magnification.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Blog: Top 10 apps to boost your productivity

• Winter is rolling in (for those in the Northern Hemisphere at least). Long summer evenings are on hold for now. In these colder months, it can be difficult to get back into work and feel efficient. But whether you are feeling tired, unorganised, or demotivated, there may be an application here to help you refocus and re-energise. Here are a few that have given us the boost we needed to get back on track. There are note-taking apps, habit trackers, calendar organisers, jira editors, drawing tools and even a snap to remind you to take regular breaks. Let’s look back at some of the top productivity-related applications from this year.

=> ↺ Firebird 3.0.8 Docker image is released

• Firebird 3.0.8 Docker image is released and the following tags can be used : 3.0, v3.0, v3.0.8 .

=> ↺ FWUPD 1.7.2 Released With Fixes, Faster & Smaller Daemon – Phoronix

• FWUPD 1.7.2 is out as the latest release of this leading open-source solution for handling firmware updates under Linux for devices from motherboard UEFI to peripheral firmware.

• FWUPD 1.7.2 adds support for handling exported MTD block devices, tweaking the compiler flags to reduce the install size by around 300 Kb, speeding up the FWUPD daemon startup by ~40% by postponing some work, and a variety of fixes. The fixes range from a possible DFU crash to DLI download troubles and other device-specific corrections.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How To Install Apache with Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache with Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority that provides free SSL certificates for websites. All SSL certificates provided by Let’s Encrypt can be used for production/commercial purposes without any costs or fees. This guide will tell you about installing the Apache web server, installing the Certbot, generating an SSL certificate with Certbot, and creating additional SSL configuration to get the A+ from the SSL test SSL Labs.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Apache with free SSL on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

=> ↺ How to install and use the HTTP prompt in Linux

• In this article, we are going to discuss the installation process and use cases of HTTP Prompt. HTTP Prompt is an interactive command-line HTTP client which is used for testing and debugging purposes and built on HTTPie and HTTP Toolkit. It has a special feature of auto-complete, interactive, and syntax highlighting. It has other features as well such as auto cookies, Unix-like pipelines, OpenApi/Swagger Integration, and HTTpie compatibility.

=> ↺ How to run RethinkDB with Docker and Docker-Compose

• In this guide we are going to explore how to run RethinkDB locally with docker and docker compose. This can be helpful if you want to run RethinkDB locally without installing it in your machine or if you want to run multiple versions of RethinkDB seamlessly.

=> ↺ How to play Super Nintendo games on Linux with Higan

• Higan is a multi-system emulator. Previously, Higan was known as Bsnes, a super Nintendo emulator. However, Higan still supports Super Nintendo roms, and in this guide, we’ll show you how to play them with this app.

• Note: AddictiveTips in no way endorses using Higan to play Super Nintendo ROMS that have been illegally downloaded. Please only play games you’ve backed up from your collection.

=> ↺ How to Install VirtualBox on Linux and Create Your First Virtual Machine

• Setting up a virtual machine can be a great way to test software or alternative operating systems on your computer without altering or putting your current system at risk.

• Follow along to install VirtualBox on Linux and create your very first virtual machine.

=> ↺ How to customize VM and cloud images with guestfish | Enable Sysadmin

• Most sysadmins are used to dealing with base, guest, or gold images to provision new virtual machines (VM) or cloud instances in their traditional virtualization or cloud environments. The appeal of using these images is their slim size, standardization, simplicity, and basic configurations, from which it is possible to perform pre- or post-provisioning customization. Much of the customization takes place post-provisioning.

=> ↺ How to install and configure Redis 6 on FreeBSD 13

• Redis is an in-memory data structure store, used as a distributed, in-memory key–value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. Redis supports different kinds of abstract data structures, such as strings, lists, maps, sets, sorted sets, HyperLogLogs, bitmaps, streams, and spatial indices.

=> ↺ Container Layer Analyzer – openQA bites

• Today I’d like to point out an amazing new tool: The Container Layer Analyzer, written by Dan Čermák. Dan also wrote a comprehensive blog post about it, which explains it much better than what I do here.

=> ↺ How To Install cPanel on AlmaLinux 8 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install cPanel on cPanel 8. For those of you who didn’t know, cPanel is a commercial enterprise-grade web hosting control panel. It is designed for hosting needs and used by most of the hosting companies for dedicated hosting, semi-dedicated hosting, shared hosting as well as cloud VPS hosting providers. This is one of the best control panels for every web hosting service.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of cPanel on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and Rocky Linux distributions.

=> ↺ How to Install Discord on Fedora Linux

• It is a boon to several communities, which helps them to expand their projects, reach out to more people, and maintain a community of fans and followers. It’s surprising considering that Discord was originally meant for gamers.

• Discord is available for various platforms, including Linux. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the steps for installing Discord in Fedora.

=> ↺ How to Install GlassFish Java Server with Nginx as a Reverse Proxy on Debian 11

• GlassFish is an open-source application server used for deploying Java applications. It supports different Java-based technologies including, JPA, JavaServer Faces, JMS, RMI, as well as many other Java-based technologies. It provides a web-based as well as a command-line interface for managing Java applications and their components. GlassFish allows you to create portable and scalable applications that can be easily integrated with legacy technologies.

• In this tutorial, I will show you how to install the Glassfish server with Nginx as a reverse proxy on Debian 11.

=> ↺ How to Install Nethogs on Centos 8 – ByteXD

• Nethogs is a small, free, open-source utility used to monitor network traffic for Linux. Nethogs behaves differently from other traffic monitoring tools, as it groups the bandwidth per process, instead of breaking the traffic down per subnet or a protocol. It doesn’t rely on kernel modules to be loaded. Therefore, Linux administrators using Nethogs can easily identify which program is generating utilization spikes.

