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● 01.14.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 14/01/2023: KDE Frameworks 5.102.0 and Mesa 23 RC

Posted in News Roundup at 7:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Veira Group introduces Linux-based Coolita 2.0 solutions for the Indian Smart TV market. – Newspatrolling.com

• Veira Group, one of India’s largest ODM for Smart TVs introduces Linux-based Coolita 2.0 solutions for the country’s growing smart TV market. With this development, Veira Group enters a new tech territory in partnership with the proprietary Coolita OS, highlighting its commitment to building a new smart TV ecosystem. Coolita OS is Skyworth first self-developed smart TV operating system, delivering a lighter, smoother, more convenient user experience.

• With the release of the Coolita 2.0 solutions, Veira intends to sell 500,000 Smart TVs equipped with the new OS for the top Indian brands. The new OS is set to transform the smart TV experience, for today’s internet-driven generation. It offers a wide variety of entertainment options and applications, such as YouTube, Prime Video, Zee5, Hungama, SonyLiv Etc. with a range of global and local content. Other features of this lite TV OS include pre-installed lite cloud games, a built-in Internet browser, an app store and a Data Saver that provides real-time data reminders to help people efficiently manage their data usage. Any Smart TV device that is connected to LAN can be used to watch a movie with network-free screen projection. With an exceptional user experience, platform stability, and affordability, Coolita is expected to become one of the leading & preferred Smart TV OS’s in India.

=> ↺ Veira Group introduces Linux-based Coolita 2.0 solutions for the Indian Smart TV market – Content Media Solution

=> ↺ The 9 Best Career Options After Learning Linux

• Ready to start your professional Linux career? Here are some of the best job options for you after you’ve learned Linux and open source.

• There is a reason why many people use Linux but in different capacities. From using Linux distros as individual users to developers writing apps for Linux users, there is a different purpose associated with Linux.

• When working on Linux, you can pursue various career options and avenues. Each stream will open opportunities, allowing you to make the most out of your newly derived skills.

• You can pursue a few options after getting familiar with Linux and its related technologies. Here are a few top professions you can choose after learning Linux.

=> ↺ Linux Around The World: USA – Missouri – LinuxLinks

• We cover events and user groups that are running in the US state of Missouri. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ System76 teases beefy Pangolin Linux laptop update with Ryzen 7 6800U – NotebookCheck.net News

• System76 is known for its high-quality laptops that run Linux (either Ubuntu or System76′s own Pop!_OS). However, most of their laptops run on Intel CPUs, so AMD fans were left in the lurch… until the original Pangolin debuted a few years ago. System76 recently teased the upcoming version of the Pangolin, replete with the latest and greatest from AMD.

• The new Pangolin will come with AMD’s Ryzen 7 6800U CPU, Radeon 680M integrated graphics (built on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture), and up to 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM (6400 MHz). The laptop will have slots for two M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs (up to 16 TB total).

• Connectivity is covered by three USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) ports, a single USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) port, and an SD card reader. USB 4 is noticeably absent. An HDMI 2.0 port and 3.5 mm combo audio jack round out connections.

• The Pangolin has most of the conveniences of other modern laptops, including a backlit chiclet-style keyboard, a multitouch trackpad, and a Kensington lock. The webcam falls flat at only 1 MP (720p), but there is a hardware kill switch to turn off the webcam.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ My podcast tastes | AksDev

• I just wanted to write this down since I’ve been talking a bit about podcasts on fediverse.

• I listen a lot of podcasts when gaming, it’s kind of a way how I relax. Nothing like good multiplayer FPS where I can turn off my brains, then I can listen podcasts on the side.

=> ↺ Don’t Buy An AMD 7900 XT – XTX On Linux – Invidious

• As always don’t buy a GPU on the launch of a new architecture, and the RDNA 3 cards with the 7900 XT and XTX prove that to be true again, these cards are a mess on Linux right now.

