● 12.22.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/12/2022: Fedora Linux 37 Election Results

Posted in News Roundup at 9:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ 3 Sure Ways to Get in the Christmas Spirit With Linux

• With the holidays around the corner, you can get the Christmassy feel a bit early using your Linux PC.

• The holiday season is a great time to relax, get cozy, and make time for just you. While many others are getting caught up in the hustle and bustle of Christmas, why not take an opportunity to just take in some of the Christmas magic at home?

• It feels good to treat yourself. But these treats are ones that you don’t have to travel far for. GNOME extensions, creative tools, and holiday wallpapers are available to unwrap from the comfort of your home.

• Let’s break down three straightforward ways to decorate your Linux desktop while you get into the holiday spirit.

Server

=> ↺ Oracle VM VirtualBox on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

• Oracle VM VirtualBox allows the simple and fast creation of virtual machines (VM) supporting a wide variety of operating systems. VirtualBox can be installed and run on various platforms, from a standalone laptop to a cloud instance. This hands on lab guides you through installing VirtualBox and its extension pack on an Oracle Linux cloud instance. It steps you through creating a new virtual machine using VirtualBox installed on the cloud instance, and installing the Guest Additions to the new VM.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ PCLinuxOS 2022.11.20 Quick overview #shorts – Invidious

• A Quick Overview PCLinuxOS 2022.11.20

=> ↺ How to install Obsidian on KDE Neon – Invidious

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Obsidian on KDE Neon.

=> ↺ Bash Scripting on Linux (The Complete Guide) Class 16 – Arguments – Invidious

• There’s WAY too much arguing in the Linux community. Things like Systemd and whether it should be adopted, which desktop environment you should use, or which text editor is the best (the answer is clearly vim).

=> ↺ Linux Action News 272

• Why we won’t see a new Raspberry Pi until 2025, the first steps to Plasma 6 are being taken, and PipeWire gets a major Bluetooth upgrade.

=> ↺ 305: The Most Impactful Linux Moments Of 2022 – Destination Linux – TuxDigital

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we go through our favorite and most impactful Linux moments of 2022. Then we discuss the amazing open source video editor, Kdenlive, and some exciting updates that are out now. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

=> ↺ [Podcast] Journeying into XDP: Cardinality and Keys

• In this episode of PING, Luuk Hendricks and Willem Toorop from NLNet Labs discuss applying Express Data Path (XDP) to the DNS protocol. Learn how to model and categorize incoming DNS to provide telemetry and manage data growth and time bounds in the Linux kernel with radix tries and bloom filters.

Applications

=> ↺ darktable 4.2

• The new module called “sigmoid” does a very sensible scene-to-display tonemapping. There’s nothing it does that you can’t do with filmic, but if you feel like filmic is way over your head, you might want trying sigmoid. Good results, less controls to deal with.

• However, while the general idea of making good results easier achievable is great, you are essentially getting another way of doing the same. Which has become a bit of a user experience issue in darktable.

=> ↺ Darktable 4.2.0 released

=> ↺ 10 Best Linux Email Clients for Your Workflow

• Are you tired of using the same old email client on your Linux system? Are you looking for something new and improved that can help you manage your inbox more efficiently and effectively? Look no further! In this article, we will introduce you to the best Linux email clients on the market.

• Whether you’re a business professional, a power user, or just someone looking for a reliable email solution, there is a Linux email client out there that will meet your needs. From popular options like Thunderbird and Evolution to lesser-known but equally powerful clients like Claws Mail and Geary, we’ve got you covered. So sit back, relax, and get ready to discover the perfect Linux email client for you!

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Linux File System Monitoring & Actions

• There can be multiple reasons to keep an eye on a critical/suspicious file or directory. For example, you could track an attacker and wait for some access to the captured credentials in a phishing kit installed on a compromised server. You could deploy an EDR solution or an OSSEC agent that implements an FIM (‘File Integrity Monitoring”)[1]. Upon a file change, an action can be triggered. Nice, but what if you would like a quick solution but agentless? (In the scope of an incident, for example)

• There is a well-known suite of API calls on Linux that track filesystem changes: inotify[2]. Around the API, a set of tools are available, like “inotifywatch” that generates an event when a file is “accessed”:

=> ↺ How to Rsync files from Android to Linux

• Rsync is a powerful tool that Linux users often use to synchronize files and folders from one directory to another or, from one computer to another. Did you know you can use this powerful tool to sync files from your Android device to your Linux device? Here’s how to Rsync files from Android to Linux.