• Nethogs relies on /proc, so most of the features are only available on Linux therefore, it doesn’t work well for other operating systems such as FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Nethogs tool will only display the connections on these systems without displaying the processes. Nethogs program is useful for monitoring real-time network traffic. Moreover, you can track a specific network interface or all network interfaces using this utility on your system.

• This article will show how to install nethogs on CentOS 8 and we will also explain how to monitor or track network traffic using the nethogs tool.

=> ↺ How to Install VirtualBox Guest Additions on Rocky Linux 8 – VITUX

• Running any operating system on a virtual box takes experience. You have to figure out various issues like connectivity issues and performance issues but out of all of them, the graphical issues is an exercise in patience. Not having fullscreen, shared clipboard, and file sharing limit your efficiency but also destroys the whole experience.

• VirtualBox Guest Additions is a beautiful piece of software that solves these issues in a single shot and ensures better display, performance, and overall functionality. Adding Virtualbox Guest Additions used to be very easy but there are a few errors and issues that are coming up with new versions of the operating systems. you have to ensure all the package dependencies are fulfilled. In this article, You will learn how to install VirtualBox Guest Additions in the up-and-coming Rocky Linux.

=> ↺ How to Install XanMod Kernel on Linux Mint 20 – LinuxCapable

• XanMod is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Linux Mint 20. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware. XanMod is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels, having multiple branches to choose from the stable, edge, and development.

• For users seeking to have their system kernel up to date and not wanting to manually install kernels or use the testing/unstable repositories, installing a third-party kernel may be for you.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the XanMod repository and install the latest Linux Kernel on your Linux Mint 20.xx operating system.

=> ↺ How to Install osTicket on Debian 11 Bullseye – Linux Shout

• Here in this tutorial, we will install the OSTicket open source support ticketing system on Debian 11 Bullseye using Apache, PHP, and MySQL, or MariaDB.

• osTicket offers free, open-source ticket management and customer care solutions for businesses of all sizes, especially small and medium-sized businesses. The software can be used to capture tickets and assign custom fields to each ticket, creating a list of data associated with each ticket that can be shared with customers in the knowledge base. You can create automatic reply templates for incoming email tickets, and rich text HTML lets you add your logo, images, and videos to tickets.

• With the ticket filter tool provided by osTicket, you can define routing rules for tickets so that tickets are sent to the correct person or department. Tickets can also be reassigned if not received by the correct person, and notes on all actions are logged in the ticket thread. The ticketing software helps to further streamline operations by preventing agent collisions using the ticket lock tool. Other features include an autoresponder, customer portal, and dashboard reports.

=> ↺ How to install Erlang on FreeBSD 13– Citizix

• Erlang is a functional, general-purpose, concurrent programming language and garbage-collected runtime environment built for concurrency, fault tolerance, and distributed application architectures. It is supported and maintained by Ericsson OTP product unit.

=> ↺ How to install pgAdmin 4 version 6.2 on Ubuntu 21.10

• In this tutorial guide I will be taking through the installation of pgAdmin 4 version 6.2 on Ubuntu 21.10.

• pgAdmin 4 is free and opensource management tool for Postgres. Its desktop runtime written in NWjs allows it to run standalone for individual users, or the web applications code may be directly deployed on a web server for use by the web browser.

• pgAdmin 4 is a complete rewrite of pgAdmin, built using Python and Java

=> ↺ How to install and configure Redis 6 on Ubuntu 20.04

• Redis is an in-memory data structure store, used as a distributed, in-memory key–value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. Redis supports different kinds of abstract data structures, such as strings, lists, maps, sets, sorted sets, HyperLogLogs, bitmaps, streams, and spatial indices.

• In this tutorial we are going to learn how to install Redis 6 on Ubuntu 20.04.

=> ↺ How to install RabbitMQ in FreeBSD 13 – Citizix

• In this guide we will explore how to install the latest release of RabbitMQ On a FreeBSD Server or Workstation

• RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software that implements the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). RabbitMQ works by receiving messages from publishers (applications that publish them) and routes them to consumers (applications that process them).

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ Wine 6.22 Announcement

=> ↺ Wine 6.22 Released With Mono 7.0, Joystick Improvements

• Wine 6.22 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms like macOS and FreeBSD. Wine 6.22 brings more improvements while the Wine 7.0 stable release is inching closer.

• We’ll likely see the freeze begin in December for Wine 7.0. In fact, last year at this time down to the very week after Wine 5.22 the Wine 6.0 release preparations began in working towards its January release. The same dance will likely begin soon for Wine 7.0.

Games

=> ↺ Seek the truth

• After more than 10 years of development, the ScummVM Team is pleased to announce support for the psychological-horror adventure game Sanitarium.

=> ↺ Proton Experimental update fixes up DEATHLOOP, Forza Horizon 5 and more | GamingOnLinux

• More fixes made their way into Proton Experimental yesterday, with Valve / CodeWeavers fixing up some issues in a few different games. What is Proton? It’s a compatibility layer designed to run Windows games from Steam on Linux. See more about it in our full guide.

=> ↺ Deck-building RPG Xenotheria looks like it’s worth keeping an eye on | GamingOnLinux

• Ganymede Games have announced Xenotheria, a story-driven deck-building RPG with turn-based combat with plans to support Linux at the full release.

• “Xenotheria takes place on Wolf Prime, a sprawling desert planet that’s home to the galaxy’s most important trading port. A seemingly ordinary day quickly turns chaotic after a mysterious, cataclysmic event. What follows can only be described as a shower of spaceships, satellites and orbital stations raining down havoc on the innocent souls of Wolf Prime. One of those souls is Squiggles, a hard-working spaceship construction yard worker with a heart of gold.

=> ↺ Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands expansion is out now | GamingOnLinux

• Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands is a brand new expansion for the popular mix of strategy and exploration from publisher Raw Fury and developers Stumpy Squid / Fury Studios.

