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● Links 14/05/2023: Fedora and Firefox 113 on POWER/POWER9OpenPOWER

Posted in News Roundup at 6:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ Your Story ☛ Ubuntu Unleashed: Why Windows and Mac-OS Are Looking Over Their Shoulders

• Step into the digital ring as we pit Ubuntu, the open-source underdog, against the heavyweight champions, Windows and macOS. quo.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ University of Toronto ☛ The paradox of ZFS ARC non-growth and ARC hit rates

• We have one ZFS fileserver that sometimes spends quite a while (many hours) with a shrunken ARC size, one tens of gigabytes below its (shrunken) ARC target size. Despite that, its ARC hit rate is still really high. Well, actually, that’s not surprising; that’s kind of a paradox of ARC growth (for both actual size and target size). This is because the combination of two obvious things: the ARC only grows when it needs to, and a high ARC hit rate means that the ARC isn’t seeing much need to grow. More specifically, for reads the ARC only grows when there is a read ARC miss. If your ARC target size is 90 GB, your current ARC size is 40 GB, and your ARC hit rate is 100%, it doesn’t matter than you have 50 GB of spare RAM, because the ARC has pretty much nothing to put in it.

=> ↺ Koehntopp ☛ 50 years in filesystems: 1974

• Progress is sometimes hard to see, especially when you have been part of it or otherwise lived through it. Often, it is easier to see if you compare modern educational material, and the problems discussed with older material. And then look for the research papers and sources that fueled the change.

• In Linux and Unix in general), this is easy.

=> ↺ Koehntopp ☛ 50 years in filesystems: 1984

• The original Unix filesystem was doing well, but also had a large number of obvious problems. BSD Unix undertook an effort to fix them, and this is documented in the book “The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System ” by Leffler, McKusick et. al.

• A more concise, but also more academic discussion can be found in the classic 1984 paper A Fast File System for UNIX , which lists Marshall McKusick, Bill Joy (then at Sun), Samuel Leffler (then at LucasFilm) and Robert Fabry as authors. The paper promises a reimplementation of the Unix filesystem for higher throughput, better allocation and better locality of reference.

=> ↺ Koehntopp ☛ 50 years in filesystems: 1994

• In 1994, the paper Scalability in the XFS File System saw publication. Computers got faster since 1984, and so did storage. Notably, we are now seeing boxes with multiple CPUs, and with storage reaching into the Terabytes. The improvements to the 4.3BSD fast filing system (or the modified version in SGI IRIX called EFS) were no longer sufficient.

• SGIs benchmarks cite machines that had large backplanes with many controllers (one benchmark cites a box with 20 SCSI controllers), many disks (three-digit-numbers of hard drives), and many CPUs (the benchmarks quote 12 socket machines) with a lot of memory (up to one gigabyte quoted in the benchmarks).

• Filesystems became larger than FFS could handle, files became larger than FFS could handle, the number of files per directory led to large lookup times, central data structures such as allocation bitmaps did no longer scale, and global locks made concurrent access to the file system with many CPUs inefficient. SGI set out to design a fundamentally different filesystem.

• Also, the Unix community as a whole was challenged by Cutler and Custer, who showed with NTFS for Windows NT 4.0 what was possible if you redesign from scratch.

=> ↺ Terence Eden ☛ The new .zip TLD is going to cause some problems

• So what happens when things which are not domain names look like they are domain names? I’ve been worrying about this for a few years: [...]

Games

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ If You Like… Diablo

• There shouldn’t be any arguments when I claim that the original Diablo was a masterpiece. Launched in the 90’s, it defined a new genre of dungeon crawling, successfully mixing traditional Rogue/Nethack elements with beautiful visuals, real-time combat, class selection, an innovative loot system, and haunting music. Let’s look at the series as a whole, and the genre it largely created.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

=> ↺ Vermaden ☛ FreeBSD 13.2 on ThinkPad T14 (GEN1)

• I used to run FreeBSD on older laptops – some more then a decade old – like my favorite ThinkPad W520 daily driver or ThinkPad X220 mobile companion. Today I will share with you my experiences of running latest production ready FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE system on a quite modern ThinkPad T14 (GEN1) from 2021/2022 (depending on the source of the information) – which is quite new I would say.

• … do not interpret this article wrong – The W520 and X220 (sometimes T420s) are still my daily/mobile/… drivers and my points explained in the Epitaph to Laptops article remain the same. I just had an opportunity to use ThinkPad T14 for several days so I thought it would be a good idea to check and document FreeBSD behavior on it.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Talospace ☛ Fedora 38 mini-review on the Blackbird and Talos II

• As I always say in these mini-reviews, Fedora was one of the first mainstream distributions to support POWER9 out of the box, it’s still one of the top distributions OpenPOWER denizens use and its position closest to the bleeding, ragged edge is where we see problems emerge first and get fixed (hopefully) before they move further downstream. That’s why it’s worth caring about it even if you yourself don’t run it.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Hackster ☛ Canonical’s Nathan Hart Wants to Get You Started with Matter on a Raspberry Pi Running Ubuntu – Hackster.io

• Canonical’s Nathan Hart has published a guide to getting started with the new Matter smart home standard with a Raspberry Pi and Ubuntu Linux — following the company’s entry into the Connectivity Standards Alliance last year.

• “The Matter standard is a particular focus for us. Its secure design and open ecosystem align well with Ubuntu’s own values of security and openness,” Hart claims. “Ubuntu Core and Matter make for a powerful pair. Ubuntu Core’s containerization makes it a highly secure OS that pairs well with the highly secure protocol. Its update and device management capabilities provide the missing pieces that the Matter standard leaves up to device makers to implement.”