=> ↺ How to add Send Later functionality to Thunderbird email | ZDNET

• I have, on occasion, needed to compose an email and send it at a more apropos time.

• more how-tos

• Lost a phone? Here’s how to track the location of an iPhone or Android device How to download YouTube videos three ways: Free, paid, and Linux command line How to create a drop-down list in Google Sheets How to recycle your old electronics into Amazon gift cards When such an instance arises, if I’m using either Gmail or Apple Mail, sending later is very simple.

• However, if I’m using Thunderbird, that option isn’t built into the app.

• Since Thunderbird is the email client I use the most, having that functionality is pretty important.

=> ↺ How to disable the “Block dangerous and deceptive content” Firefox feature

• Firefox is the best web browser out there (my opinion). However, it has sometimes a bit of annoying behaviors. Today, you will learn how to disable the “Block dangerous and deceptive content” Firefox feature.

• Let’s see, when surfing the Internet, it is common to download files that even if you know they are from trusted sources, the system, or the browser, detects that they are vulnerable.

• An example of this is the DEB or RPM packages that you find on the Internet. These packages contain binaries of applications that the system could consider as a threat. But what if we are confident that they are not threats?

• Well, Firefox does not know it, and it will “protect” you prohibiting the download, if you know that it is not threat, then it will be very annoying the situation. In this case, the best thing to do is to disable, even temporarily, this feature.

=> ↺ How to Install Sensu GO Monitoring Tool on Ubuntu – Tips On Unix

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Sensu Go Monitoring Tool on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.04

=> ↺ MySQL Root Password Reset in 3 Simple Steps

• Have you forgotten your MySQL server’s root password? No worries. Here’s how to quickly and easily reset it.

=> ↺ How to Install Dolibarr on Debian 11 – RoseHosting

• In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to install Dolibarr on Debian 11 OS.

• Dolibarr is an open-source ERP platform and CRM solution used by many small business companies worldwide. Dolibarr includes different features for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). In this blog post, we will install the LAMP stack for Dolibarr to be accessible in the browsers via the domain name.

• Installing Dolibarr on Debian 11 with LAMP stack is a straightforward process and may take up to 20 minutes. Let’s get started!

=> ↺ How to install Openshot video editor on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install Openshot video editor on a Chromebook.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ ‘Haruna’ is a Slick Qt-Based Video Player with YouTube Support

• I tried it this week and was really impressed by its design, its feature-set, and its ease of use.

• I’ve written a fair bit about fancy GTK media players like Clapper and Celluloid in the past. But Qt apps? Those not so much. And yet Haruna, an open source video player built using Qt/QML and libmpv, is every inch a match for those (and other) players.

• And naturally it looks fab on the KDE Plasma desktop…

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ On the discussion about elogind and dbus ‘hate’, is there reason? | systemd-free linux community

• A vivid discussion has broken out between members of the community, whether q66 considers her/himself one or not is not our prerogative to define, or exclude anyone, about the hardcore stance against FOSS pests such as systemd, elogind, dbus, udev, etc. So since the topic of discussion is very specific it would have been best if a topic addressed the specific issue, which is irrelevant to whether Chimera Linux belongs on a strict list of distributions without systemd or not. The criteria about that list are very clear. The criteria for the “gray” list are not very clear, but nobody really cares about this sloppy list of gray categorized distros, such as void, artix, and devuan.