• This expansion brings with it a new land to explore, inspired by Norse Viking culture with a whole new campaign to expand the world. In Norse Lands, players can look forward to unleashing abilities drawn upon from Norse gods, commanding mighty units, building Viking- inspired armaments, solving challenging puzzles, and facing a new enemy Greed.

=> ↺ Nobodies: After Death is a point & click where you clean up after assassins | GamingOnLinux

• Nobodies: After Death is another point & click game where you’re part of the cleaning crew for a top-secret intelligence agency from developer Blyts. The second game of its kind from Blyts, following on from Nobodies: Murder Cleaner released in 2019 which was actually pretty good.

• “You are a ‘cleaner’ for a top-secret intelligence agency. Your mission is to hide all evidence of carefully planned murders, leaving no sign that you or the target were ever there.

=> ↺ Set off chain reactions in the explosive upcoming Bomb Club Deluxe | GamingOnLinux

• Bomb Club Deluxe is an upcoming casual comedy game about setting off many explosions across hundreds of levels from Antoine Latour and Lozange Lab (Swim Out / Rip Them Off).

• Looking over the details, it plays out like a puzzle game with you need to place the right type of bomb in the right location, to set off a chain reaction of all the other bombs going off to complete a level and it sure does look fun.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ 15 Best GNOME Extensions for Ubuntu (2021 Edition)

• Well, how about here, with this list of the best GNOME Shell extensions for Ubuntu.

• This roundup makes an ideal starting point for anyone looking to experiment with GNOME extensions on their Ubuntu install, regardless of which version it is.

• Better yet, this roundup is fully up-to-date for 2021 and only includes GNOME extensions that are actively maintained and work with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (and up).

• Read on to discover some truly great add-ons!

=> ↺ Emmanuele Bassi: Fair Weather Friends

• Today I released libgweather-3.90.0, the first developers snapshot of GWeather 4….

=> ↺ Felix Häcker: #19 Updated Calculations

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 12 to November 19.

Distributions

=> ↺ Discover Slitaz, a 50MB Lightweight Desktop Operating System

• Slitaz GNU/Linux is an Swiss computer operating system that is user-friendly, super lightweight and very fast to install, with a spider logo, for both desktop and server. It can run on a quarter of a GB memory. Its installation image is only fifty megabytes, full desktop included, with LiveCD capability. We overview Slitaz in this article with short highlights on where you can get it, available versions and how its desktops and applications are. Happy discovering!

=> ↺ What is Clear Linux? — Most Powerful Operating System in 2022

• The most powerful Operating and Best Kept Secret of 2021. There is a new kid on the block, Clear Linux by Intel.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ Ruby, Plasma, GTK Update in Tumbleweed

• There were a total of four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released this week.

• Snapshot 20211117 gave KDE users the Plasma 5.23.3 update. The bug-fix release had changes for the systemsettings5 package, which had a fix for a touchscreen click. The plasma-desktop had a fix involving drag and drop that reset a position and overlap; the package also had a fix showing an inactive kwin console. The kwin package also made some fixes that prevented crashing of screencasting and provided a couple fixes for Wayland. The update of kplotting was the single KDE Frameworks 5.88.0 package updated in the snapshot; the rest came in the previous day’s snapshot. Xfce users also had an update in the snapshot with xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin 2.6.2, which provided a fix for the menu not toggling after pressing escape. The package also fixed shifting the background when showing the menu. Other packages to update in the snapshot were fribidi 1.0.11 and restorecond 3.3, which is a daemon that watches for file creation.

=> ↺ openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/46

• Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

• This week, we had a little bit of a fight with our snapshots in openQA: not because of openQA, but actually because some issues could not have been in staging but became visible in the full product tests (e.g. ncurses memory leak, which manifested while installing a full Tumbleweed fro the net installer). So, out of the 7 snapshots produced and tested, we only managed to publish 3 (1111, 1116, and 1117).

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Dynamic scheduling of Tekton workloads using Triggers | Opensource.com

• Tekton is a Kubernetes-native continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) framework. It allows you to create containerized, composable, and configurable workloads declaratively through Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRD).

=> ↺ Improve multicore scaling in Open vSwitch DPDK

• A new feature in version 2.16 of Open vSwitch (OVS) helps developers scale the OVS-DPDK userspace datapath to use multiple cores. The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is a popular set of networking libraries and drivers that provide fast packet processing and I/O.

• After reading this article, you will understand the new group assignment type for spreading the datapath workload across multiple cores, how this type differs from the default cycles assignment type, and how to use the new type in conjunction with the auto load balance feature in the poll mode driver (PMD) to improve OVS-DPDK scaling.

=> ↺ Hybrid work model: 3 ways to simplify yours

• Last year’s expedited shift to remote work did not give business leaders much time to map out a thoughtful out-of-office setup for employees. But the challenges leaders have faced over the past year and a half have led to a better understanding of how to lead a hybrid workforce – and how to simplify the hybrid work model.

=> ↺ Remi Collet: PHP version 7.3.33, 7.4.26 and 8.0.13

• RPMs of PHP version 8.0.13 are available in remi repository for Fedora 35 and remi-php80 repository for Fedora 33-34 and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).

• RPMs of PHP version 7.4.26 are available in remi repository for Fedora 33-34 and remi-php74 repository Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).

• RPMs of PHP version 7.3.33 are available in remi-php73 repository for Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).

=> ↺ Red Hat Satellite 6.10.1 has been released

• We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.10.1 is generally available as of November 18, 2021.

• Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.

=> ↺ Putting security into DevOps is tougher than it looks

=> ↺ The Register is dead

• If software development has absorbed a single lesson in the last two decades it’s that there’s an urgent need to integrate security at an early stage rather than leaving flaws to rot dangerously inside compiled code. Optimistically, dubbed shift left, the trick has been working out what this means in an era undergoing an historic transformation of development models.