=> ↺ Notebook Check ☛ Orange Pi 5 Plus: Rockchip RK3588 SBC debuts from US$89 with dual 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI 2.1 connectivity – NotebookCheck.net News

• Shenzhen Xunlong Software has started selling the Orange Pi 5 Plus, a 100 x 70 mm single-board computer (SBC) and the third member in the Orange Pi 5 series. While the Orange Pi 5 Plus shares similarities with the Orange Pi 5 and Orange Pi 5B, it relies on the Rockchip RK3588 and not the Rockchip RK3588S like its series counterparts. As such, the newer model contains more ports and connectivity options.

=> ↺ Linux Gizmos ☛ Rugged computing System houses Jetson AGX Orin SoM

• The Jetsys-5330 is a rugged small computer system built around the NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX Orin System-on-Module. The new device from Elma Electronic features multiple expansion ports and can handle up to 6x GMSL2/GMSL1 cameras. 

=> ↺ Andrew Hutchings ☛ Acorn Archimedes A3000: Restoration Part 3

• I last left this machine in a state where it boots RISC OS 3.11 when using a bench power supply, but there was a weird video issue which meant I could only use an OSSC for the SCART to work.

=> ↺ Tom’s Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Zero Gambles for Bitcoins with USB Antminer

• The way the project works is simple enough. The Raspberry Pi is running Raspberry Pi OS. It’s connected to an Antminer via USB which is responsible for handling Bitcoin mining algorithms. The system is connected to it Bitcoin wallet which will receive a handsome deposit if he’s lucky enough to win an entire hash. Because the system is so small, it’s not practical enough for regular mining and is better suited for what’s called lotto mining. In this case, he has a 1 in 2 billion chance of winning a whole block each day.

Modding

=> ↺ Tom’s Hardware ☛ Intel Deploys Undisclosed Microcode Security Update For CPUs Going Back To Coffee Lake

• Nayeli Rico, a BIOS engineer at Intel, uploaded the release notes and source code for the microcode-20230512 release 20 hours ago. The description reads: “Security updates for [INTEL-SA-NA].” The “SA” acronym likely stands for Security Advisory; meanwhile, “NA” probably stands for “Not Available.”

• Whatever the security vulnerability may be, it evidently affects many of Intel’s platforms, including the latest consumer Intel 13th Generation Core Raptor Lake and 4th Generation Xeon Sapphire Rapids server chips. However, it’s the first time that recent lineups, such as Alder Lake-N and Atom C series (Arizona Beach), received a microcode update. The lengthy list includes desktop processors dating as far back as the Coffee Lake days and mobile chips starting from Kaby Lake going forward.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ OMG! Linux ☛ List – a Linux App that Doesn’t Overcomplicate Your To-Dos

• List is a (relatively) new to-do app for Linux built in GTK4/libadwaita (meaning it looks super nice on modern Linux desktop). Its USP is simplicity; Lists forgoes fussy organizational features in favour of flat focus.

• You add tasks and sub-tasks, mark them complete, and that’s basically it — it’s the digital equivalent of a plain sheet of paper and a biro where you jot stuff down, then get on with doing it.

=> ↺ Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive?

• Two systems I know pretty well, Apache BookKeeper and Apache Kafka, were designed in the era of the spinning disk, the hard-drive or HDD. Hard-drives are good at sequential IO but not so good at random IO because of the relatively high seek times. No wonder then that both Kafka and BookKeeper were designed with sequential IO in mind.

• Both Kafka and BookKeeper are distributed log systems and so you’d think that sequential IO would be the default for an append-only log storage system. But sequential and random IO sit on a continuum, with pure sequential on one side and pure random IO on the other. If you have 5000 files which you are appending to in small writes in a round-robin manner, and performing fsyncs, then this is not such a sequential IO access pattern, it sits further to the random IO side. So just by being an append-only log doesn’t mean you get sequential IO out of the gate.

=> ↺ Understanding ActivityPub

• In this blog post, I’m using ActivityPub.Academy (see the announcement post) to explore the ActivityPub protocol. We’ll see how different instances communicate that one user wants to follow another and how a social graph is built; how messages are distributed to followers on different instances; and lastly, what happens on the protocol level when an account is moved to a different one.

• The blog post has two purposes. First, it can hopefully be read as a stand-alone post if you are interested in ActivityPub, but you don’t want to read the entire ActivityPub Spec. And second, it serves as an introduction on how to use ActivityPub.Academy to explore the protocol. It is an invitation to do your own experiments and explorations and learn about the protocol in this way. And once you have some practical experience with the protocol, trying to read the Spec is probably not as daunting anymore.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Talospace ☛ Firefox 113 on POWER

• Yes, I skipped a version, sosumi. I’m running a little low on development space on the NVMe drive, but still managed to squeeze in Firefox 113 which introduces enhanced video Picture-in-Picture, more secure private windows and password generation, support for AVIS images, debugger improvements and additional CSS and API features. [...]

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ [Old] Boston Review ☛ What Does That Server Really Serve?

• SaaS inherently gives the server operator the power to change the software in use, or the users’ data being operated on. Once again, no special code is needed to do this.

• Thus, SaaS is equivalent to total spyware and a gaping wide back door, and it gives the server operator unjust power over the user. We can’t accept that.