• This is not a fan related categorization and polarization as “some” may prefer to portray it, not in the manner of being Barcelona or Liverpool fans, NY Yankees or Dallas Cowboys, against others. This is about rational content of why we might choose one over the others. The obvious is security of a system for a single user system. ONE does not need enterprise solutions, such as logind and dbus. An administrator who wants to maintain privileges over hundreds of users may benefit from such solutions, we isolated users of a single machine and installation have little to gain and way too much surface to protect over the “known threats” of privacy, anonymity, and security of data. The same may have been true for MS users, back when Win for workroups, and then NT were invented as enterprise solutions, finally combined into one system in XP, vista, 7-8-10-11. To the cost of the user’s system, one size of system fits all who can afford it, and they are the ones who are the market. If you have no money for an i3 or A6, you are no market to be worried about.

• IBM’s aim to dominate and dictate what is going on in FOSS through its finance of RH, Gnome, Freedesktop, etc.. and linux kernel itself, may have penetrated a significant part of the FOSS market, but its goal is not yet complete by any means. There are certain actors still out there, pretending to be independents, who facilitate this long-term plan of dominance, while there may be adversaries of equal intents, competitively acting for a share themselves. Qt corporation may be one, Intel may be another, Google, Oracle, MS, among others. So let us see what aspects have yet to be penetrated. A glibc based infrastructure has been penetrated to the maximum, and Gnu-tools based systems as well. A Musl based system is next, while the BSDs are also to be exploited. So are the active members/project actors for sale, working on those submarkets? Porting systemd, elogind, dbus functionality, udevd, into systems that have traditionally lived without? Would that be the next stage goal for corporations to achieve? If Qt is successful in one subcategory that fits the general goal, can it be purchased, owned, controlled, by a bigger fish? Of course, it can and it will when time is ripe. Can Oracle strategists see where all this is going and strategically forming alliances with IBM or others to be there among the few when time comes? Of course they can. So don’t go “wow!!!” when the news are official, try to see the news before they happen.

BSD

=> ↺ 2022 in Review: Fundraising Update | FreeBSD Foundation

• Wow, another year has flown by! Is it just me, or are the days/years flying by more quickly than ever? Like many of you, December is when I reflect over the past year. I had a few personal goals, some I met and some I didn’t, but it helps guide me with determining what I want to accomplish in the new year. We do the same here at the Foundation. We start with lofty, but realistic goals. Lofty because there is so much we want to do to help the FreeBSD Project and community, but we are limited in what we can do because of the lack of resources. I like to think of us as a small, but mighty team of passionate FreeBSD supporters. If you haven’t yet, please take a look at what our team has accomplished over the past year throughout this newsletter.

• When discussing goals for the Foundation, one might argue that one of our most important goals revolves around fundraising. I have to agree with that. So, let’s talk about where we are with our fundraising efforts for 2022.

=> ↺ 2022 in Review: Software Development | FreeBSD Foundation

• From ZFS support in makefs to experimental 16k page support on arm64 to lldb and wireguard improvements, the Foundation development staff and contractors had another busy year working to improve FreeBSD. From January 1, 2022 until mid-December 2022, 1114 of the 7575 commits to the src repository (about 15%) identify the FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor. The raw commit data give a broad indication that the Foundation is dedicated to directly improving FreeBSD, however commit data only tell part of the story. Let’s review the Foundation’s role in FreeBSD development over the past year.

• Members of the Foundation team support development by serving in many ways. For example, two staff members serve on the FreeBSD core team, which takes on a variety of roles including setting Project policy and resolving disputes. We coordinate contracted development work, including internships and we contribute to cluster administration, source repository management, the security team, and continuous integration. We also played key roles in FreeBSD’s Google Summer of Code program. One Foundation staff member administered the program and served as a mentor, while two other staff members also served as project mentors. The program was a success in that all projects passed and code was contributed to the tree. For example, drm debugfs support was added to the LinuxKPI in f697b943. We also participated in a mentorship program through RISC-V International to get Syzkaller, a kernel fuzzer, working on FreeBSD/RISC-V. The project was a success and some RISC-V bug reports (e.g. PR 266108) have started coming in.

=> ↺ FreeBSD and ZFS Holiday Reads – 2022 Edition

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

=> ↺ Reannouncing OpenMandriva deploying Mirrorbits – Announcements and Communications – OMA forum

• Mirrorbits is a geographical download redirector written in Go for distributing files efficiently across a set of mirrors. It offers a simple and economic way to create a Content Delivery Network layer using a pure software stack. It is primarily designed for the distribution of large-scale Open-Source projects with a lot of traffic.

