Today in Techrights

• InteLeaks – Part XXX: Harbor Research's Pseudo-scientific 'Research' for Intel, Bizarrely Suggesting a Microsoft Partnership for a Domain Largely Controlled or Dominated by Linux
• Chromium and Chrome Are Not Free Software But an Example of Microsoft-Fashioned Openwashing Tactics
• Links 23/1/2021: Chromium Pains and New Debian Maintainers
• InteLeaks – Part XXIX: Harbor Research Did Not Produce a Study But an Elaborate Hoax for Intel, Suggesting Microsoft Partnership and Outsourcing Based on Zero Evidence and No Solid Rationale
• Video: The State of Communities Surrounding GNU/Linux Distributions
• IRC Proceedings: Friday, January 22, 2021
• InteLeaks – Part XXVIII: Intel Served Report From Microsoft Boosters, Who Provide No Actual Evidence and No Science to Back Their Supposed 'Findings'
• Erosion of Communities, Ascent of Corporate-Industrial Fake Communities
• The Corporate 'Left' and the Open Source Pseudo 'Movement'
• Links 22/1/2021: pfSense Plus, Endless OS Foundation, and Many Laptops With GNU/Linux

today's leftovers

• Skul: The Hero Slayer is a delightful repeatable head-swapping action rogue-lite out now

  After being in Early Access since February 2020, SouthPAW Games have now released their head-swapping rogue-lite action platformer Skul: The Hero Slayer. Taking place in a world where it seems that things are a bit backwards. The heroes appear to be going on a rampage, enslaving other creatures to help with their dirty work and destroy the demons once and for all. Everyone has been taken prisoner, except for you, a little little Skul. With action comparable to the likes of Dead Cells which I adore, and Hollow Knight, this is a rogue-lite you're going to want to keep on playing. You're no ordinary fighter though, as you can swap your regular boring old skul with another. When you do this, you gain some pretty impressive abilities and there's quite a lot of different skul's to find. This makes it quite unique because it can end up being very different on each run. [...] I should note that the current build on Linux has an issue of a black screen instead of the main menu, although all it does it get you to click a button to load back into the game which does work so it's not a big problem. I've let the developer know.

• New release candidate: Tor 0.4.5.4-rc

  There's a new release candidate available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.5.4-rc from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release likely around this coming Tuesday.

  Tor 0.4.5.4-rc is the second release candidate in its series. It fixes several bugs present in previous releases.

• Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

  A post on the Debian developer list about issues installing the operating system on a laptop sparked a debate about whether Debian's free software principles have become a blocker to adoption. Wanting to convert his laptop from Windows 10 to Debian, Dan Pal clicked "Download" on the Linux distro's homepage. It did not install because his wireless chipset was not supported. He succeeded eventually by downloading a DVD image, but had to hunt for it. "The current policy of hiding other versions of Debian is limiting the adoption of your OS by people like me who are interested in moving from Windows 10," he said. There is a distributable driver for this wireless card but it is non-free, which means it is not officially part of Debian. It is a good principle, but works against users if it completely blocks installation. The issue has been debated before. "I idly wonder if we could call it firmware and call it a day. I tried to propose that a bunch of times and was not successful," said a reply to the post.

today's howtos

• Remembering the LAN

  We can have the LAN-like experience of the 90's back again, and we can add the best parts of the 21st century internet. A safe small space of people we trust, where we can program away from the prying eyes of the multi-billion-person internet. Where the outright villainous will be kept at bay by good identity services and good crypto.

  The broader concept of virtualizing networks has existed forever: the Virtual Private Network. New protocols make VPNs better than before, Wireguard is pioneering easy and efficient tunneling between peers. Marry the VPN to identity, and make it work anywhere, and you can have a virtual 90s-style LAN made up of all your 21st century devices. Let the internet be the dumb pipe, let your endpoints determine who they will talk to based on the person at the other end.

• Predicting Hard Drive Failure with Machine Learning

  These data points are labelled as members of the negative or positive class, which in this case means “hard drive operates normally” or “hard drive has failed.” Note that the “positive” in “positive class” doesn’t mean “good.” Instead, it means “this sample exhibits the behavior we’re looking out for.” A machine learning model would read this dataset, then look for patterns in the features that determine why each hard drive ended up in its class.

  Normally there would be enough data points and features that a human couldn’t read the whole dataset—let alone spot a pattern in it! This example is simplified enough for us to step through the process that a model might follow. Let’s look for a pattern in each feature:

• Escape from System D, episode VII

  Well, it’s been an awfully long time since I last blogged about Dinit (web page, github), my service-manager / init / wannabe-Systemd-competitor. I’d have to say, I never thought it would take this long to come this far; when I started the project, it didn’t seem such a major undertaking, but as is often the case with hobby projects, life started getting in the way.

• Doing «Data Science» even if you have never heard the words before

  I’d like to shatter some of this mystery today. Let’s do some machine learning, find some patterns in our data – perhaps even make some predictions. With good old Python only – no 2-gigabyte library, and no arcane knowledge needed beforehand.

• How To Install Emacs Editor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Emacs Editor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Emacs is a very useful plus feature-rich text editor that may be used across multiple various platforms. Because of its considerable support for writing code within different languages, it is favored by most programmers. 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 Emacs Editor 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.

• How to Change Debian’s Default Applications

  We all have our preferences when it comes to the application we want to use for opening and working with a certain file type. For example, whenever I start using a new version of an operating system, I install and switch to the VLC media player for playing music and videos. In Debian, you can change your default applications both through the command line and the graphical user interface through the simple steps described in this tutorial. We have performed the commands and procedure described in this tutorial on the latest Debian 10 Buster system.

• How To Install Chrome In Ubuntu / Linux Mint | Tips On UNIX

  Google Chrome one of the common and most widely used web browsers in the world. It is blazing fast and easy to use with security features. Google Chrome‘s new version 88 comes with more changes and one of the notable changes is the end of flash support. This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Chrome in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 18.04, and Linux Mint 20.1

• How to Install and Configure Gogs Git Service on Ubuntu Linux

  The Gogs is a compact and self-hosted hassle-free Git service that you can install on your Ubuntu Linux server and distribution to enjoy the Git facilities. The Gogs services are lightweight yet powerful; you can install the Gogs services on Docker, cloud server, and even on a Raspberry Pi system. Even old PC and hardware systems can handle the Gogs services. The Gogs is written in the Go language. The simple dashboard, custom domain support, HTTP security, and multi-database support of the Gogs Git Service will give you a comfortable setting to use the Git service on your Ubuntu system.

• How to Install and Use GCC Compiler on Linux System

  While building the Linux kernel, the developers had to build a free and open-source compiler to create the kernel and modules. The GCC compiler was build under the GNU project. In the current version of all Linux distributions, the GCC compiler comes pre-installed inside the operating system. You can use the GCC compiler to compile C, C++, Ada, Go, and a few other object-oriented programming languages. You can compile codes on your terminal shell through the GCC compiler on a Linux system.

• How to create, compile & run a C Program in Linux terminal - Linux Shout

  The C programming language is still alive because it is simple and can do a lot of things. As we know Turbo C compiler is a discontinued integrated development environment, well, on Linux you don’t need it as there is already GNU Compiler Collection to compile and run C or C++ programs. Therefore, if you know the C language, it is much easier to learn, write programs and run other programming languages ​​on Linux operating systems such as C ++, Java, Perl, or PHP, as the languages ​​have certain similarities. Here we will show the steps to install GCC compiler and how to write, compile and run a C program in Linux.