Education

=> ↺ Rlang ☛ The 15th Annual R/Finance Conference 2023

• The conference brings together experienced R users in the field to discuss quantitative finance – covering R (or Python or Julia!), portfolio construction, statistics, and more! Some of the topics that will be covered include advanced risk tools, decentralized finance, econometrics, high-performance computing, market microstructure, portfolio management, and time series analysis.

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ Navigating the intersection of open source, AI and security: Open Source Summit final analysis

• Open-source communities and AI developers have been in a state of heightened collaboration in recent years. The dialogue between these two industries has expanded, fostering a mutual understanding of each other’s domains.

• The open-source community isn’t sitting on the sidelines. Industry experts are actively engaging and collaborating with AI-focused foundations. At this week’s Open Source Summit in Vancouver, Canada, developers, technologists and community leaders collaborated on open-source innovation.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Ciprian Dorin Craciun ☛ Misusing random oracles for practical purposes

• Why this article? Because I believe that cryptographic “random oracles” are such a wonderful construct that should be known and used even outside the theoretical cryptography domain, where they are used mainly to prove the security of various cryptographic constructs “in the random oracle model”.

• (And because, as feedback to my article from yesterday about multi-factor encryption, I’ve received a few comments that stated I’ve made a mess of things, mixing “theoretical constructs such as oracles used in proofs” with real world encryption.)

=> ↺ Fernando Borretti ☛ Language Tooling Antipatterns

• Earlier today I tried to write a small project starter template for OCaml, since tooling is the weakest link to getting started with that language. After a thousand little sources of friction I was defeated, so I decided to write this post instead.

=> ↺ Remi Collet ☛ Remi Collet: PHP version 8.1.19 and 8.2.6

• RPMs of PHP version 8.2.6 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 36 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky…) and in remi-php82 repository for EL 7.

• RPMs of PHP version 8.1.19 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 36 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky…) and in remi-php81 repository for EL 7.

• The modules for EL-9 are available for x86_64 and aarch64.

=> ↺ Why engineers need to be bored. – by John McBride

• An analysis on boredom in engineering productivity and how it can lead to deeper innovation.

=> ↺ Lucas F Costa ☛ You don’t need Scrum. You just need to do Kanban right.

• Why did you choose Scrum instead of Kanban? If you can’t answer that question, you didn’t choose Scrum. Someone else chose it for you.

=> ↺ Appreciating Your Way to XP

• This advice from the first edition of XP Explained is a pretty good summary of the engineer’s approach to change: find a problem, solve it. Unfortunately, this approach ignores many of the prerequisites for lasting change.

=> ↺ vmtest: Run your tests in virtual machines

• Systems software that depend on specific kernel or host properties often contains logic to gate functionality based on what features are available at runtime. This necessarily begs the question: how do you test platform specific logic? Mocks can help, but they come with their own set of tradeoffs. At the end of the day, there is no substitute for actually running your code.

• eBPF (BPF) is somewhat of an extreme example because of how fast development occurs in that ecosystem. Most, if not all, BPF features are baked into the kernel, meaning that any non-trivial BPF-powered application heavily depends on kernel version. Since I do quite a bit of BPF development, the rest of this post is as a result, BPF focused. Despite that, keep in mind that all proposed techniques/solutions are quite general and can be applied to other domains.

=> ↺ Rlang ☛ Working with Dates and Times Pt 1

• Introduction In this post, we will cover the basics of handling dates and times in R using the as.Date, as.POSIXct, and as.POSIXlt functions. We will use the example code below to explain each line in simple terms. Let’s get started!

=> ↺ Key practice: Test Driven Development

• Test Driven Development means test first + coding + refactoring.

• Test Driven Development doesn’t mean tests written shortly after coding OR just “developer testing”.

• Test First means code is designed to be testable as a primary concern.

• Test First means the tests tend not to be coupled to the implementation.

IDEs

=> ↺ Make Use Of ☛ How to Transform Neovim Into a Full-Fledged IDE on Linux

• Neovim is a modern, feature-rich, and highly extensible text editor that has become increasingly popular among developers in recent years. Although it comes with a wide range of features out of the box, it can also be transformed into a full-fledged integrated development environment (IDE) with the help of various plugins and configurations.

• This can be particularly useful for developers who prefer to work in a single, powerful environment that can handle all aspects of their workflow. Learn how you can supercharge Neovim and turn it into a full-fledged IDE on Linux.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Federal News Network ☛ Atlantic City casino can’t live without a beach, so it’s rebuilding one

• What’s an ocean without a beach? One Atlantic City casino that takes its name from the sea doesn’t want to find out, and so it’s spending up to $700,000 of its own money to rebuild a badly eroded beach in front of it. The Ocean Casino Resort began the work Wednesday, and plans to have a new 110-foot-wide beach open for Memorial Day weekend. Chronic erosion near the casino has reduced the beach to just 5 to 8 feet wide in places. Bill Callahan, the casino’s general manager, says Ocean simply can’t wait for the next government-funded beach replenishment project, which could take another year or two.

=> ↺ Be a thermostat, not a thermometer | Lara Hogan

• As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of those around us. It’s usually not even something we do consciously; we just see someone using a different tone of voice or shifting their body language, and something deep in our brain notices it.

• If you’ve ever attended a meeting where there were some “weird vibes,” you know what I’m talking about. You couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but something about the energy of the room was off—and that feeling affected you, even if it was super subtle.

• We’re wired to spidey sense this stuff; this gut instinct is part of what’s helped us stay safe for millenia. Our amygdalas are constantly on the lookout for threats in our environment that could be bad news. Plus, we tend to infer meaning from those weird vibes. Our brain is trying to make sense of the shift in behavior, so we’ll make some (often subconscious) guesses about what’s truly going on. We often even jump to the assumption that those vibes are about us.