=> ↺ Should I Convert Ext3 to Ext4? – Invidious

• Let me know what you think… Should I convert my / partition from Ext3 to Ext4?

=> ↺ 403 – 2023 Predictions – mintCast

• Linux Mint 21.1 Vera released, Goodbye SHA-1: NIST Retires 27-Year-Old Widely Used Cryptographic Algorithm, Pine Tab2 announced, More developers reportedly now use Linux than macOS

=> ↺ Archcraft: Minimal Linux Based on Arch – Invidious

• Today we look at ArchCraft with the OpenBox window manager and dig into the default settings. This Linux distro is not user friendly, but is powerful for those willing to learn it.

=> ↺ Apple spies on users, Mastodon loses users, Mozilla ♥️ Fediverse: Linux – Open Source News – Invidious

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 6.1.6 [LWN.net]

• I’m announcing the release of the 6.1.6 kernel.

• All users of the 6.1 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 6.1.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.1.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s…

• thanks,

• greg k-h

=> ↺ Linux 5.15.88 [LWN.net]

• I’m announcing the release of the 5.15.88 kernel.

• All users of the 5.15 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 5.15.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.15.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s…

• thanks,

• greg k-h

=> ↺ Linux 5.10.163 [LWN.net]

• I’m announcing the release of the 5.10.163 kernel.

• All users of the 5.10 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 5.10.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.10.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s…

• thanks,

• greg k-h

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ [ANNOUNCE] mesa 23.0.0-rc1

Applications

=> ↺ Kid3 Autio Tagger Celebrate Its 20th Birthday by Releasing v3.9.3 | UbuntuHandbook

• Kid3, the free and open-source Qt app for editing audio tags, now is 20 years old!

• It was January 12, 2003, exactly 20 years ago, when the first version 0.1 of Kid3 was released. And, it’s the first app that I used to edit music tags in Ubuntu when in 2008.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Install Varnish with Apache on Ubuntu 22.04

• . We already know that Apache is one of the best web servers out there. But there are always tools to improve it and to increase its power. So, today, you will learn how to install Varnish with Apache on Ubuntu 22.04.

=> ↺ Perform Unattended VM Installation on VirtualBox 7

=> ↺ How To Install uTorrent on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install uTorrent on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, µTorrent (also known as uTorrent) is a popular and widely used BitTorrent client that allows users to download and manage torrent files. One of the key features of µTorrent is its small size and minimal system requirements. It is designed to be lightweight and fast, which makes it suitable for use on older or less powerful computers. It also has a simple and user-friendly interface, which makes it easy to use for both beginners and advanced users.

• 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 uTorrent BitTorrent client on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

=> ↺ How to install and use the G4Music app on Linux

• If you’ve been looking for a new music app for Linux, look no further than G4Music. G4Music is a new, elegant GTK4 music application for Linux. It is light and easy to use. In this guide, we’ll show you how to install and use it on your Linux system.

=> ↺ Automating HA cluster configuration with RHEL system roles

• The ability to provide services to customers continuously and with minimal-to-no outages is critical in today’s world. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) High Availability Add-On can help you achieve that goal by improving the reliability, scalability and availability of production systems. High availability (HA) clusters do this by eliminating single points of failure and by failing over services from one cluster node to another in case a node becomes inoperative.

• In this post, I’ll demonstrate using the ha_cluster RHEL system role to configure an HA cluster running an Apache HTTP server with shared storage in active/passive mode.

=> ↺ Create Your Own Emacs Start Page – Invidious

• In the last few days, I have been playing around with creating my own “start page” for Doom Emacs. By default, Doom comes with its own “dashboard” program but I wanted to create my own, mainly for the experience, but also because I could create a start page that was tailored exactly to my needs..

=> ↺ How to enable developer mode on Chrome OS Flex

• I have recently switched to Chrome OS Flex as main operating system. The experience so far is really great. It does everything what it should do. I can browse the internet with it, game with it (in the past Google Stadia, now Xbox Cloud), answer my mails and even work on Arch Linux. Even printing worked pretty much out of the box.

