Starting with the basics, this is a thin and light notebook. The processor inside powering Avita Essential is the Intel Celeron N4000 which is not a powerful processor for windows but perfect for Ubuntu or ChromeOS. There is 4GB of LPDDR4 inside which again is not good enough for Windows but perfect for Ubuntu and ChromeOS. For storage Avita Essential has 128GB SSD. Fast storage means faster boot time but again we would highly recommend using Ubuntu or ChromeOS on this machine.

Fedora 33 is a bold release, and we’ve put it through the wringer. We tell you what’s great, and what you should know before diving in.

Plus our thoughts on the bigger problem exposed by the youtube-dl takedown.

In our Innards section, we talk lesser known browsers

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

The Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" series are about seven years old almost to the day and the AMD Linux open-source driver crew is seemingly celebrating by finally adding the few lines of code needed to enable BACO power management.

[...]

The patch posted on Tuesday amounts to just a few lines of code for wiring up Hawaii to the AMDGPU driver's BACO support. It's just a few lines of code now but it's only been more recently that AMDGPU began squaring away its BACO support. Thus back in the early days of Hawaii it wasn't as trivial to provide this support albeit for end-users still a pity it took so long for allowing these GPUs to support S4/hibernation.

In another of my frequent late-night bouts with insomnia, I started thinking about the intersection of a number of different issues facing Debian today, both from a user point of view and a developer point of view.

Debian has a reputation for shipping “stale” software. Versions in the stable branch are often significantly behind the latest development upstream. Debian’s policy here has been that this is fine, our goal is to ship something stable, not something bleeding edge. Unofficially, our response to users is: If you need bleeding edge software, Debian may not be for you. Officially, we have no response to users who want fresher software.

Debian also has a problem with a lack of manpower. I believe that part of why we have a hard time attracting contributors is our reputation for stale software. It might be worth it for us to consider changes to our approach to releases.

Talk about complex and tedious, but necessary. Identifying all copyright holders, licenses and license obligations within Linux is just that. Added to the already complex maze that is Linux is the fact that the accuracy of licensing information is tied to the specific version of the Linux Kernel you’re using, and older versions will have more issues than newer. Files may contain erroneous license data and subsequently make its way into your software inventory and Bill of Materials.

With this survey, the study coordinators are interested in complementing the literature, database and case study driven approach to assess impact of OSS and OSH with input from the respondents of the stakeholder survey. All together, this body of evidence will be used to derive policy recommendations.

One of the databases the county uses to verify voter signatures on absentee ballots is not working after some county network outages due to a ransomware attack on Oct. 7. Registration Coordinator Kay Wimpye with the county elections office said employees can still verify voter signatures by manually pulling hard copies of voter registration cards, which is more time-consuming. Most voter signatures can be verified using a state database that has been unaffected by the outages, she said.

On Monday the board said that an internal probe had determined that a second breach had occurred in March 2019. It appears that at that point Tapio was aware of the breaches and of shortcomings in the psychotherapy provider’s data security systems.

Officials at San Francisco International Airport discovered Russia’s state [attackers] had breached the online system that airport employees and travelers used to gain access to the airport’s Wi-Fi. The [attackers] injected code into two Wi-Fi portals that stole visitors’ user names, cracked their passwords and infected their laptops.

]As well as their personal data, the extortionist told them that records of their discussions with therapists would be published.

It is not known whether the extortionist is the same individual or group that [cracked] the data in the first place.

Individual emails were sent on Saturday evening, with [YLE] receiving messages from 8pm onwards. All the victims described receiving the same message.

The extortionist wrote that recipients must pay 200 euros within 24 hours, or if they don't meet that deadline, 500 euros within 48 hours.

Datacamp is a very well known online learning platform for programmers. It aims to teach a variety of different languages and topics through the use of videos, text and exercises.

In this review we’ll be attempting to cover everything about Datacamp, from it’s format to it’s user complaints to it’s good points. Whether Datacamp is worth the time and money, will be clear to you by the end of this review.

Who else remembers printing out code on a dot matrix printer? Ah, those were the days… (Image courtesy Arnold Reinhold.)

YottaDB, the database for transactional systems where data integrity is paramount, today announced production-grade Octo 1.0, a YottaDB plugin to query YottaDB application data using popular SQL tools. YottaDB excels for transactional systems, where data integrity and application robustness are paramount – applications that effect database state change to provide mission-critical functionality, such as electronic health record systems, core banking systems, library systems, and election systems.

There is a vast ecosystem of tools using SQL/JDBC for reporting, visualization, analysis, and more. Octo 1.0 makes databases of transactional applications that use YottaDB, accessible to those tools.

Octo is a YottaDB plugin for using SQL to query data that is persisted in YottaDB’s key-value tuples (global variables).