Science

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ The Biggest Explosion in the Cosmos Just Keeps Going

• For three years, telescopes have monitored “one of the most luminous” events ever: a supermassive black hole consuming a gigantic cloud of interstellar gas.

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Astronomers ‘Puzzled’ by The Largest Cosmic Explosion We’ve Observed

• It’s 100 times the size of our Solar System.

=> ↺ Gizmodo ☛ Shock to the System: Stuck Antenna on Jupiter Probe Finally Unfurls After Clever Fix

• Success finally came earlier today, with controllers firing a “non-explosive actuator” affixed to the jammed bracket. “This delivered a shock that moved the pin by a matter of millimetres and allowed the antenna to unfold,” ESA explained in a May 12 statement. The firing of a second actuator allowed the final part of the stuck antenna to fully deploy, and the entire apparatus extended to its fully intended length.

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Remembering Virginia Norwood, Mother Of NASA’s Landsat Success

• Virginia T. Norwood passed away earlier this year at the age of 96, and NASA’s farewell to this influential pioneer is a worth a read. Virginia was a brilliant physicist and engineer, and among her other accomplishments, we have her to thank for the ongoing success of the Landsat program, which continues to this day.

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ ESA Juice’s RIME Antenna Breaks Free After Some Jiggling And Percussive Action

• After ESA’s Jupiter-bound space probe Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) launched on April 14th of this year, it initially looked as if it had squeezed out a refreshingly uneventful deployment, until it attempted to unfurl its solar panels and antennae. One of these antennae, for the RIME (Radar for Icy Moons Exploration) instrument that uses ice-penetrating radar to get a subsurface look at Jupiter’s moons, ended up being rather stuck. Fortunately, on May 12th it was reported that ESA engineers managed to shock the sticky pin loose.

Education

=> ↺ Pro Publica ☛ Examining the Conway, Arkansas, School Board Meeting Arrests

• When one police officer heard the radio call for backup at a high school campus outside Little Rock, Arkansas, he first thought there’d been a problem at a football game. The indecipherable chanting in the background sounded like roars from the bleachers. But it turned out that the rhythmic rallying call that November night last year was coming from the lobby outside a school board meeting.

Hardware

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Tools Of The Trade: Dirt Cheap Or Too Dirty?

• We’ve recently seen a couple reviews of a particularly cheap oscilloscope that, among other things, doesn’t meet its advertised specs. Actually, it’s not even close. It claims to be a 100 MHz scope, and it’s got around 30 MHz of bandwidth instead. If you bought it for higher frequency work, you’d have every right to be angry. But it’s also cheap enough that, if you were on a very tight budget, and you knew its limitations beforehand, you might be tempted to buy it anyway. Or so goes one rationale.

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ An Open-Source 4-Shaft Portable Loom

• Part of writing for Hackaday involves doing the rounds of our community’s events in search of amazing projects for your delectation. This weekend it was a trip to Maker Faire Delft, thanks to the wonders of the European Interail scheme. Once on the site, [Aslı Aydın Aksan]’s 4-shaft weaving loom immediately caught our eye. This is an open-source portable folding loom design. In weaving terms, shafts are sliding vertical frames. As the name implies, this loom has four, which allow different sets of warp threads to be brought to the surface of the weave at different times. This feature makes it capable of weaving complex patterns in the fabric and thus makes it a very interesting project indeed.

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Never Stare Down A Robot

• There are a few things historically difficult to make a robot do. Stairs, of course, are the obvious problem. But realistic blinking behavior is harder than you might think. At first, it might seem frivolous and simple to have a robot blink, but according to Italian scientists, it is both more important and more difficult than you probably think.

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Prize 2023: The NEOKlacker Pocket Computer

• Science fiction always promised us pocket computers. These days, we’re spoiled for choice. [Spider Jerusalem] eschewed a simple smartphone or tablet, though, instead building a custom pocket computer of their own design. 

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Eating Late Can Alter How You Burn Calories And Store Fat, Depressing Study Finds

• It’s not just what you eat.

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ New Alzheimer’s Drug Shows 35% Reduction in Cognitive Decline in Late-Stage Trial

• We don’t have all the data yet.

=> ↺ US News And World Report ☛ Am I Depressed? The Most Common Symptoms to Look Out For

• By Ann Schreiber HealthDay ReporterThink you might be struggling with depression? It’s not always easy to recognize, but identifying the symptoms…

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ Pandemic emergency is over. Societal shifts linger.

• The pandemic health emergency is officially over. But some related societal shifts could be lasting, from more remote work to a rise in children’s screen time.

=> ↺ US News And World Report ☛ New Menopause Drug for Hot Flashes Gets FDA Approval

• The Food and Drug Administration has approved a new type of drug to treat hot flashes caused by menopause

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ FDA Approves New Drug to Treat Hot Flashes

• It is the first nonhormonal treatment for the menopause symptom.

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ A simple skin patch shows promise for preventing peanut allergies

• Peanut allergy is a serious public health concern. Nearly 2% of people suffer from it in the western world, and it is the most common cause of anaphylaxis in children in the US. The allergy usually emerges in the early years of life; only about 20% of the children who have it outgrow it.