=> ↺ [Fixed] VirtualBox Needs Microsoft Visual C++ 2019 Redistributable Package

• Here’s a quick guide to fix the error “VirtualBox Needs Microsoft Visual C++ 2019 Redistributable Package”.

• Oracle’s VirtualBox is a popular virtualization software that helps you create guest virtual machines for Linux distributions in any host system.

=> ↺ Kubernetes App Deployment from the Command Line – The New Stack

• If you’ve been following my Kubernetes 101 series, you may have discovered that there are ways to make Kubernetes considerably easier. Thanks to MicroK8s and Portainer, the journey doesn’t have to be challenging all the time. But even though you can begin your dive into Kubernetes as a point-and-click affair with Portainer, at some point you might want to be able to work from the command line. That’s not a given but you never know if you’ll be thrown into a situation where you’re asked to deploy an app or service to a Kubernetes cluster and there is no Portainer GUI to be found.

Games

=> ↺ The Best Deck accessory: a Virtual Monitor? nReal Air AR glasses Review – Boiling Steam

• The Steam Deck we all know and love was designed with pragmatism in mind — an all-in-one gaming console that you could use anywhere, uncluttered, unencumbered. It largely succeeded; so much that often the gaming portals and news sites must remind the reader that it is not a gaming PC. It has neither the power nor the peripherals for fulfilling this role, and its 7″ screen while bright and clear is unable to substitute for a big gaming monitor. And while you could attach such monitors to the Deck, they are big, heavy and power-hungry, and definitely not portable.

• At least, not the physical monitors. How about a virtual monitor? Augmented reality is the merging of the real-world view with a digital image in real-time, done with devices like glasses and headsets. What if the digital image is the monitor, and the augmented reality device are particularly unassuming sunglasses?

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Ships Frameworks 5.102.0 – KDE Community

• KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.102.0.

• KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.

• This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

=> ↺ KDE Frameworks 5.102 Enables File Transfers over 2GB in KDE Connect

• The KDE Project released today KDE Frameworks 5.102 as the latest update to this collection of over 80 add-on libraries to Qt providing commonly needed functionality for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and related apps.

• KDE Frameworks 5.102 is packed with many changes, but the most prominent ones include support for file transfers over 2GB in size in the KDE Connect app, which lets you transfer files between your mobile device and your computer, but also do other things like receive notifications, control media players, etc.

=> ↺ Running Plasma on VisionFive-2 – cordlandwehr

• New year, new RISC-V Yocto blog post \o/ When I wrote my last post, I did really not expect my brand new VisionFive-2 board to find its way to me so soon… But well, a week ago it was suddenly there. While unpacking I shortly pondered over my made plans to prepare a Plasma Bigscreen RaspberryPi 4 demo board for this year’s FOSDEM.

• Obvious conclusion: “Screw it! Let’s do the demo on the VisionFive-2!” — And there we are:

• After some initial bumpy steps to boot up a first self-compiled U-boot and Kernel (If you unbox a new board, you need to do a bootloader and firmware update first! Otherwise it will not boot the latest VisionFive Kernel) it was surprisingly easy to prepare Yocto to build a core-image-minimal that really boots the whole way up.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

=> ↺ Mabox Linux Called ‘Throwback to Old-School Linux’ – Slashdot

• “If you’ve been itching to try an Arch Linux distribution and want something outside of the usual GNOME/KDE/Xfce desktop environments, Mabox Linux is an outstanding option….” writes ZDNet’s Jack Wallen.

Red Hat

=> ↺ Zooming Out: Enterprise-Level Cloud Infrastructures

=> ↺ Building our technology ecosystem: Connecting a love for learning to tech sales

• Ana Basso first heard of Red Hat during her time at a technical high school in Brazil, where students had a subject focused on Linux. She clearly remembers their teacher showing them the company’s logo featuring Shadowman and explaining Red Hat’s role in the open source community.