=> ↺ Reannouncing OpenMandriva deploying Mirrorbits – OpenMandriva

• To expand on information about our Mirrorbits mirror management instance we are re-announcing OpenMandriva deploying Mirrorbits

Fedora / Red Hat

=> ↺ Fedora Linux 37 election results – Fedora Community Blog

• The Fedora Linux 37 election cycle has concluded. Here are the results for each election. Congratulations to the winning candidates, and thank you all candidates for running in this election!

=> ↺ Kubernetes 1.26: Support for Passing Pod fsGroup to CSI Drivers At Mount Time | Kubernetes

• Delegation of fsGroup to CSI drivers was first introduced as alpha in Kubernetes 1.22, and graduated to beta in Kubernetes 1.25. For Kubernetes 1.26, we are happy to announce that this feature has graduated to General Availability (GA).

• In this release, if you specify a fsGroup in the security context, for a (Linux) Pod, all processes in the pod’s containers are part of the additional group that you specified.

• In previous Kubernetes releases, the kubelet would always apply the fsGroup ownership and permission changes to files in the volume according to the policy you specified in the Pod’s .spec.securityContext.fsGroupChangePolicy field.

• Starting with Kubernetes 1.26, CSI drivers have the option to apply the fsGroup settings during volume mount time, which frees the kubelet from changing the permissions of files and directories in those volumes.

=> ↺ Fedora 38 To Prohibit Byte Swapped Xorg and Xwayland Clients – Slashdot

• A rather exotic feature in Xorg and Xwayland is being proposed to have the default value turned off going forward in Fedora 38 due to its use in attacks (CVE-2014-8095, CVE-2014-8099, CVE-2014-8103. . . to name a few). The feature allows servers running on one endianess to byte-swap to allow clients of a different endianess to connect to it. This was more common in the 1980s when X servers ran on big-endian and clients would connect who were little-endian.

=> ↺ Career builders: Upskill in the new year with these 10 free Red Hat Training webinars

• Throughout 2022, training experts from Red Hat Training and Certification delivered free monthly Taste of Training webinars built around our existing curricula to provide viewers valuable insight into our course catalog and the latest updates on Red Hat technology. Don’t worry if you weren’t able to attend the live sessions – each webinar is available on-demand for one year after the live session. Here is a look back at the topics that were covered this year:

=> ↺ Customer success: Highlights from our public customer stories in 2022

• As this year draws to a close, we stop to reflect on what 2022 has meant to us. For many, it’s been a year that saw people returning to the office and other public venues, mingling with coworkers, family and friends—some of whom we haven’t seen in more than two years. Gatherings are becoming more frequent, restrictions are being lifted and fewer masks are worn in grocery stores and doctor’s offices, among a number of other things.

• Red Hat Summit went hybrid for the first time, with more than 900 attendees in Boston and in excess of 14,000 logging into the virtual experience. AnsibleFest was another popular event, showcasing the benefits of automation for organizations—from development and operations to security and network teams.

=> ↺ ELF section retrieval with debuginfod

• It’s been almost a year since our last blog regarding debuginfod, an HTTP file server that provides debugging resources to debugger-like tools. Since then we have been busy working on improvements to the server itself, as well as the debuginfod clients built into tools such as GDB, Valgrind and Systemtap. One feature that we recently added is the ability to download specific ELF sections from ELF binaries available from the server. First I’ll give brief summaries of how debuginfod works and what ELF sections are. For more information you can check out our other debuginfod blog posts.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Welcome Back, Bullseye – Björn Wärmedal

• Tried Debian Testing (Bookworm) for a while recently both on my laptop (vanilla Debian with MATE desktop) and on one Raspberry Pi (Raspberry Pi OS with the Pixel desktop). Eventually things just broke in ways that got me fed up. It really sucked when the laptop broke because I didn’t know how to create a new boot image without it. The things that broke were Network Manager and the graphic desktop. I can do without the latter, but how do i get a new image without the former? It was Friday evening and my work laptop was at the office.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Where is My Librem 5? Part 2

• Earlier this year I wrote a post titled Where is My Librem 5? where I went into detail about some of the challenges (in particular in the supply chain) that we faced in making the mass-produced Librem 5. If you haven’t yet read that article, I highly recommend it so you have more background on our Librem 5 production challenges. Understanding that will help you understand this post better.