=> ↺ US News And World Report ☛ Kansas Governor Vetoes Measures to Aid Anti-Abortion Centers, Limit Health Officials’ Power

• Kansas’ Democratic governor has vetoed Republican legislation that would have provided a financial boost to pregnancy centers run by abortion opponents and curbed state and local officials’ powers during infectious disease outbreaks

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Your Contact Lenses May Be a Hidden Source of ‘Forever Chemicals’

• It’s right in front of us.

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Popular Obesity Drug Turns Out to Have a Secret Cancer-Killing Effect

• Fighting the good fight.

=> ↺ Helsinki Times ☛ Finnish Medical Association: Healthcare cuts threaten patients’ basic rights

• The Finnish Medical Association has released a statement warning that cuts to healthcare funding threaten patients’ fundamental rights. In its spring meeting on May 12, 2023, the association stated that in the current situation where healthcare costs already exceed the allocated funding and waiting times are at record highs, cutting funding is not a viable way to save costs without completely collapsing the system.

=> ↺ MIT Technology Review ☛ Why tiny viruses could be our best bet against antimicrobial resistance

• This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Regular readers will know that the microbiome is one of my favorite topics to cover.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Daily Dot ☛ Remote Worker Laid Off During her Trip to Mexico

• A remote worker went viral on TikTok after sharing how she was laid off from her job a week after arriving in Mexico to be a digital nomad.

• The video was uploaded by TikTok user @laoraz1 where she revealed the screen of her laptop, searching for “content marketing” jobs on LinkedIn. Then, she shifted the camera to show a pool and palm trees outside. According to the text overlay, @laoraz1 was laid off from her remote job after arriving on her trip to Mexico, so now she’s “unemployed and broke.”

=> ↺ Denver ☛ Denver-based software company Poppulo laid off 80 employees as tech industry downsizing continues

• Poppulo, a Denver-based software development company, laid off 80 employees at the end of April, including 20 workers in Colorado.

• The move follows downsizing in the tech industry that started in 2022, with impacted companies including Twitter, Microsoft, Dell Technologies Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc., the owner of Facebook and Instagram. But other Colorado sectors aren’t immune to layoffs either, with the energy, cannabis and manufacturing sectors also taking blows earlier this year.

• Although inflation is steadily slowing, and the U.S. isn’t in a recession yet, the economic forecast for 2023 remains shaky.

=> ↺ Microsoft: New listing reveals Microsoft job cuts may cross 10,000 [Ed: Well, it crossed it a very, very long time ago. Shame on the media not fact-checking Microsoft months ago, then properly assess the real scope and scale of the layoffs there. It's like there's no real media left, just parrots.]

• Microsoft announced job cuts this year citing global macroeconomic uncertainties. Reportedly, this is also the reason behind no salary hike this year.

Pseudo-Open Source

Large Language Models and Openwashing

=> ↺ Introducing MPT-7B: A New Standard for Open-Source, Commercially Usable LLMs

• Introducing MPT-7B, the latest entry in our MosaicML Foundation Series. MPT-7B is a transformer trained from scratch on 1T tokens of text and code. It is open source, available for commercial use, and matches the quality of LLaMA-7B. MPT-7B was trained on the MosaicML platform in 9.5 days with zero human intervention at a cost of ~$200k. Starting today, you can train, finetune, and deploy your own private MPT models, either starting from one of our checkpoints or training from scratch. For inspiration, we are also releasing three finetuned models in addition to the base MPT-7B: MPT-7B-Instruct, MPT-7B-Chat, and MPT-7B-StoryWriter-65k+, the last of which uses a context length of 65k tokens!

=> ↺ Releasing 3B and 7B RedPajama-INCITE family of models including base, instruction-tuned & chat models

• The RedPajama project aims to create a set of leading open-source models and to rigorously understand the ingredients that yield good performance. A few weeks ago we released the RedPajama base dataset based on the LLaMA paper, which has galvanized the open-source community. The 5 terabyte dataset has been downloaded hundreds of times and used to train models like MPT, OpenLLaMA, OpenAlpaca. Today we are excited to release RedPajama-INCITE models, including instruct-tuned and chat versions.

=> ↺ Kevin Liu ☛ Large Language Models can Simulate Everything

• TL; DR: Simulation is the only way to forecast how future complex / AI systems will misbehave.

• This is post #1 in a series of 3 outlining my current views on AI. Part 1 focuses on the need for improving how people think, rather than improving their leverage over the world. Part 2 gives “no brainer,” objective strategies helpful for improving the safety of ML systems on the margin. Part 3 focuses on the best ways to measure and empirically evaluate ML systems as they are deployed in the world.

• A hot take: the #2 most important use case for AI in the next decade will be performing large-scale, in-silico sociological simulations.

• This has huge potential for safety; in a world where 99% of AI innovations make us more productive with less oversight (giving us a bigger hammer), it’s important to better understand where to point that hammer. Simulation and forecasting techniques can help us improve institutional decision-making, provide plausible tail scenarios with natural language feedback, and help us run instant, virtual A/B tests to iterate faster on all levels of policy and design.

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Phoronix ☛ Microsoft Aims For Greater Script Execution Control On Linux

• This week alongside several other Linux Foundation events in Vancouver was the Linux Security Summit. Commanding a significant presence at the Linux Security Summit was Microsoft…

=> ↺ Virtualization ☛ Tech Talent: Senior Roles Get Axed, Devs/Managers Get Hired [Ed: The so-called 'Linux' Foundation keeps spreading all the meaningless buzzwords that proprietary vendors spread for lock-in purposes; the goal differs from the community's]

• The Linux Foundation released its annual report on tech talent, examining the current and future technology staffing requirements and skills needed within organizations.

• [...]