Conforming to YottaDB’s standard for plugins, Octo is installed in the $ydb_dist/plugin sub-directory with no impact on YottaDB or existing applications. In addition to YottaDB itself, Octo requires the YottaDB POSIX plugin. The popularity of SQL has produced a vast ecosystem of tools for reporting, visualization, analysis, and more. Octo opens the door to using these tools with the databases of transactional applications that use YottaDB.

I try to use the Selinux MLS with Fedora 31 and I wrote on my last article about Fedora 31 : Can be better? part 005.After relabeling the files and start the environment I get multiple errors and I ask an answer at fedoraproject lists:This is an example of the problem of implementing MLS in Fedora and can be remedied because MLS Selinux is old in implementing Selinux.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install HPLIP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, HPLIP (HP Linux Imaging and Printing Driver) developed by HP for Printing, scanning, and faxing with HP inkjet and laser-based printers in Linux platforms.

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

Allison has a unique perspective on the practice of managing with open values because she was familiar with working in an open organization before becoming a manager, and therefore needed to learn how to practice the values differently as she transitioned to a manager role at Red Hat. That was “easier said than done,” as she put it during our discussion, because of a manager's responsibilities for helping and coaching individuals on their team, specifically regarding performance and development.

Allison manages a team focused on internal communications, where associates have a variety of unique responsibilities and work on different tasks rather than collaborate on a single deliverable. This makes both the sharing of knowledge and the use of knowledge toward an innovative goal of primary importance. Because of that, she feels she is not a "boss"—not someone who directs work— but rather "just another member of the team" who "sets the context in which works take place."

She feels she is not a "boss"—not someone who directs work— but rather "just another member of the team" who "sets the context in which works take place."

While Windows and macOS users have been enjoying their flavors of dark mode for quite some time now, Chrome OS users have sadly been missing out on the fun. However, thanks to a recent sighting by Android Police on the Chrome OS Canary channel, it looks like Chrome OS users can now join in on the dark mode hype train.

We reported back in September that Google has been internally working on proper dark and light themes for Chrome OS. The system-wide feature is still in its early development stages and is not officially ready to come to the Stable channel yet, but if you have a Chromebook and are itching to start using the upcoming feature today, you can do just that by going into the Flags menu on Chrome.

Going back more than a year there have been Intel "i915" kernel graphics driver patches implementing integer mode scaling support while finally for Linux 5.11 in early 2021 the support will have landed.

Intel added integer mode scaling to their Windows graphics driver back in 2019 to provide better clarity when upscaling games (particularly pixel art type content) and other software. The Linux patches materialized in September 2019 for nearest-neighbor integer mode scaling and then seemingly forgotten about. The capability works with Gen11 / Ice Lake and newer.

Intel developer Manasi Navare has submitted a series of patches for the Linux kernel that brings support for variable refresh rates on Intel's latest graphics chips to the Linux kernels i915 driver. The feature is only enabled on Tiger Lake, Sapphire Rapids and newer Intel graphics chips.

[...]

You do not need a special "Freesync" monitor to use adaptive vertical synchronization, Freesync is just a marketing term used by AMD. The DisplayPort specification has included variable refresh rate (VRR) as an option feature since DP 1.4 and there are many monitors with support for it that are not marketed as "Freesync" or "gaming" monitors. Monitors that are marketed as "Freesync" support the standard DisplayPort VRR protocol so you don't need to use a AMD graphics card to get the benefits of a Freesync monitor. You will soon be able to use one of the very latest Intel CPU's with integrated graphics or one of Intel's upcoming dedicated graphics cards with Freesync monitors on Linux.

Today, GitLab released the version 13.5 with several new features. Also Salsa got some changes applied to it.

[...]

It's been way over two years since we started to use Google Compute Engine (GCE) for Salsa. Since then, all the jobs running on the shared runners run within a n1-standard-1 instance, providing a fresh set of one vCPU and 3.75GB of RAM for each and every build.

GCE supports several new instance types, featuring better and faster CPUs, including current AMD EPICs. However, as it turns out, GCE does not support any single vCPU instances for any of those types. So jobs in the future will use n2d-standard-2 for the time being, provinding two vCPUs and 8GB of RAM..

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, and Petros Koutoupis talk social media regulation and its relationship to journalism and the threat to Section 230.

Chris gets left out in the cold after a Home Assistant glitch, and Alex puts a big batch of USB hard drives to the test

Plus a great pick for you pack rats, feedback, and more.

Gatekeeping, tribalism and toxicity in the Linux community. We're tired of it and it's time to silence it. But WHY does it happen, and HOW do we DEAL with it?

As the Glean SDK continues to expand its features and functionality, it has also continued to expand the number and types of consumers within the Mozilla ecosystem that rely on it for collection and transport of important metrics. On this particular adventure, I find myself once again working on one of these components that tie into the Glean ecosystem. In this case, it has been my work on the Nimbus SDK that has inspired this story.