=> ↺ Navigating 5G transformation: Key learnings from the Red Hat partner ecosystem

• In case you missed it, Red Hat recently hosted its annual Open5G event to discuss the latest innovations, challenges and opportunities facing service providers when it comes to 5G networks. Business transformation continues to be top of mind for many in the telecommunications industry as the scope of 5G and the associated cloud infrastructure implications are pushing service providers and operators to rethink the way they deploy and support workloads using open source technologies.

• At Red Hat, our partner ecosystem is the beating heart behind many of the innovations driving telco business transformation today and into the future, comprising some of the world’s leading service providers, systems integrators, cloud providers and more. During Red Hat’s Open5G event, partners took the virtual stage alongside Red Hat and customers to share their unique experiences and perspectives in 5G. Here are a few key learnings from Red Hat partners:

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Digi International : Embedded Yocto 4.0-r1 LTS Announcement | MarketScreener

• Digi is delighted to unveil the details of the latest version of Digi Embedded Yocto (DEY) 4.0-r1 LTS (Long-term Support). Our customers require a product lifecycle management policy that maintains a stable version of the software for years to avoid compromising the stability or compatibility of applications running on the LTS version. Our renowned and reliable operating system shaped for our feature-rich and secure shielded Digi ConnectCore® system-on-modules (SOM), fully meets these customer needs. Additionally, the enhancements and functionality in this new release will enable the development of robust new device designs for business, industrial, transportation, government, and medical use cases.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ This glove translates sign language using an array of sensors | Arduino Blog

• For people not familiar with American Sign Language (ASL), being able to recognize what certain hand motions and positions mean is a nearly impossible task. To make this process easier, Hackster.io user ayooluwa98 came up with the idea to integrate various motion, resistive, and touch sensors into a single glove that could convert these signals into understandable text and speech.

• The system is based around a single Arduino Nano board, which is responsible for taking in sensor data and outputting the phrase that best matches the inputs. The orientation of the hand is ascertained by reading values from the X, Y, and Z axes of a single accelerometer and applying a small change based upon prior calibration. Meanwhile, resistive flex sensors spanning the length of each finger produce a different voltage level according to the bend’s extent.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week – Android Apps Weekly

=> ↺ 5 Android Apps for Designing and Buying Your Own Custom T-Shirts

=> ↺ Android Auto�redesign rolling out draggable seek bar in music apps

=> ↺ Tecno first-gen retractable-lens Android flagship smartphone pre-orders coming to Amazon.in – NotebookCheck.net News

=> ↺ Android Is Closing the Gap With Apple With This New Feature – CNET

=> ↺ Can Your Android Phone Be Tracked When It’s Turned Off?

=> ↺ The Google vs CCI slugfest and how it could impact Android users

=> ↺ Best Android Games Updates – Arknights, Stardew Valley, And More – Droid Gamers

=> ↺ 5 Best USB-C Earbuds with Microphones for Android Smartphones – Guiding Tech

=> ↺ Google needs to raise the bar for Android updates again in 2023

=> ↺ Malware Comes Standard With This Android TV Box on Amazon

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

GNU Projects

=> ↺ Jérôme Lejeune Foundation adopts GNU Health

• We start 2023 with exciting news for the medical and scientific community!

• GNU Health has been adopted by he Jérôme Lejeune foundation, a leading organization in the research and management of trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome) and other intellectual disabilities of genetic origin.

• Lejeune foundation has its headquarters in France, with offices in Argentina, the United States and Spain.

=> ↺ GNU Binutils 2.40 released

• Hi Everyone,

• We are pleased to announce that version 2.40 of the GNU Binutils project sources have been released and are now available for download at:

• https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils

• https://sourceware.org/pub/binutils/releases/

=> ↺ Sean Whitton: Always running Emacs under gdb

• The emacsclient(1) program is used to connect to Emacs running as a daemon. emacsclient(1) can go in your EDITOR/VISUAL environment variables so that you can edit things like Git commit messages and sudoers files in your existing Emacs session, rather than starting up a new instances of Emacs. It’s not only that this is usually faster, but also that it means you have all your session state available – for example, you can yank text from other files you were editing into the file you’re now editing.

