today's leftovers

• Top Alternatives to Adobe Photoshop [Ed: GIMP and Krita top of this list]

  It’s customary to cringe at the name of this multi-platform application, which is an acronym for the “GNU Image Manipulation Program.” Look past the name, and there’s a lot to like here. Available on Windows, Linux, and macOS, GIMP is a free photo editing tool with the ability to have masks, layers, color adjustments, and a huge library of plug-ins. There's also a fairly large community of users, and thorough documentation making it a good tool for power users and photo enthusiasts.

• Best GPL Guru Alternative site review for Wp Themes & Plugins

  GPL Guru is a popular GPL themes and plugins provider website that has been around since Jun 2017. This website offers premium GPL themes and plugins for its users and it has a wide range of themes and plugins that you can check out. GPL Guru website has simple user interface and a huge base of users from all around the globe. It is a trusted and verified platform that offers 100% unique and authentic products.

• The Mozilla Blog: Celebrating our community: 10 years of the Reps Program

  Mozilla has always been about community and understanding that the internet is a better place when we work together. Ten years ago, Mozilla created the Reps program to add structure to our regional programs, further building off of our open source foundation. Over the last decade, the program has helped activate local communities in over 50 countries, tested Mozilla products and launches before they were released to the public, and collaborated on some of our biggest projects. The last decade also has seen big shifts in technology, and it has only made us at Mozilla more thankful for our volunteers and more secure in our belief that community and collaboration are key to making a better internet. “As the threats to a healthy internet persist, our network of collaborative communities and contributors continues to provide an essential role in helping us make it better,” said Mitchell Baker, CEO and Chairwoman of Mozilla. “These passionate Mozillians give up their time to educate, empower and mobilize others to support Mozilla’s mission and expand the impact of the open source ecosystem – a critical part of making the internet more accessible and better than how they found it.” Ahead of our 10 year anniversary virtual celebration for the Reps Mozilla program, or ReMo for short, we connected with six of the 205 current reps to talk about their favorite parts of the internet, why community is so important, and where the Reps program can go from here.

• Some notes on Firefox's media autoplay settings as of Firefox 89

  The basic control for media autoplaying (for video and audio) is in Preferences → Privacy & Security, as covered in Allow or block media autoplay in Firefox. As mentioned there, if you want to block all videos you want 'block audio and video', not just 'block audio', which only blocks videos with un-muted audio and still allows silent ones to autoplay if they want to. This appears to affect everything, including bare video content such as direct links to .mp4s, which is a change from 2018. The limitation of this setting is that by itself, once you click to play a video in a tab, (auto)playing stays enabled until you close the tab again. So once you've let the first Youtube video play, Youtube (or anywhere else) will autoplay as much else as it wants to (in that tab). I prefer to specifically play each video.

• Europe's Software Problem

  If Europe wants to have its citizens (and companies) rely significantly on European-operated software, it has no choice but to develop better software, and to also offer that for free. The good news is: we have the talent. Tens of thousands of Europeans work for US tech companies, often from Europe even.

• OpenEmbedded attempt fix for host glibc 2.33

  OE is a cross-compiler, that compiles almost all of the packages for EasyOS. The host system is EasyOS Dunfell-series, which has glibc 2.31 -- up until Easy version 2.7.3 that is. I recently did a complete recompile in OE, bumping glibc from 2.31 to 2.33, and released EasyOS 2.8.1 with glibc 2.33. Running Easy 2.8.1, the host system, yesterday I attempted to compile a package in OE, and got a warning...

• Gpptp fixed

  Gpptp is a GUI frontend created by forum member 'jafadmin' for the 'gpptp' utility, a PPTP VPN client.

• Tobias Bernard: Community Power Part 2: The Process

  In part 1 of this series we looked at some common misconceptions about how power works inside the GNOME project and went over the roles and responsibilites of various sub-groups. With that in place, let’s look at how of a feature (or app, redesign, or other product initiative) goes from idea to reality.

• How the X Window System Influenced Modern Computing

  I should probably wait five years to write this article, so that I could frame it as a eulogy on the death of the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Not too long from now, we will interact with highly intelligent computerized agents using speech, gestures, and wearable devices. But right now, the GUI is still the most common way to interact with a computer, even if keyboards and mouse clicks are augmented by swipes, voice recognition, and autofill. The X Window System, in addition to presenting an important and historic GUI, also exemplified other important trends that made modern computing possible.