• In monolithic, linear development, implementing shift left was about adding a security checking stage earlier in the coding lifecycle. This was never easy and, the complaint went, slowed everything down, but the pileup of vulnerability disasters told the industry something had to change. One case study was Microsoft’s then novel Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) of the early 2000s.

• Today, however, coding is increasingly defined by cloud native applications, agile development, and infrastructure as code (IaC), coordinated using continuous deployment platforms such as Kubernetes. In this world of high-velocity DevOps, the idea of early intervention is stretched to breaking point. Code is created, tested, and deployed at incredible speed.

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2021-46

• Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

• Fedora Linux 33 will reach end of life on Tuesday 30 November. The F35 retrospective survey is open through 4 December.

• I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

=> ↺ Near Zero Downtime maintenance with RHEL for SAP Solutions

EasyOS Development

=> ↺ Home button fixed in ROX-Filer

• At the top of a ROX-Filer window, there is an icon of a house, mouseover shows “Change to home directory”. Clicking that icon changes the window to the /root folder.

=> ↺ Mesa now has r600 and radeonsi drivers

• Folder /usr/lib/dri has drivers that provide hardware acceleration for libGL.

=> ↺ Package libxres compiled

• I was recently compiling a source package, forget what it was, might have been xfce, it required a dependency ‘libxres”. OK, it is a small library, might as well include it in the build, so now compiled in OpenEmbedded and added to the EasyOS package-list.

Debian Family

=> ↺ True Convergence is Here: PureOS 10 is Released for all Librem Products

• Purism has released its latest version of its convergent operating system (OS), PureOS 10, code named Byzantium. PureOS is a freedom respecting, free software OS that is neither based on Android nor iOS. Endorsed by the Free Software Foundation it is now the default operating system installed on all Librem products, including the

• PureOS is the first truly convergent operating system, where the same OS is used for laptops, desktops, and mobile.

• The new version, PureOS 10, is now the default for Purism’s Librem laptops, phones, and mini-computers. “Making the same OS convergent across mobile, laptop, and desktop computers is a dream many big technology companies have, but so far none have achieved. It’s taken a lot of investment and work to make PureOS 10 an OS with true convergence, and now it’s a dream come true.” said Kyle Rankin, Chief Security Officer at Purism.

=> ↺ Purism’s Librem 5 Linux smartphone costs $1199 after the latest price hike

• The Purism Librem 5 was one the most powerful smartphone capable of running mainline Linux software when the first units began shipping in limited quantities a few years ago. But it’s also one of the most expensive – and that’s even more true after a price hike that took effect this month.

• When Purism launched a crowdfunding campaign for the Librem 5 in 2017, backers could pre-order the phone for $599. The price has gone up several times since then, and now the Librem 5 costs twice as much.

=> ↺ Raven Reader

• There is a new application available for Sparkers: Raven Reader

=> ↺ Neil Williams: git worktrees

• You could go to the trouble of making a new directory and re-cloning the same tree. However, a local commit in one tree is then not accessible to the other tree.

• You could commit everything every time, but with a dirty tree, that involves sorting out the .gitignore rules as well. That could well be pointless with an experimental change.

• Git worktrees allow multiple filesystems from a single git tree. Commits on any branch are visible from other branches, even when the commit was on a different worktree. This makes things like cherry-picking easy, without needing to push pointless changes or branches.

• Branches on a worktree can be rebased as normal, with the benefit that commit hashes from other local changes are available for reference and cherry-picks.

• I’m sure git worktrees are not new. However, I’ve only started using them recently and others have asked about how the worktree operates.

=> ↺ Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2021)

• The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Bastian Germann (bage) Gürkan Myczko (tar)

• The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Clay Stan Daniel Milde David da Silva Polverari Sunday Cletus Nkwuda Ma Aiguo Sakirnth Nagarasa

• Congratulations!

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Lilbits: A smartphone with a smartwatch on the back, mini PCs, and Linux for phones, PCs, and servers

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 Release | UBports

• Ubuntu Touch is the privacy and freedom-respecting mobile operating system by UBports. Today we are happy to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-20, our twentieth stable update to the system! OTA-20 will become available for the following supported Ubuntu Touch devices over the next week:

• BQ E4.5 Ubuntu Edition BQ E5 HD Ubuntu Edition BQ M10 (F)HD Ubuntu Edition BQ U Plus Cosmo Communicator F(x)tec Pro1 Fairphone 2 Fairphone 3 Google Pixel 2XL Google Pixel 3a Huawei Nexus 6P LG Nexus 4 LG Nexus 5 Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition Nexus 7 2013 (Wi-Fi and LTE models) OnePlus 2 OnePlus 3 and 3T Oneplus 5 and 5T OnePlus 6 and 6T OnePlus One Samsung Galaxy Note 4 (910F, 910P, 910T) Samsung Galaxy S3 Neo+ (GT-I9301I) Sony Xperia X Sony Xperia X Compact Sony Xperia X Performance Sony Xperia XZ Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet (LTE or Wi-fi only) Vollaphone Vollaphone X Xiaomi Mi A2 Xiaomi Mi A3 Xiaomi Mi MIX 3 Xiaomi Poco F1 Xiaomi Redmi 3s/3x/3sp (land) Xiaomi Redmi 4X Xiaomi Redmi 7 Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 and 7 Pro Xiaomi Redmi 9 and 9 Prime Xiaomi Redmi Note 9, 9 Pro, 9 Pro Max and 9S

=> ↺ UBports releases its twentieth stable update of Ubuntu Touch

• Do you remember several years ago when all the tech firms wanted in on the mobile space but were more or less forced out due to Apple’s and Google’s market dominance? One of the players was Canonical which was aiming for true convergence across desktop, tablets, and phones. Canonical ended up shelving that ambitious goal but its mobile operating system, Ubuntu Touch, was picked up by the UBports Foundation and that organisation has just published OTA-20, the twentieth stable release of Ubuntu Touch.