• The main purpose of that article was to give a general status report on where we are, and where we intended to go to finish shipping everyone their Librem 5. In particular I identified three different production batches (E3, E4, and E5) that were necessary to complete all outstanding orders, and shared our internal goal to try to fulfill all of the orders by the end of the year. While we haven’t met that goal in that time frame, many people have received their Librem 5, and we are well on our way. In this post I will give an update on where we are currently and what the next few months will look like for Librem 5 fulfillment.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi 5 Not Launching Until After 2023 | Tom’s Hardware

• Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton talks to Explaining Computers about the impact of the pandemic and global chip shortage on the Raspberry Pi 5.

=> ↺ “The Sidecar’ — Adding advanced networking, and a Linux shell, to a Psion palmtop

• I am a huge fan of finding creative ways of using the serial port on older computers to get them On-Line — and otherwise extend their functionality.

• One of my favorite such approaches is using a single board computer to emulate an old-school, analog modem… bridged to a WiFi connection. This allows an old computer — even ones which never had a networking stack — to use any plain old telecom software (the kind you might use to dial up a BBS in the 1980s) to connect to a Telnet or SSH server.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Find My Device: You can now find your Android without Internet

=> ↺ Here are the best Android wallpapers our readers created in 2022

=> ↺ Android 13 is bringing Pixel’s Personal Safety app to more phones

=> ↺ Android 13 arrives for Samsung Galaxy A13 5G in the US – PhoneArena

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

FSF

=> ↺ Surprise your loved ones with an FSF membership gift this holiday season

• Joining the FSF as an associate member is one of the best ways to bring your friends and loved ones into the free software community. For a full year, they’ll be welcomed into the FSF community’s collective push towards freedom, and your support will allow us to keep on spreading the free software message all year round — as well as for years to come. Plus, your gift of a membership will count towards our year-end goal of 455 new members, helping us start the year off right financially.

• Your friend, colleague, or loved one will be able to redeem their membership from the moment your donation is complete. After donating, you’ll receive a code and a printable page so that you can present your gift as a physical object, if you like. The membership is valid for one year, and includes the many benefits that come with an FSF associate membership, including a USB member card, email forwarding, access to our Jitsi Meet videoconferencing server and member forum, discounts in the FSF shop and on ThinkPenguin hardware, and more.

• [...]

• If you have a few spare moments around the kitchen table this holiday season, now might be the perfect time to share (or reshare!) our video ShoeTool for a way to start the conversation about free software and explore some of its most basic concepts.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ cheat.sh Gives You Access to the Best Linux and Programming Cheat Sheets

• Learning how to do new things or fix problems on Linux can sometimes be overwhelming. If you’re searching for an answer to a problem, and the man pages aren’t working out, it’s tempting to dive headfirst into Stack Overflow or even YouTube.

• But it’s easy to access the best community-driven cheat sheet repositories in the world—right from your terminal.

=> ↺ The advantages of coding on Linux | Qrius

• Whether you’re running a business or are just an average user, open-source software has many benefits. Linux, in particular, is one to keep an eye out for, with its share in the worldwide market expected to reach $15.64 billion by 2027 due to the easy usability and perks it offers users.

• From securer networks to impressive customisation potential, Linux is an excellent platform for programmers and coders. While proprietary software is better suited for certain applications, Linux offers its users a variety of advantages, and here are just a few of them…

=> ↺ Get the window width and height in Javascript, Vanilla Javascript

• The script below displays the window width and window height dimensions.

• When the window is resized the window dimensions are reloaded using the window.addEventListener resize function.

• We assign window.innerWidth and window.innerHeight properties to variables and then use the document.write to print the dimensions on the screen.