• The Linux Foundation conducted the survey Feb. 23-March 10, 2023, and promoted it through various channels including social media, the Linux Foundation and Linux.com web sites, and the Linux Foundation Newsletter.

=> ↺ Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) Announces Addition of Fidelity Investments as Buy-Side Member [Ed: Is "Fintech" as a buzzword still a thing? Shouldn't they come up with a newer, modern-sounding one like "MetaFin" and "FinDevAIOp", maybe "Internet of Fins" or something with "blockchain"?]

Security

=> ↺ Hacker News ☛ New Stealthy Variant of Linux Backdoor BPFDoor Emerges from the Shadows [Ed: The term "Linux Backdoor" is intentionally misleading because it does not come with Linux or via Linux or because of a hole in Linux. This is typical Microsoft-centric propaganda from Windows-friendly sites. If people inject some malware into a Windows PC via some Adobe Photoshop zero-day or Chrome flaw, does that mean it is a "Windows backdoor"? Meanwhile, former news sites have became shallow public relations for their sponsors, so FUD such as this won't be often (or ever) rebutted.]

• The malware is specifically geared towards establishing persistent remote access to compromised target environments for extended periods of time, with evidence pointing to the hacking crew operating the backdoor undetected for years.

=> ↺ Cybernews ☛ Russia-affiliated CheckMate ransomware quietly targets popular file-sharing protocol [Ed: Microsoft Window TCO]

• Unlike most ransom campaigns, CheckMate, discovered in 2022, has been quiet throughout its operations. To the best of our knowledge, it doesn’t operate a data leak site.

• That’s quite unusual for a ransomware campaign since many prominent gangs brag about big targets and post them as victims on their data leak sites. They do this to raise the pressure for a victim to pay the ransom.

• Cybernews research has recently detected new CheckMate activity. It turns out the gang has been actively targeting weakly-protected SMB shares.

=> ↺ Student Medical Records May Have Been Taken in San Diego Unified Hack

• The breadth of a cyber attack against San Diego Unified School District last year is coming into view. Student medical records may have been taken during the hack, district officials notified parents in a letter dated May 4.

=> ↺ Data Breaches ☛ Ransomware attack on PharMerica affected 5.8 million patients [Ed: Microsoft Window TCO]

• While the Fortra/GoAnywhere data breach by Clop is shaping up to be the biggest, or one of the biggest, breaches affecting HIPAA-covered entities and business associates in 2023, an attack by Money Message on PharMerica is currently the largest single breach reported so far this year, with almost 6 million affected.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Security Week ☛ Executive Fired From TikTok’s Chinese Owner Says Beijing Had Access to App Data in Termination Suit

• A former executive fired from TikTok’s parent company ByteDance made a raft of accusations against the tech giant Friday, including that it stole content from competitors like Instagram and Snapchat, and served as a “propaganda tool” for the Chinese government by suppressing or promoting content favorable to the country’s interests.

=> ↺ [Repeat] Axios ☛ Ex-ByteDance exec claims CCP “maintained” access to U.S. data

• The Chinese Communist Party “maintained supreme access” to data belonging to TikTok parent company ByteDance, including data stored in the U.S., a former top executive claimed in a lawsuit Friday.

=> ↺ [Repeat] EDRI ☛ Commissioner Johansson cannot be trusted with the EU’s proposed CSA Regulation

• EDRi has conducted an investigation into Johansson’s claims about the CSA Regulation and – based on solid evidence – has assessed that Johansson is repeatedly serving inaccurate and misleading claims about how technology works, what the law could really achieve in practice, and what current detecting practices have shown.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Federal News Network ☛ What to know about judge’s ruling on age limit for young gun buyers

• A judge’s ruling striking down a federal law that bans licensed federal firearms dealers from selling handguns to young adults under 21 is the latest example of how a landmark Supreme Court decision is transforming the legal landscape around firearms. The ruling was issued Wednesday by a federal judge in Virginia. It is just the beginning of what’s likely to be a lengthy court battle over rules aimed at making it harder for 18- to 20-year-olds to get handguns. The judge’s ruling won’t go into effect until he issues a final order that would bar the government from enforcing the age limit. The Justice Department is likely to appeal and could ask for the final order to be put on hold while it does.

=> ↺ Federal News Network ☛ A Texas woman was fatally shot by a boyfriend angry she had an abortion, police say

• Police in Dallas say a man angry that his girlfriend had an abortion in another state fatally shot the 26-year-old woman. According to an arrest warrant affidavit, Gabriella Gonzalez was with her boyfriend in a Dallas parking lot Wednesday. She had returned from Colorado the night before. Police say 22-year-old Harold Thompson tried to put her in a chokehold, then shot her in the head. Police believe he was the father of the child and did not want her to get an abortion. As of Friday he was jailed on a murder charge. Court records don’t list an attorney.

=> ↺ VOA News ☛ US Lawmakers Seek to Curb Chinese Farmland Purchases

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports Chinese-connected investors own less than 162,000 total hectares (400,000 acres) of land in the U.S. — only a fraction of which is farmland. That is 1.12% of the total area of Iowa.

=> ↺ [Old] NPR ☛ China is buying up more U.S. farmland. Some lawmakers consider that a security threat

• Four witnesses — including H.R. McMaster, former president Donald Trump’s national security adviser, and Tong Yi, a former secretary to prominent Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng — spoke about issues involving national security, economic competition and human rights.