• Building and maintaining an operating system is no easy job which explains why Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 is still based on the archaic Ubuntu 16.04 which came out more than five years ago. Nevertheless, the team is still working away on improvements. In this update, LED notification support was added for devices with the Halium 9 base. If your device is newer and doesn’t have an LED light, vibration support for incoming notifications has also been added. Other new features include support for Khmer and Bengali fonts and the ability to define a custom notification sound by picking any audio file.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 Released for Linux Phones, Here’s What’s New

• Still based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system series, Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 is a maintenance update that introduces support for the notification LED and vibration for incoming notifications on Halium 9 devices, such as OnePlus 6, OnePlus 6T, Xiaomi Mi A2, Xiaomi Mi 6, and others.

• However, the devs note the fact that some recent devices with a Halium 9 base do not have a notification LED, so this new feature doesn’t apply to them. These include the Volla Phone and Google Pixel 3a.

=> ↺ Distrowatch Top 5 Distributions Review: Linux Mint

• Besides the couple of negatives I listed earlier, I really don’t have much negative to say about Linux Mint. It’s got graphical tools for driver installations, it’s got great support, it’s based on one of the most commonly used OS’s in the Linux World, and it’s a system that even first-time users can enjoy. Cinnamon is a gorgeous Desktop Environment for those who enjoy more traditional layouts similar to Windows, and it’s highly customizable too. I highly recommend anyone who hasn’t used it yet, check this OS out.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ 10.1-inch Raspberry Pi All-in-One touchscreen display review – Part 1: Unboxing and installation

• I’ve just received a 10.1-inch touchscreen display designed for Raspberry Pi model B boards with 1920×1080 resolutions from the EVICIV store on Amazon that also offers models with 1366×378 and 1280×800 resolutions, and allows users to create an All-in-One computer based on the popular SBC.

• The product can also be used as a standalone display connected to an HDMI or USB-C (via DisplayPort Alt mode) source, so it could be interesting for all sorts of projects and not only ones relying on Raspberry Pi boards. In the first part of the review, I’ll check out the hardware, install a Raspberry Pi 4, and boot it to check out whether it works, before going into more details in the second part of the review.

=> ↺ Jetson powered systems offer dual GbE and a 256GB SSD

• Seeed’s Xavier NX based “Jetson EX1 Mini PC-Ubuntu” and 2.5-inch equipped “Jetson SUB Mini PC-Black” systems offer 2x GbE, 2x HDMI, 4x USB, and 256GB storage. There is also a metal-clad “Silver” variant of the earlier Jetson SUB Mini PC Kit.

• Last month, Seeed launched a $799 Jetson SUB Mini PC Kit. The kit is almost identical to Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier NX Developer Kit but is based on Leetop’s A206 Jetson carrier board equipped with a Jetson Xavier NX module. Seeed has now launched two more Xavier NX-based systems: a Jetson EX1 Mini PC-Ubuntu and a larger Jetson SUB Mini PC-Black, which is equipped with a 2.5-inch SATA bay.

=> ↺ Jetson EX1 and SUB mini PCs put Xavier NX SoM into metal enclosures

• Seeed Studio has just unveiled another Jetson Xavier NX mini PC with the Jetson EX1, plus some metal enclosures for the Jetson SUB mini PC announced last month with the official NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX developer kit, a 128GB SSD, and the Re_Computer case comprised of an aluminum frame and a plastic cover.

• The Jetson EX1 mini PC has a different design with a custom carrier board offering dual Gigabit Ethernet and support for four MIPI CSI cameras, a 256GB NVMe SSD, and an aluminum enclosure designed to help with cooling, albeit the computer is not completely fanless since a 5V fan is included in the design as well.

=> ↺ Linux-on-NXP boards from Kontron and SolidRun gain Arm SystemReady compliance

• Kontron and SolidRun have each announced several NXP-based embedded products that have achieved Arm SystemReady certification for interoperable Linux stacks and boot systems.

• Following Arm’s formal announcement of its Arm SystemReady initiative in Oct. 2020, support for the interoperability program has begun to accelerate. Yesterday, Kontron announced three embedded Linux products based on NXP processors that have received Arm SystemReady certification for standardized firmware and hardware running on Arm-based CPUs. The products include its pITX-iMX8M Pico-ITX SBC and sandwich-style BL i.MX8M Mini, as well as a new KBox A-203-LS networking box with an NXP LS1028A.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ This Portal fan brought Wheatley to life as his own personal assistant

• The video game Portal 2 is widely regarded as a classic that introduced players to several memorable characters, including one of the main protagonists-turned-antagonists, Wheatley. This anthropomorphized personal assistance robot was able to move, speak, and listen/respond to speech from a user, which is exactly what Steve Turner was trying to recreate when he built his own version of Wheatley. His animatronic device starts by waking up, and from there it selects a folder of audio files to play at random. Additionally, its AI-powered interactivity is provided by an Amazon Echo Dot via Alexa and the Arduino Cloud.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ The Android 12 Quick Settings trick you’ve been missing | Computerworld

=> ↺ How to install Android 12 Beta on Samsung phones – 9to5Google

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy A13 5G user manual confirms key specs and Android 11 onboard – GSMArena.com news

=> ↺ The Best Games on Sale for Android This Week – Donut County, Tempest, Deemo Reborn and More – Droid Gamers

=> ↺ AetherSX2: A promising PS2 emulator for Android – Android Authority

=> ↺ Xiaomi 12X leak reveals a Snapdragon 870-powered compact Android ‘flagship’ | Android Central

=> ↺ YouTube on Android TV tests autoplay videos on homepage – 9to5Google

=> ↺ A new Lenovo Tab P12 Pro on Android 12L has a new Google-generated discount code – NotebookCheck.net News

=> ↺ How to Check Screen Time on Android

=> ↺ AetherSX2: A promising PS2 emulator for Android – Android Authority

=> ↺ Android Engg Team In India Will Look At Developing Devices Beyond Smartphones: Google India GM

=> ↺ DuckDuckGo Privacy Tool: App Tracking Protection for Android

=> ↺ When is Android 12 coming to Samsung phones?