• Control AMD's Wraith cooler RGB on Linux using Wraith Master with a new release | GamingOnLinux

  Have a fancy AMD CPU with a Wraith Prism cooler? You might want to adjust some of the RGB settings on Linux and for that you should check out Wraith Master. What it is: Wraith Master is a feature-complete graphical and command-line application for controlling the RGB LEDs on AMD's Wraith stock coolers. At the moment, the only supported cooler is the Wraith Prism, but there are plans to add other Wraith coolers as well. It exists as an independent companion to OpenRGB, and is designed to provide control over all functionality exposed by the hardware. In summary: it's lightweight, it's native, it's fast, it's complete, and it's self-contained.

• Linux Privilege Escalation – Exploiting Capabilities

  Capabilities can certainly be a very powerful tool for system administrators to be able to do their job and work around some of the restrictions of the Linux operating system, however, they should be carefully set as if misconfigured they could lead to a full system compromise.

• No, Windows is not copying KDE Plasma

  Every so often there appear some new pics from developer builds of Windows or even leaks such as the recent Windows 11 preview screenshots. More or less every time this happens there are comments from the Linux side that Windows is copying KDE Plasma – a desktop environment that is, granted, among the most similar ones to Windows. The similarity is, however, only very superficial. To convince you of this, in this post I’ll dissect several design elements and show how the two competitors differ in approaching them. [...] The design in newer parts of Windows is almost nothing like Plasma. To say that Windows is copying Plasma is pretty wrong. The Windows 11 changes actually further separate the two, rather than bring them closer. The changes also highlight the differences in the approaches underlying design choices: Plasma is more conservative and Windows is more progressive.

• Installing Linux Is HARD!?

  So you want to switch to Linux? Or maybe run it alongside Windows? Great idea! But you've probably heard things that scared you away like "installing Linux is hard." Is it really true?

• TIL How RetroForth Implements Deferred Behavior

  INTENDED AUDIENCE: Forth and RetroForth novices. A basic understanding of how to define words and how Forth dictionaries work is assumed.

  GOAL: Understand how to use hook, set-hook, and unhook in RetroForth. Briefly cover the use of DEFER in standard Forth systems.

Ubuntu: Oracle, LF, and More

• Ubuntu Version check command and 5 Easy Steps explained

  Do you log in to an Ubuntu Operating System fist time? and you don’t know what Ubuntu version is running on?. It is a good command for the ubuntu version check step by step guide. If you are a beginner, you can use it. When you install Ubuntu on your system, what version it is. To know more about Ubuntu install please check my previous article How to install Ubuntu on Virtualbox. but what happened after upgrading your system, A new version will be installed and the old version will disappear. Right now, the situation is the same as the unknown system you are using. Now your next task to check Ubuntu version.

• Ubuntu Supports Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Ampere A1 Compute - Database Trends and Applications

  Oracle and Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, have announced Ubuntu support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Ampere A1 Compute. Combining the benefits of Ubuntu, a popular cloud operating system, with the performance of Oracle's new offering, the companies say, enterprises can now run traditional workloads in a cost-optimized fashion. The ARM-based platform is also well-suited for new use cases, such as Canonical’s solution Anbox Cloud, which allows organizations to run Android in the cloud at scale and securely. Ubuntu on OCI Ampere A1 is available as a platform image in the OCI console now.

• Canonical presents EdgeX to the community | Ubuntu

  With a longstanding commitment to Edge and IoT applications, Canonical has historically placed great emphasis on EgdeX – a set of microservices that enable developers to build apps that run at the edge and act as a middleware connecting the things and the cloud . It’s no surprise that Canonical has also been supporting the EdgeX Foundry – the open source, vendor neutral LF Edge platform for middleware Edge IoT. This year, we’re excited to be sharing two presentations with the community, to help share knowledge and ideas around EdgeX. They’re naturally open to all, so go ahead and download EdgeX (if you haven’t already), and join us!

• GMK NucBox Review - A palm-sized Windows 10 mini PC - CNX Software

  Whilst a detailed comparison between the two operating systems is beyond the scope of this review, it is worth noting some of the key findings I observed. Looking at the performance tools common between the two OS showed that they were reasonably evenly matched. However, as the fan is not detected under Ubuntu and video playback on WIndows runs better than on Ubuntu, given the price includes a Windows 10 Home license it probably doesn’t make too much sense to use the device as a Linux HTPC.