• Another, somewhat different use of emacsclient(1) is to open new Emacs frames for arbitrary work, not just editing a single, given file. This can be in a terminal or under a graphical display manager. I use this as often as I invoke emacsclient(1) via EDITOR/VISUAL. I use emacsclient -nc to open new graphical frames and emacsclient -t to open new text-mode frames, the latter when SSHing into my work machine from home, or similar. In each case, all my buffers, command history etc. are available. It’s a real productivity boost.

• Some people use systemd socket activation to start up the Emacs daemon. That way, they only need ever invoke emacsclient, without any special options, and the daemon will be started if not already running. In my case, emacsclient on PATH is a wrapper script that checks whether a daemon is running and starts one if necessary. The main reason I have this script is that I regularly use both the installed version of Emacs and in-tree builds of Emacs out of emacs.git, and the script knows how to choose what to launch and what to try to connect to. In particular, it ensures that the in-tree emacsclient(1) is not used to try to connect to the installed Emacs, which might fail due to protocol changes. And it won’t use the in-tree Emacs executable if I’m currently recompiling Emacs.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Software testing, and why I’m unhappy about it

• Automated testing of software is great. Unfortunately, what’s commonly considered best practice for how to integrate testing into the development flow is a bad fit for a lot of software. You know what I mean: You submit a pull request, some automated testing process is kicked off in the background, and some time later you get back a result that’s either Green (all tests passed) or Red (at least one test failed). Don’t submit the PR if the tests are red. Sounds good, doesn’t quite work.

• There is Software Under Test (SUT), the software whose development is the goal of what you’re doing, and there’s the Test Bench (TB): the tests themselves, but also additional relevant parts of the environment like perhaps some hardware device that the SUT is run against.

• The above development practice works well when the SUT and TB are both defined by the same code repository and are developed together. And admittedly, that is the case for a lot of useful software. But it just so happens that I mostly tend to work on software where the SUT and TB are inherently split. Graphics drivers and shader compilers implement some spec (like Vulkan or Direct3D), and an important part of the TB are a conformance test suite and other tests, the bulk of which are developed separately from the driver itself. Not to mention the GPU itself and other software like the kernel mode driver. The point is, TB development is split from the SUT development and it is infeasible to make changes to them in lockstep.

=> ↺ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RApiDatetime 0.0.8 on CRAN: Maintenance

• RApiDatetime provides a number of entry points for C-level functions of the R API for Date and Datetime calculations. The functions asPOSIXlt and asPOSIXct convert between long and compact datetime representation, formatPOSIXlt and Rstrptime convert to and from character strings, and POSIXlt2D and D2POSIXlt convert between Date and POSIXlt datetime. Lastly, asDatePOSIXct converts to a date type. All these functions are rather useful, but were not previously exported by R for C-level use by other packages. Which this package aims to change.

=> ↺ gui_engine runs in initrd

• I posted yesterday about compiling ‘dialog’ statically, enabling text-mode GUIs in the initrd:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202301/first-bootup-2-letter-language-asked-in-initrd.html

• ‘dialog’ is completely stand-alone, doesn’t require any shared libraries, and is 508KB. It supports unicode characters.

• All of the utilities in the initrd are statically-linked; ‘busybox’ is another example.

• [...]

• The example is named ‘example’ and is 304KB. That is a statically-link standalone application. Most of the size is the linked-in libsdl, so adding more features to the app won’t increase the size much.

• Very limited widgets, no documentation, but very simple and small C code. So definitely interested in taking it on as a project. Might be of interest to someone else also. First task — there is no way to exit from the example, had to do a hard power-off.