=> ↺ [Update: Nov. 19] Xiaomi Android 11 update bugs & issues tracker: Here’s the current status

=> ↺ What are Android security updates, and why do they matter?

=> ↺ Google Finally Has a Solution For iMessage Reactions on Android

=> ↺ Lost your Android phone? Here’s how to remove or block Google Pay and Paytm account | Technology News,The Indian Express

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Open-Source Apache CloudStack 4.16 Improves Cloud IaaS

• The Apache CloudStack project’s second major milestone release of 2021 improves storage and Kubernetes integration for the cloud platform.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Thousands of Firefox users accidentally commit login cookies on GitHub

=> ↺ Microsoft just doesn’t care about security and the media is paid to blame the victims for Microsoft’s own problems

• Thousands of Firefox cookie databases containing sensitive data are available on request from GitHub repositories, data potentially usable for hijacking authenticated sessions.

• These cookies.sqlite databases normally reside in the Firefox profiles folder. They’re used to store cookies between browsing sessions. And they’re findable by searching GitHub with specific query parameters, what’s known as a search “dork.”

• Aidan Marlin, a security engineer at London-based rail travel service Trainline, alerted The Register to the public availability of these files after reporting his findings through HackerOne and being told by a GitHub representative that “credentials exposed by our users are not in scope for our Bug Bounty program.”

• [...]

• “I’m frustrated that GitHub isn’t taking its users’ security and privacy seriously,” Marlin told The Register in an email. “The least it could do is prevent results coming up for this GitHub dork. If the individuals who uploaded these cookie databases were made aware of what they’d done, they’d s*** their pants.”

=> ↺ Mozilla Performance Blog: Upgrading Page Load Tests to Use Mitmproxy 7

• mitmproxy is a third-party tool that we use to record and play back page loads in Firefox to detect performance regressions.

• The page load is “recorded” to a file: the page is loaded while mitmproxy is running, and the proxy logs all requests and responses made and saves them to a file.

• The page load can then be played back from this file; each response and request (referred to as a “flow”) made during the recording is played back without accessing the live site.

• Recorded page load tests are valuable for detecting performance regressions in Firefox because they are not dependent on changes to the site we are testing. If we tested using only live sites, it would be much more difficult to tell if a regression was caused by changes in Firefox or changes in the site being tested.

• So, as we run these tests over time, we have a history of how Firefox performs when replaying the same recording again and again, helping us to detect performance regressions that may be caused by recent changes to our code base.

=> ↺ When you use Bing to search for Chrome or Firefox, this is what happens instead.

• Microsoft can’t just put on their big boy pants and admit that people don’t like Edge and don’t want to use Edge.

• This reeks of desperation. But then, we didn’t suspect it would end with the paid shitposting about Edge on GNU/Linux or with the million ways you can accidentally launch Edge in Windows Vista SP11. Did we?

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Mike Hommey: Announcing git-cinnabar 0.5.8

• Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.

=> ↺ Evgeni Golov: A String is not a String, and that’s Groovy!

• Halloween is over, but I still have some nightmares to share with you, so sit down, take some hot chocolate and enjoy

• When working with Jenkins, there is almost no way to avoid writing Groovy. Well, unless you only do old style jobs with shell scripts, but y’all know what I think about shell scripts…

• Anyways, Eric have been rewriting the jobs responsible for building Debian packages for Foreman to pipelines (and thus Groovy).

=> ↺ Looking for Qt Champions – 2021!

• Who do you think should be a Qt Champion? Nominate the champions you know right now!

Perl/Raku

=> ↺ Perl Weekly Challenge 139: JortSort and Long Primes

Rust

=> ↺ Rebecca Rumbul named new CEO of The Rust Foundation • The Register

• The Rust Foundation – the US non-profit behind the programming language since Mozilla let the team go – has picked a new CEO: Rebecca Rumbul, formerly director of research and engagement at digital democracy charity mySociety, and before that the Privacy Collective.

• Dr Rumbul’s appointment at the relatively new foundation reflects the growing importance of the Rust language – which can be seen from the foundation’s list of members. Facebook is using it, as is Google, Microsoft, various Linux kernel developers, and Linux lappy vendor System76. There are even a couple of Rust-based OSes, Redox and Theseus.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ OpenCL 3.0.10 Brings A Handful Of New Extensions – Phoronix

• OpenCL 3.0.10 has been tagged as the newest revision to the OpenCL 3.0 API.

• One month since OpenCL 3.0.9, v3.0.10 is now available with several new extensions added along with some cosmetic documentation updates.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Popsicle-Stick Piano Sounds Sweet | Hackaday

• Technically, this is a kalimbaphone, and not a piano or even a chordophone since there are no strings. But this handcrafted instrument doesn’t just sound sweet, it’s also mellow, and it’s much nicer than you’re probably imagining. Go check out the short build video, which starts with a demo.

=> ↺ Electric Mini Rat Rod Starts ‘Em Young | Hackaday

• These days, a lot of people barely even say hello to their neighbors. But not [dewey302]. They’re so tight with the people next door that they built this bad-ass electric mini rat rod for the neighbors’ five-year-old kid. Talk about community!

• Nearly every bit of this rod is recycled — the body is a wheelbarrow, the transaxle is from a mobility scooter, and the frame was welded together from scrap tubing including the wheelbarrow itself, and old bike or two, and some broken lawn chairs. The rear wheels are also from the ‘barrow, though the front ones were purchased (one of few new parts. Power comes from a pair of 18 V tool batteries wired in series and running through the Curtis controller from the scooter. Depending on the weight of the driver, this baby will do 10-12 MPH.