=> ↺ Memfault Adds Embedded Linux to IoT Device Reliability Platform

• Memfault, the provider of the first IoT reliability platform, announced today its platform includes full support for embedded Linux. The expansion offers cross-platform support for developers building on MCUs, Android, or embedded Linux for any hardware device for an unlimited number of devices running any use case, anywhere.

• With Memfault’s IoT reliability platform, developers can solve operational challenges via fleet observability, remote debugging, and smart firmware over-the-air (OTA) management. Embedded Linux developers will now have easy access to Memfault’s device reliability engineering tools that offer product, engineering, and support teams deep insights into embedded device performance, irrespective of the hardware. Memfault’s device reliability engineering capabilities will be available across all product lines enabling teams to make product changes irrespective of device hardware and operating system with the confidence that it won’t impact their device fleets.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ Day 23: Sigils followup: semantics and language design – Raku Advent Calendar

• Until a few days ago, I’d intended for this post to be an update on the Raku persistent data structures I’m deveoping. And I have included a (very brief) status update at the end of this post. But something more pressing has come to my attention: Someone on the Internet was wrong — and that someone was me.

• Specifically, in my post about sigils the other day, I significantly misdescribed the semantics that Raku applies to sigiled-variables. And – considering that the post was about sigils, the final third focused on Raku’s sigils, and much of that section discussed the semantics of those sigils – being wrong about the semantics of Raku’s sigils isn’t exactly a trivial mistake. Oops!

• In partial mitigation, I’ll mention one thing: no on pointed out my incorrect description of the relevant semantics, even though the post generated over two hundred comments of discussion, most of it thoughtful. Now, it could be no one read all the way to Part 3 of a 7,000 word post (an understandable choice!). But, considering the well-known popularity of correcting people on the Internet, I view the lack of any correction as some evidence that my misunderstanding wasn’t obvious to others either. In fact, I only discovered the issue when I decided, while replying to a comment on that post, to write an an oddly-designed Raku class to illustrate the semantics I’d described; much to my suprise, it showed that I’d gotten those semantics wrong.

=> ↺ Perl Weekly Challenge 196: Pattern 132 and Range List

Rust

=> ↺ There is Rust in the Kernel! – Invidious

• In this video I discuss the implications of the Rust programming language being used in the Linux Kernel

=> ↺ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 474

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Can you please tell me what time it is? Adventures with public NTP servers., (Wed, Dec 21st)

• Keeping accurate time has never been easier. In the early days of my computing experience, the accuracy of computer clocks was always questionable. Many of them kept worse time than a $5 wristwatch. Having a cheap quartz oscillator on a motherboard with widely varying temperatures just didn’t work all that well.

• Along came NTP, and now, almost all operating systems, even many IoT devices, come preconfigured with some reasonable NTP server. In addition, “pool.ntp.org” has made available many publicly available servers to choose from. Currently, “pool.ntp.org” claims to consist of about 4,000 servers provided by volunteers. But how good are they? That is a question that often comes up with volunteer projects like that. Pretty much anybody may join “the pool” and of course, there is no guarantee that the times are accurate. So I did a quick test and wrote a little python script to figure out how good they are.

Leftovers

Proprietary

=> ↺ Commercial Dev Tool vendor adds ARM64 and “Dark Mode” for Linux

• I’m a big fan of commercial software supporting Linux. Big, big fan.

• When I see game developers and publishers throw their weight behind Linux, it makes my heart sing. Even when those games are closed source, it’s worth supporting their endeavors to support one of my favorite open source operating systems.

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Linux Foundation Makes Open Street Maps Great Again – Invidious

• The Linux Foundation is starting a new foundation called the Overture Maps Foundation with the aim of making open mapping even better with full compatibility with Open Street Maps, with the help some big tech giants.

=> ↺ New Linux Foundation dataset aids in food traceability, carbon tracking and crop production – SiliconANGLE

• The Linux Foundation has today announced that its AgStack project will host a new open-source code base and computation engine that offers a data dataset of registry data for agricultural fields to aid in food traceability, carbon tracking, crop production and other field-level analytics.

Security

=> ↺ Software bills of material face long road to adoption

• There are few things the fractious community of cybersecurity experts and researchers can agree on. One of the rare exceptions is the need for more widespread use of software bills of materials, or SBOMs, a tool that lists the components of a given piece of software.