=> ↺ What is ActiveRecord becomes from Rails

• Have you heard about the ActiveRecord becomes method from Rails? Maybe it’ll come handy one day.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ How to prevent an infinite loop

Leftovers

=> ↺ So Many Itches To Scratch

• It may be weird to consider in a world where we have so many ways to interact with things through touch, but we don’t use all of those types of interaction to communicate with a computer. To offer an example: Scratching. Often done with fingernails, quarters, or other somewhat abrasive materials, it’s a common type of gesture that has no true equivalent in the world of smart devices (well, unless you scratch your screen). I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of scratching recently, and for today’s Tedium, I wanted to offer up every single scrap of thinking on scratching. I’m feelin’ kinda itchy.

• [...]

• Thanks to its use of a latex-based ink or varnish that covers up the winning details until you scratch them off, scratch-offs are naturally multi-layered, and that general design allows for things to be hidden. In some ways, the coating is the key element—but in others, it’s the underlying algorithms behind the game of chance. Maybe it’s the combination of the two.

• As the Detroit Free Press reported late last year, the invention comes to us from an early computer scientist named John Koza, one of the first graduates of the University of Michigan’s computer science program. Koza’s innovation was not the scratch-off material itself—which was already in wide use by his employer in undergrad at the time, the sweepstakes company J&H International—but the addition of algorithms that helped turned lottery games into things that could be played—and won—instantly, rather than things that came with a long wait.

Science

=> ↺ James Webb telescope reveals Milky Way–like galaxies in young universe

• New images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal for the first time galaxies with stellar bars—elongated features of stars stretching from the centers of galaxies into their outer disks—at a time when the universe was a mere 25% of its present age. The finding of so-called barred galaxies, similar to our Milky Way, this early in the universe will require astrophysicists to refine their theories of galaxy evolution.

• Prior to JWST, images from the Hubble Space Telescope had never detected bars at such young epochs. In a Hubble image, one galaxy, EGS-23205, is little more than a disk-shaped smudge, but in the corresponding JWST image taken this past summer, it’s a beautiful spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar.

=> ↺ 1940s Bell Telephone introduces the mobile phone | Boing Boing

• This video is fun. I miss the ring of an old Bell telephone. I have one here in the house but no landline to plug it into, and so it sits on my desk. I also have a candlestick phone that is nothing more than art.

Security

=> ↺ Sigstore announces the first stable release of code and certificate signing tool for Python

• Sigstore community today announced the first stable release of sigstore-python, improving software supply chain security and paving the way for other client implementations of Sigstore that are in earlier stages.

• Sigstore is an open source project launched by Linux Foundation with the goal of providing free and stable services for all developers to easily sign, verify and protect their software projects. While code signing is a valuable tool to prevent hackers from co-opting patching systems and delivering malware, it is difficult to implement in open source projects given the complexity of key management.

=> ↺ Security researchers report Linux malware with cryptocurrency miner payload

• “It is presumed that after successful authentication through a dictionary attack on inadequately managed Linux SSH servers, various malware were installed on the target system. This bot supports not only DDoS attacks such as TCP flood, UDP flood, and HTTP flood, but various other features including command execution, reverse shell, port scanning, and log deletion,” researchers said.

=> ↺ New Linux Malware Downloader for Compromised Servers Spotted in the Wild

=> ↺ This new Linux malware floods machines with cryptominers and DDoS bots

=> ↺ A Brief History of Cryptography

• Cryptology is a young science.

• Though it has been used for thousands of years to hide secret messages, systematic study of cryptology as a science (and perhaps an art) just started around one hundred years ago.

• The first known evidence of the use of cryptography (in some form) was found in an inscription carved around 1900 BC, in the main chamber of the tomb of the nobleman Khnumhotep II, in Egypt. The scribe used some unusual hieroglyphic symbols here and there in place of more ordinary ones. The purpose was not to hide the message but perhaps to change its form in a way which would make it appear dignified. Though the inscription was not a form of secret writing, but incorporated some sort of transformation of the original text, and is the oldest known text to do so. Evidence of some use of cryptography has been seen in most major early civilizations. “Arthshashtra”, a classic work on statecraft written by Kautalya, describes the espionage service in India and mentions giving assignments to spies in “secret writing” – sounds like an ancient version of James Bond?