Science

=> ↺ There were Almost Jet Packs on the Moon

• Here it is almost 2022 and we still don’t have our jet packs. But don’t feel bad. NASA astronauts wanted a lunar jetpack, but they didn’t get one either. [Amy] at The Vintage Space has an interesting video about what almost was, and you can see it below.

• Of course, a jet pack on the moon would be easier than an Earthbound one. The goal was to allow the crew to range further from their lander since they couldn’t carry very much and the lander didn’t have a lot of consumables, either. In addition, if you lost sight of the lander, getting back could be a problem since navigating on the moon was an unknown skill.

• In 1969 awarded exploratory contracts for lunar personal flying vehicles including one to Bell who had their Earth-bound jet pack that shows up every so often for example in Bond movies.

Hardware

=> ↺ Cheap Big Servo For Robot Arm | Hackaday

• [Skyentific] is looking to push the hobbyist robotics state of the art. Motors and their gears, the actuators, are typically the most expensive part. For his build, he realised he needed big servos capable of delivering plenty of torque. Thus, he set about creating a 3D-printed design to get the job done on a budget. (Video, embedded below.)

• Stepper motors are the order of the day here, chosen for their low cost compared to brushless solutions, particularly when taking control hardware into account. In this design, the stepper motor drives a sun gear as part of a bigger planetary gearbox with a high gear ratio. Cross-roller bearings are used to allow the servo to effectively handle both radial and axial loads. The servo as a whole is designed to fit neatly into the joints of the robot arm itself, and has external mounting points provisioned as such.

=> ↺ N64 Mini PC Conversion Includes All The Trimmings | Hackaday

• We’ve seen quite a few retro gaming consoles physically modded to house modern emulation hardware, but the NUC-64 by [RetroModder] stands out as one of the most impressive Nintendo 64 guttings that we’ve seen to date.

• Observed from the front, the NUC-64 almost resembles a stock Nintendo console. The project’s name is printed across the vestigial cartridge slot, and two suspiciously modern wireless networking antennas can be seen poking out from the back. The console’s modifications are fully revealed when looking at it from the rear – gone is the power brick socket, which now houses the I/O for the replacement motherboard. A custom 3D printed I/O shield keeps everything looking neat and tidy.

=> ↺ Pushing Photos Through Wires

• In some ways, when I became a graphic designer in the newspaper industry, I had it easy. By that time, wire photos were already being transmitted primarily over the internet, and those that weren’t could quickly be scanned into a digital format via a flatbed scanner. To place those images on the page, all I had to do was hit a key command, and suddenly, I was ready to paste an image in. A lot of things had to happen to get us to that point, and one of those things was a process called phototelegraphy. This concept, essentially, refers to the process of distributing images via wires or through the radio, something that we’ve covered in other ways previously, but not directly. In many ways, it cuts to the heart of why we call wire services wire services. And because I love newspapers, I’m going to tell you all about them. Today’s Tedium talks about formative efforts to spread photographs far and wide.

=> ↺ The Silent Dripper Dispenses Water Without Making Any Sound | Hackaday

• Engineering is all about making a design that conforms to a set of requirements. Usually those are boring things like cost, power consumption, volume, mass or compatibility with existing systems. But sometimes, you have to design something with restrictions you might have never considered. [Devon Bray] was tasked with designing a system that could dispense single drops of water, while making absolutely no noise. [Devon]’s blog describes in detail the process of making The Silent Dripper, which was needed for an art installation called The Tender Interval by [Sara Dittrich].

• The design process started with picking a proper pump. Centrifugal pumps can be very quiet due to their smooth, continuous motion, but are not suitable for moving small quantities of liquid. Peristaltic pumps on the other hand can generate single drops of liquid very accurately, but their gripping-and-squeezing motion creates far more sound. [Devon] still went for the latter type, and eventually discovered that filling up the pumping mechanism with lithium grease made it quiet enough for his purpose.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

=> ↺ Dynatrace : Managed release notes version 1.230

Security

=> ↺ SkyFail. 6 million routers left exposed

• DNS rebinding is a technique that allows an attacker to bypass the Same-origin policy, a defence implemented in web browsers to prevent web applications interacting with different domains without the user’s consent.

• This can be exploited when a user visits a malicious web page under the control of the attacker.

=> ↺ diffoscope 193 released

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 193. T

=> ↺ Security updates for Friday

• Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium, grafana, kubectl-ingress-nginx, and opera), Debian (netkit-rsh and salt), Fedora (freeipa and samba), Mageia (opensc, python-django-filter, qt4, tinyxml, and transfig), openSUSE (opera and transfig), Red Hat (devtoolset-11-annobin, devtoolset-11-binutils, and llvm-toolset:rhel8), SUSE (php72 and php74), and Ubuntu (mailman and thunderbird).

=> ↺ This new Linux malware targets ecommerce sites ahead of Black Friday

• The malicious agent, dubbed linux_avp is written in Golang, and was discovered by researchers at Sansec, who were approached by an affected merchant who couldn’t seem to get rid of malware from his store.

=> ↺ New Rowhammer Technique

• Rowhammer is an attack technique involving accessing — that’s “hammering” — rows of bits in memory, millions of times per second, with the intent of causing bits in neighboring rows to flip. This is a side-channel attack, and the result can be all sorts of mayhem.

=> ↺ DDR4 memory protections are broken wide open by new Rowhammer technique

• Rowhammer exploits that allow unprivileged attackers to change or corrupt data stored in vulnerable memory chips are now possible on virtually all DDR4 modules due to a new approach that neuters defenses chip manufacturers added to make their wares more resistant to such attacks.