Nimbus is our new take on a rapid experimentation platform, or a way to try out new features in our applications for subsets of the population of users in a way in which we can measure the impact. The idea is to find out what our users like and use so that we can focus our efforts on the features that matter to them. Like Glean, Nimbus is a cross-platform client SDK intended to be used on Android, iOS, and all flavors of Desktop OS that we support. Also like Glean, this presented us with all of the challenges that you would normally encounter when creating a cross-platform library. Unlike Glean, Nimbus was able to take advantage of some tooling that wasn’t available when we started Glean, namely: uniffi.

So what is uniffi? It’s a multi-language bindings generator for Rust. What exactly does that mean? Typically you would have to write something in Rust and create a hand-written Foreign Function Interface (FFI) layer also in Rust. On top of that, you also end up creating a hand-written wrapper in each and every language that is supported. Instead, uniffi does most of the work for us by generating the plumbing necessary to transport data across the FFI, including the specific language bindings, making it a little easier to write things once and a lot easier to maintain multiple supported languages. With uniffi we can write the code once in Rust, and then generate the code we need to be able to reuse these components in whatever language (currently supporting Kotlin, Swift and Python with C++ and JS coming soon) and on whatever platform we need.

Tor Browser 10.5a2 for Desktop platforms is now available from the Tor Browser Alpha download page and also from our distribution directory.

Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable release instead.

Tor Browser 10.0.2 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

This release updates Firefox to 78.4.0esr and NoScript to 11.1.3. This release includes important security updates to Firefox.

How should they have acted?

They should have provided the source code to anyone asking, preferably online, right from the start when they set up their service. Even if they would not have named me, but had provided source code, it would be fine by me.

I'm not sure how long their site was online (they state 3 years in the email), but they have been violating the license all that time, and the half-assed attempt ended badly. I suspect their service was not used that much, because they just took it down without notice. I hope all their subscribers know of it, since they will never be notified if their certificate is about to expire.

When I still hosted this code myself, I had about 20,000 (twenty thousand) domains being checked. When I cancelled the service, each and every one of those domains got a message notifying them that their service would be cancelled after 30 days with a few alternative services they could use.

SAML and OAUTH are technical standards for authorizing users. These standards are used by Web Application developers, security professionals, and system administrators who are looking to improve their identity management service and enhance methods that clients can access resources with a set of credentials. In cases where access to an application from a portal is needed, there is a need for a centralized identity source or Enterprise Single Sign On. In such cases, SAML is preferable. In cases where temporary access to resources such as accounts or files is needed, OAUTH is considered the better choice. In mobile use cases, OAUTH is mostly used. Both SAML (Security Assertion and Markup Language) and OAUTH (Open Authorization) are used for web Single Sign On, providing the option for single sign-on for multiple web applications.

While HTTP/3 specification is still in the draft stage, the latest version of the Chrome browser already supports it by default . With Chrome holding around 70% of browser market share, you could say HTTP/3 has gone mainstream.

The new revision of this foundational protocol aims to make the web more efficient, secure, and shorten the content-delivery latencies. In some ways, it’s a braver take of HTTP2: similar goals addressed by replacing the underlying TCP protocol with a new, purpose-built protocol QUIC. The best way to explain the benefits of QUIC is to illustrate where TCP falls short as a transport for HTTP requests. And to do that, we’ll start at the very beginning.

Many businesses today are struggling through digital transformation, dealing with a rapidly changing technology landscape that often seems to present too many choices, too much uncertainty, and too little support.   Maybe your business is struggling too.  For sure you want to ride the next great technology wave, but just as surely you don’t want to get crushed by it.

Take Kubernetes for example.  It’s an incredibly powerful container management platform that’s fast becoming a modern infrastructure standard.   It could enable you to deliver new digital capabilities more quickly, to create the exceptional customer experiences that will launch you ahead of your competition.  But Kubernetes is notoriously difficult to use, especially for the application development and operations teams that stand to benefit from it most.

Our SUSE Certification Program offers industry-leading certifications and exams that are globally recognized. High-stakes assessments are vital, so it is important to always look for ways to improve the overall experience for the certification candidate. We have begun transitioning all of our exams to Questionmark. Questionmark is as full-service, enterprise-grade assessment platform, which enables him-stakes exams and assessments to be conducted remotely and securely.

A team of students at the Wellington Institute of Technology (WelTec) is developing a proof of concept that involves implementing a software defined storage solution for campus-wide staff and student use. WeITec is one of New Zealand’s oldest tertiary education institutions that trains over 6,000 students each year. They offer degree programmes that are future-focused, developed alongside industry and provide students with practical real-world skills.

If you haven’t seen my earlier posts about this, OLED screens flicker uncomfortably for some of us, especially in low light and when being moved. This is amplified when holding a phone that literally moves in your field of vision as a function of its regular operation. The visual sensation can cause headaches even after a short time; I get them because I find focusing difficult, which irritates my eyes and mimics the unsettling colour shimmer I get at the onset of a migraine.