=> ↺ A year in cyber: Computing’s biggest security stories of 2022

• Here’s our round-up of the security stories that have shaped the cyber year in what has been yet another rollercoaster ride for infosec professionals.

Environment

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Endangered Pink Iguana Hatchlings Seen for First Time on Galapagos Island

• Scientists have discovered hatchling and juvenile populations of the Galapagos pink land iguana, an endangered reptile native to a sole island on the Ecuadorean archipelago, for the first time since the species’ discovery just decades ago.

• Native only to the slopes of Wolf Volcano on the Galapagos’ Isabela Island, the iguana is considered critically endangered and just several hundred are left, according to estimates.

Finance

=> ↺ A Royal Commission into Scott Morrison? He sold off the farm, in secret – Michael West

• Scott Morrison approved tens of billions in foreign takeover deals after secretly being appointed Treasurer last year, compromising Australia’s national interest. Sydney Airport, electricity giants AusNet and Spark Infrastructure. All gone. Michael West reports.

Monopolies

Software Patents

=> ↺ Even Avanci’s Supporters Don’t Defend its Litigation Funding Scheme – Patent Progress

• In July 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division issued a business review letter (BRL) addressing Avanci LLC’s proposed pool pursuant to…

Copyrights

=> ↺ Opinion: Here are ChatGPT’s practical uses for marketers, programmers and journalists – MarketWatch

• ChatGPT is a revolutionary iteration of OpenAI’s GPT-3 neural network machine learning model. It’s trained to generate any type of text using internet data.

• ChatGPT accrued more than one million users in five days when it was released this month. Maybe you’ve used it, or read stories about people creating fantastical stories with the software.

• Being in love with all things artificial intelligence (AI), I was thrilled to cover today’s topic: practical uses and implementations of GPT-3.

=> ↺ Kondrashov DMCA abuse seems to continue

• 21,000+ notices piggyback on set of notices from Blog Part I

• In light of the growing number of revelations regarding Russian corruption in recent months, it stands to reason that anyone who may be under investigation for such behavior would want any online criticism of their behavior removed. The DMCA notice and takedown procedure remains the favored approach for coordinating the suppression of critical articles as part of larger reputation management efforts.

• The essence of the DMCA’s notice and takedown procedure is that OSPs cannot be held liable for copyright infringement as long as they removed disputed materials in response to takedown notices they receive. For copyright holders, takedown notices have made it easier to address online infringement and remove content online without having to go to court to assert their rights.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

=> ↺ No GoToSocial

=> ↺ GoToSocial instead of snac

• Here’s what I didn’t like.

• When I followed a person, all their posts ended up in my feed, even if they replied to people not in my feed. It was confusing. I remember this used to be a default in the distant past, and I remember Pleroma having this, too. When that default was changed for Mastodon, I didn’t like the change. Now, I don’t like going back. I am following hundreds of accounts from my main octodon.social account. I imported just a small sliver into snac, and it already felt like a glorious mess.

=> ↺ PostmarketOS as semi daily driver

• So, its now about a week that i flashed PostmarketOS on a Oneplus 6 i scavanged at work. How does it fare so far? I would say pretty good (bar the few hickups that were more or less my fault).

• One thing i can not get reliably to work is voice calling. Under SXMO i can establish a call but get no audio (and i get the error message “We failed to establish call audio”), under Phosh (yeah, i flashed the device multiple times… but more on that later) i CAN get working calls but not reliably. After spending a few days getting it to work and getting pretty frustrated a thought crept into my mind and i dug out the emails of the coworker that owned the device previously, and yes, a similar behaviour was wat lead to the device ending up in the “crap electronics” box in my office in the first place. Hmm… ok, lets put “voice calling” a few steps down on the priority ladder.

Programming

=> ↺ Unit Tests

• Granted, programmers may be under some amount of time pressure; tests and documentation are likely first to the axe. And rare may be the developer who actually likes writing and maintaining the tests and documentation; certain programming languages and operating systems have more of a culture for this than others.

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