• Over the course of three hours, they made a case for how the Chinese Communist Party has gained power over global markets and endangered American interests.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Germany to supply Ukraine with largest military aid package yet, worth 2.7 billion euros — Meduza

• Germany will supply Ukraine with military aid worth a total of 2.7 billion euros (nearly $3 billion), reported Der Spiegel. This would make it Germany’s largest military aid package to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Russia launches overnight drone attacks across Ukraine — Meduza

• Russian troops shelled the city of Mykolaiv on the night of May 13. Mykolaiv’s governor, Vitaliy Kim, reported that a five-story apartment building was damaged and a two-story industrial building was destroyed. The attack sparked fires in both buildings, which were extinguished. Three people were injured.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Two Mi-8 helicopters and two bomber planes crash in Russia’s Bryansk region — Meduza

• Two Mi-8 helicopters, one Su-34 bomber plane and one Su-35 bomber plane crashed in Russia’s Bryansk region, according to Kommersant.

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ Rebrand ‘Mass Shootings’ as ‘Second Amendment Celebrations’

• I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really bummed out by all of these mass shootings. One after another, day after day, more than one a day since the beginning of the year. Something has to change. This is America after all. The United States has a long history of dealing with challenging problems.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Home Heating With Bitcoin Miners Is Now A Real Thing

• If you were reading this post a month ago, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was an April Fools post. But we assure you, this is no joke. A company called HeatBit has recently opened preorders for their second generation of Bitcoin miner that doubles as a space heater.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Scientists Discover a Subtle Difference in How Monkeys Perceive The World

• A divergence some 25 million years ago.

=> ↺ Science Alert ☛ Surprisingly Few Insects Live in The Ocean, And We May Finally Know Why

• “A simple explanation to a long-standing question.”

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ Deforestation in Brazilian Amazon Fell 68% in April Compared With Last Year

• Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest decreased by 68% this April compared with last year, according to preliminary government data published Friday.

Finance

=> ↺ Latvia ☛ Anti-graft force targets MEPs Ušakovs and Ameriks

• The Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau (KNAB) is asking for the prosecution of five individuals for causing losses of more than €10 million to Rīga municipality and its capital company, LETA and Latvian Television reported on May 11.

=> ↺ Axios ☛ U.S. inflation is hard to whip. Here’s why.

• For the first time in decades, the forces shaping the world economy look inflationary.

• Why it matters: We’re seeing a reversal of the economic trends that, pre-pandemic, helped put downward pressure on consumer prices. That might make it more difficult (and possibly more economically painful) to get inflation back down to policymakers’ desired level, and keep it there.

• Driving the news: Inflation is below 5%, less than a year after peaking at 9%. That huge decline was the easier phase of the inflation fight: Energy prices plummeted and supply chain bottlenecks ebbed.

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ Tax the Rich to Defeat the Horrors of Child Labor

• America’s social studies textbooks urgently need an update—on child labor. Our textbooks, ever since the middle of the 20th century, have been applauding the reform movement that gradually put an end to the child-labor horrors that ran widespread throughout the early Industrial Age. Now those horrors, here in the 21st century, are reappearing.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ The voters’ decision in İstanbul’s Fatih may turn out to be staying away from the polls

• The debate between MHP officials and the women, those who have lost their hope in AKP, those who prefer to keep silent, the woman who says that she will go to the polls with her conscience… Impressions from Fatih, “the castle of AKP,” when two days are left to the May 14 elections…

=> ↺ teleSUR ☛ Final Acts of Election Campaigns: Erdoğan and Kılıçdaroğlu

• “…Voters in Turkey are heading to the polls…”

=> ↺ France24 ☛ Turkey’s Erdogan to lead Hagia Sophia prayers on eve of fight for political life

• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will lead Saturday prayers at Istanbul’s iconic Hagia Sophia mosque, ahead of a battle for his political life against a powerful secular rival.

=> ↺ Gizmodo ☛ TikTok Is Testing Exclusive Deals With Musicians—but It’s Definitely Not a Record Label

• A report from The Information details ByteDance’s plans for these new deals. According to the outlet, the company has been pursuing deals with dozens of musicians to distribute their music through ByteDance’s new service called SoundOn. SoundOn promises artists overwhelming control of their music, with distribution directly to TikTok and streaming services, 100% of ownership and royalties being paid directly to the musician, and promotional tools. TikTok’s global head of music business development and intellectual property rights Ole Obermann confirmed to The Information that the company had secured some distribution deals, but that these were operating more as test runs.

=> ↺ Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Is Expanding Its ‘New Music’ Hashtag Into ‘A Global Music Discovery Hub’ Amid Reports of a Streaming Buildout

• ByteDance-owned TikTok unveiled its latest feature – having also rolled out a “Creativity Program” and a “Work With Artists” option to this point in May – in an announcement message today. Meanwhile, although talks of the highly controversial platform’s potential stateside ban have largely simmered down in recent weeks, the service’s U.S. head of safety, Eric Han, quietly exited the role today.

=> ↺ [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ From proprietary to open source: The new landscape of the software industry

• Danen spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Rob Strechay at Open Source Summit NA, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the significant and disruptive influence of artificial intelligence and how to engage the next generation of contributors in the open-source community.

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ Celebrating 8 Years of Progressive Governance in Barcelona

• “They want us isolated, but they will find us in common.”

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ US Sold Weapons to Roughly 60% of World’s Authoritarian Nations in 2022: Analysis

• President Joe Biden claims that the United States is leading “democracies” in a fight against “autocracies” to establish a peaceful international order, but his administration approved weapons sales to nearly three-fifths of the world’s authoritarian countries in 2022.