• Fast forwarding to around 100 BC, Julius Caesar was known to use a form of encryption to convey secret messages to his army generals posted in the war front. This substitution cipher, known as Caesar cipher, is perhaps the most mentioned historic cipher in academic literature. (A cipher is an algorithm used for encryption or decryption.) In a substitution cipher, each character of the plain text (plain text is the message which has to be encrypted) is substituted by another character to form the cipher text (cipher text is the encrypted message). The variant used by Caesar was a shift by 3 cipher. Each character was shifted by 3 places, so the character ‘A’ was replaced by ‘D’, ‘B’ was replaced by ‘E’, and so on. The characters would wrap around at the end, so ‘X’ would be replaced by ‘A’.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Bocchi the Rock! / ぼっち・ざ・ろっく!

• Readers of my gemlog may have guessed that I quite like music-themed anime, so how could I have missed out on Bochi the Rock. It started out as probably the most invisible show of the season, but wao, that surely changed quickly.

=> ↺ Moving to Hugo

• I started this website around 2008 at wordpress.com. Later in 2012[1], I moved to Jekyll and started blogging on Markdown. I started using git to manage the code and host the website first on GitHub Pages and later on Netlify. Since then, I’ve slowly moved other projects from Jekyll to Hugo. I still have a few in the good old ruby tech, the biggest one, without any doubt, being the daily geospatial digest[2].

=> ↺ Email training

• By the end of last year, I enrolled in cibervoluntarios[1], an NGO that provides free training about Information technologies to seniors and young people, and other groups with exclusion risk. It’s an entirely virtual organization where volunteers sign up for proposed activities, and the organization provides all the materials and guidance. Then on the training day, you show up and do the gig.

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: AEHIRYW Wordo: AMITY

Technical

=> ↺ Allotment Plan: 2023

• This year, I’m going to do some high-intensity growing on the allotment, following a pretty relaxed quarter-year in 2022 where I just cut back overgrowth and harvested things put in by the previous owner.

=> ↺ Adding a minimal fingerd to bubblewrapped services (bws)

• Some time back Toby Kurien published details and code about his favourite setup regarding self hosting services at home. He did put in quite some effort to make this simple to install and run. I quite like this setup and I have written a minimal finger daemon to run in this setup.

=> ↺ Perception of what the Internet looks like today

• I came across DOStodon, a Mastodon client for MS-DOS. I looked at screenshots and I saw today’s Internet distorted by the crystal of time. So there is almost everything in its place, but it looks different. A similar feeling accompanies browsing a world map in MapSCII, and probably during the usage of other niche tools.

• So we have a vision of today’s Internet in our mind. It could be similar to the vision of the black-and-white film era, which made our minds feel that people, cities, and their activities then were less colorful than now. Or characteristic colors of Kodachrome film, which is emulated today by software color palettes.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Tidying up gemini.circumlunar.space user capsules

• In earlier times, I offered free sftp-based Geminispace at this server, and sixty or so people took advantage before I discontinued the offer. Some of those capsules continue to be regularly updated to this day, which makes me very happy. Others have been abandoned, which is to be expected, but some never even got off the ground in the first place. I’d like to start tidying the place up a bit.

Programming

=> ↺ A Wafer Thin Common LISP Package Primer

• Common LISP packages tend to trip up noobs presumably only familiar with packages as found in other languages; in those languages you usually have a file that contains a package and that package is only defined in that one file. We might call this a file-package. This is obviously a simplification; usually other languages have various ways to break the file-package rule, e.g. code to import things into or from somewhere else, dynamic loading, monkey patching, LD_PRELOAD, and worse.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

=> Techrights

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