=> ↺ This Week in Security: Intel Atoms Spill Secrets, ICMP Poisons DNS, and The Blacksmith

• Intel has announced CVE-2021-0146, a vulnerability in certain processors based on the Atom architecture, and the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is at the center of the problem. The goal of the system around the TPM is to maintain system integrity even in the case of physical access by an attacker, so the hard drive is encrypted using a key stored in a secure chip on the motherboard. The TPM chip holds this encryption key and provides it during the boot process. When combined with secure boot, this is a surprisingly effective way to prevent tampering or data access even in the case of physical access. It’s effective, at least, when nothing goes wrong.

• Earlier this year, we covered a story where the encryption key could be sniffed directly from the motherboard, by tapping the traces connecting the TPM to the CPU. It was pointed out that TPM 2.0 can encrypt the disk encryption key on the traces, making this attack impossible.

• The entire Trusted Compute Model is based on the premise that the CPU itself is trustworthy. This brings us back to Intel’s announcement that a debug mode could be enabled via physical access. In this debug mode, the CPU master key can be extracted, leading to complete compromise. The drive encryption key can be recovered, and unsigned firmware can be loaded to the Management Engine. This means data in the TPM enclave and the TPM-stored encryption key can be compromised. Updated firmware is rolling out through motherboard vendors to address the problem.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Privacy legislation reform: Bill 64 has now been passed

=> ↺ Amazon reportedly gave employees access to practically all customer data

Environment

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Abundance decline in the avifauna of the European Union reveals global similarities in biodiversity change: Input datasets & species results

• This archive contain the two input datasets of bird population estimates and trend estimates underpinning the journal article: Abundance decline in the avifauna of the European Union reveals global similarities in biodiversity change. It also contains the species level results obtained from the Bayesian hierarchical model described in section 2.2.1 of the paper.

=> ↺ Eerie video captures elusive, alien-like squid gliding in the Gulf of Mexico

Finance

=> ↺ The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow

• Whitney joins RJ Eskow of the Zero Hour to discuss the efforts of Wall Street banks and Central banks to monetize and take ownership of the natural world through the recently created Natural Asset Corporations and the UN-backed Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ From Myanmar to Sudan, autocratic regimes have weaponised internet shutdowns. Time to fight back.

• Internet censorship is nearly as old as the internet itself. While much of the theorizing about the early internet viewed it as a free and open space for the exchange of new ideas, a number of governments had different ideas about its potential.

• While China is well-known for its sophisticated internet censorship apparatus, several governments across the Middle East and North Africa — including Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—were early adopters of certain censorship tactics such as keyword filtering and DNS tampering. Similar to China, these countries targeted a range of content, including sites that offered information about human rights violations, sex, and certain religions, as well as those that encouraged political opposition.

• But in recent years, governments have taken the more decidedly extreme tactic of cutting off internet access entirely, depriving their citizens of a lifeline to the world…and each other, a tactic that Human Rights Watch has rightly called “collective punishment.”

=> ↺ Ideas | Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster. – Rest of World

• For many, the Facebook Papers come as no surprise. As a Palestinian digital rights advocate, the recent revelations perfectly describe and validate the archetypal experience of Palestinians and millions of others generating daily content outside the U.S.

• For years, activists and civil society organizations have warned of Facebook’s negligence of non-English speaking regions, and its deeply discriminatory content moderation structure which have served to silence globally marginalized voices, not empower them. Yet Facebook, at every ebb and flow, has chosen profit over people.

• The thousands of pages of leaked documents now provide incontestable evidence, finally laying to rest one of the biggest claims repeatedly made by Facebook and its leadership since the heyday of the Arab Spring: Safety and freedom of expression are not afforded to all users equally, but are rather dictated by the company’s market interests and bottom line.

=> ↺ Digital world seen moving into ‘authoritarian space’ | Reuters

• From blocking websites to forcing companies to share user data, governments – including democracies – are increasingly resorting to “authoritarian” methods to control the internet, tech experts warned on Thursday.

• Governments like China and Russia are blocking social media content, requiring firms to submit to data surveillance, and silencing journalists and activists online, panelists told the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s annual Trust Conference.

• “The digital world is increasingly moving into an authoritarian space,” said Alina Polyakova, head of the Center for European Policy Analysis, a U.S.-based think-tank.

=> ↺ Web trust dies in darkness: Hidden Certificate Authorities undermine public crypto infrastructure

• Security researchers have checked the web’s public key infrastructure and have measured a long-known but little-analyzed security threat: hidden root Certificate Authorities.

• Certificate Authorities, or CAs, vouch for the digital certificates we use to establish trust online. You can be reasonably confident that your bank website is actually your bank website when it presents your browser with an end-user or leaf certificate that’s linked through a chain of trust to an intermediate certificate and ultimately the X.509 root certificate of a trusted CA.

• Each browser relies on a trust store consisting of a hundred or so root certificates that belong to a smaller set of organizations. Mozilla’s CA Certificate List for example currently has 151 certs representing 53 organizations.

• Some of the more well-known CAs in the US include IdenTrust, DigiCert, Sectigo, and Let’s Encrypt.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Naked Capitalism’s Private Equity Trust-Busting

Trademarks

=> ↺ Streamlabs shamed into dropping ‘OBS’ from product name after open-source OBS Project wades into Twitter spat

• One of the few virtues of Twitter is that if someone makes a complaint to a big corporation, it’s public. Everyone can see it, which sometimes means you get a rapid escalation and result. Just ask the OBS Project, which this week shamed Logitech subsidiary Streamlabs into changing the name of a product.

• The clash started when cloud-based streaming tools vendor Lightstream pointed out the very conspicuous resemblance between Streamlabs’ website and its own. That led to Lightstream’s co-founder namechecking the open-source OBS Project, on which Streamlabs is based.

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