10 Linux Distros for Beginners, Intermediate, and Advanced Users

As a free and open-source OS, Linux continues to spread its wings, amassing attention from new and experienced people alike. Whether you are a beginner, an intermediate, or an advanced user, there is already a distribution waiting for you. Check out some of these desktops and install the ones which suit your interests and skillsets.

Security Leftovers and Proprietary Software

• Free Open Source UChecker Made Available to Detect Vulnerable Libraries on Linux Servers

  CloudLinux today announced as part of its TuxCare security services that it is making available free open source software, UChecker, that scans Linux servers for vulnerable libraries that are outdated and being used by other applications. This provides detailed actionable information regarding which application is using which vulnerable library and needs to be updated, which helps improve the security awareness patching process.

• UChecker tool scans Linux servers for outdated libraries

  Security teams running Linux servers now have access to UChecker, a new tool from CloudLinux that runs scans on Linux servers to detect outdated shared libraries on both disk and in memory. Offered as part of CloudLinux’s TuxCare security services, UChecker works with all modern Linux distributions and has been licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 2. According to ZDNet, UChecker tells security pros which application uses which vulnerable library and offers up the relevant process ID and process name. With this new information administrators can see which libraries they need to update.

• Samsung Galaxy devices were exposed to vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to steal data

• We've found another reason not to use Microsoft's Paint 3D – researchers

• Identity management is now mostly about security

• How Does One Get Hired by a Top Cybercrime Gang?

  The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last week announced the arrest of a 55-year-old Latvian woman who’s alleged to have worked as a programmer for Trickbot, a malware-as-a-service platform responsible for infecting millions of computers and seeding many of those systems with ransomware.

• Nasty Linux systemd root level security bug revealed and patched

  The good news is the seven-year-old security bug in Linux systemd's polkit, used in many Linux distros, has been patched. The bad news is that it was ever there in the first place. Polkit, which systemd uses in place of sudo, enables unauthorized users to run privileged processes they'd otherwise couldn't run. It turned out that you could also abuse polkit to get root access to a system.

• Apple Watches are mistakenly calling 911, police say

• Add Microsoft And Another Congressional Staffer To The List Of Entities Targeted In Trump DOJ Leak Investigations

  The hits just keep on coming. Gag orders are being lifted or expiring and we're finding out even more about DOJ leak investigations under Trump. Under AGs Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, the DOJ targeted journalists, Congressional reps... even readers of USA Today.

• TSA working on additional pipeline security regulations following Colonial Pipeline hack [iophk: Windows TCO]

  The new directive will be the second issued by TSA, with the agency rolling out a directive last month that required pipeline owners and operators to report cybersecurity incidents within 12 hours of discovery to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). It also increased coordination between pipeline owners and both CISA and TSA.

  Proctor said Tuesday that the upcoming second directive would be classified as more sensitive in nature than the first directive due to “the nature of the mitigating measures that are going to be required.”

• Verizon, water agency targeted in Chinese cyber espionage campaign: report [iophk: Windows TCO]

  Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California said that it had found a compromised Pulse Secure appliance after the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued its April alert announcing that hackers had breached multiple government agencies and other critical organizations using vulnerabilities in Pulse Secure technologies.

• Apple Surrendered Former White House Counsel Don McGahn's Account Information to Trump DOJ

  On Sunday, The New York Times reported that in February 2018 the Department of Justice (DOJ) subpoenaed Apple for the account information of former Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn and his wife. The company complied with the subpoena, according to anonymous sources who spoke with the Times. A nondisclosure order prevented it from notifying the McGahns about the request until May of this year.

  This news comes on the heels of revelations last week that the DOJ under former President Donald Trump had subpoenaed Apple and Microsoft for the account information of journalists and Democratic lawmakers as part of a leak investigation.

• New browser signal could make cookie banners obsolete

  Today, noyb and Sustainable Computig Lab ("CSL") published a proposal for a new automatic browser signal to finally eliminate obsolete cookie banners. "Advanced Data Protection Control" (ADPC) aims to demonstrate that a user-friendly European solution for privacy settings can easily be implemented.

• Microsoft Gets Second Shot at Banning hiQ from Scraping LinkedIn User Data

  The court has thrown out a case previously ruled in hiQ Labs’ favor and sent it back down to the lower court for further consideration. The court based its decision on its June 4 ruling in the case Van Buren v. United States that limited the type of conduct that can be prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA), which is also at the heart of the LinkedIn case.

  The decision effectively vacates a 2019 ruling by the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals barring LinkedIn from prohibiting hiQ access to publicly available information of LinkedIn’s users, bouncing the case back to the lower court to hear again.