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ The Teapot Dome Scandal: When Democracy Worked to Hold the Fat Cats Accountable

• In what is now considered run of the mill business in Washington, the Teapot Dome corruption scandal in the 1920s signified a time where politicians and the corporations that bribed them could be brought to justice at the hands of courageous representatives.

=> ↺ Michael West Media ☛ GG David Hurley and his beloved foundation, a secret priority yet at ‘arms length’?

• It was the most unusual pet project for a serving Australian Governor-General, a project where the highest office in the land, on multiple occasions, lobbied then Prime Minister Scott Morrison, to support a mysterious foundation to the tune of $18 million. Ronni Salt and Jommy Tee report.

• New documents obtained via FOI reveal the Governor-General, David Hurley, and his top bureaucrat, Paul Singer, underplayed the level of their behind-the-scenes involvement in prodding the Morrison government to fund the Australian Future Leaders Foundation.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ France24 ☛ Parties in Kyiv nightclubs in the midst of war? Watch out for these misleading images

• Several posts, including one with a video viewed more than 8 million times, claim to show current scenes of the nightlife in Kyiv, apparently showing that the population of Ukraine is using donations from the West to throw these parties despite the war.

• The footage in the video, however, comes from scenes filmed in 2021, or in establishments that have been closed since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ VOA News ☛ Journalists Attacked and Internet Blocked Amid Pakistan Unrest

• Following Khan’s arrest, authorities imposed [Internet] shutdown in several regions, including the capital Islamabad, and blocked platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. On Wednesday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said the [Internet] shutdown would remain in effect for an indefinite period.

• Digital rights groups condemned the latest development in what has become a pattern of Pakistani authorities blocking [Internet] access in response to political instability and protests.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Voting starts at 08:00, pre-election restrictions started at 18:00 yesterday

• The voting for the presidential and parliamentary elections starts at 08:00 today throughout Turkey. The propaganda ban and other pre-election restrictions started at 18:00 yesterday. The sale of alcoholic drinks will be forbidden from 06:00 until 24:00.

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ Erdoğan Re-Election Would Be Horrific for Turkey’s Women

• “It will be like the Taliban regime,” says Melek Önder, asked what will happen to women’s rights if Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is re-elected as president of Turkey in the election on Sunday.

• Önder is a spokesperson for We Will Stop Femicides (Kadin Cinayetlerini Durduracagiz), one of the most active groups in Turkey’s women’s movement. The platform was founded in 2010 after Cem Garipoğlu, 17, murdered his girlfriend Münevver Karabulut, also 17. It collects data on femicides and campaigns against violence against women.

=> ↺ ANF News ☛ If Erdogan loses, his myth will be over and it will be a turning point for Turkey

• Over the past 20 years, Erdoğan’s AKP party has secured its power through violence against opposition parties, and justifications for the arrests and detentions of hundreds of thousands of people, for example, after the alleged 2016 coup. Is it still possible to call the Turkish political order a Republic?

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ United Pilots Picket for Better Contract After American, Southwest Counterparts Authorize Strikes

• Following what the Air Line Pilots Association called “more than four years of empty promises,” 3,000 off-duty United Airlines pilots represented by the union protested at major airports across the U.S. on Friday, demanding the finalization of a contract with higher pay and humane scheduling practices.

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ How to Ensure Next Month’s Pride Is More Than a PR Stunt

• It’s official—we’re less than a month away from the beginning of Pride. And the anticipation is building. Disney recently announced its first ever Pride event, “Disneyland After Dark: Pride Nite.” Meanwhile, cities around the country have been announcing their Pride themes. San Francisco will focus on “Looking Back and Moving Forward.” D.C. Capital Pride’s theme will be “Peace, Love, Revolution;” and New York City’s is “Strength in Solidarity.”

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ Abolish the Death Penalty and a Touch of Hope for Richard Glossip

• Richard Glossip has been on Oklahoma’s death row for 25 years, convicted of masterminding the 1997 beating death of Barry Van Treese, the owner of a motel he managed. While Glossip has maintained his innocence, he’s faced nine separate execution dates. Just weeks ago, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted to allow Glossip’s scheduled May 18th execution to proceed. Then, last week, the U.S. Supreme Court granted Glossip a temporary stay of execution pending its review of his case. Despite a growing consensus that Glossip is actually innocent, Oklahoma’s capital punishment “justice” system remains determined to kill him.

=> ↺ Pro Publica ☛ Could the Oxford, MI, School Shooting Have Been Prevented?

• On a cold evening in March, at a school board meeting in Oxford, Michigan, Buck Myre approached members with a sheaf of papers. As they were passed down the line, he paced and fidgeted.

• For three minutes, the room was quiet. One board member covered her eyes with both hands. Finally, Myre stepped to the lectern. He released a shaky exhale, crackling the microphone.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ Torrent Freak ☛ One YouTube-Ripping Site Will Get 4 Billion Visits in 2023; Time to Blame

• With many pirate sites pulling in 10, 20, 50 or even 90 million visits per month, debate over popularity seems pointless. However, when compared to some platforms already declared illegal by rightsholders, even 200 million visits per month is nothing. Last month a single YouTube-ripping domain received a staggering 343 million visits and is still trending upwards, so who gets the blame?

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: EFHISLK Wordo: JEWEL

Technical

=> ↺ Who Likes The Likers

• There’s a new social hub in Geminispace today at, appropriately enough, geminispace.org.

=> ↺ Unix Agitprop

• There is of course “The Unix-Hater’s Handbook”, which is long, and now pretty old. I’ve only skimmed it now and then.

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