GNU poke 1.2 released

I am happy to announce a new release of GNU poke, version 1.2. This is a bug fix release in the poke 1.x series, and is the result of all the user feedback we have received since we did the last release. Our big thanks to everyone who provided feedback :) See the file NEWS in the released tarball for a detailed list of changes in this release.

Security Leftovers

• Microsoft can no longer maintain Windows 10.

• A Linux Admin's Getting Started Guide to Improving PHP Security

  Running PHP on a Linux web server is a prerequisite for the use of many popular applications such as Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. Linux administrators and web developers must approach PHP with caution, as new vulnerabilities in poorly written and implemented PHP code are abundant and dangerous. In a recent security incident, hackers were able to add a backdoor to the PHP source code. Although the backdoor mechanism was discovered before it made it into production, the incident serves as the latest reminder of the importance of prioritizing PHP security. PHP security is inextricably tied to web server security. Because the popular open-source server-side scripting language is often paired with MySQL, PHP compromise can mean a compromise of the accompanying MySQL database, as well as any web applications running on the web server. This article will examine how you can configure and run PHP securely to mitigate the risk of attacks and compromise, secure web applications, protect user privacy and maintain a secure and properly functioning Linux web server.

• Openwall Releases 'Linux Kernel Runtime Guard' 0.9.0

today's howtos

• Download A Portion Of Youtube Video with Youtube-dl And FFmpeg

  Even though there are multitude of programs available to download and encode videos, I prefer to use Youtube-dl and FFmpeg. These two utilities are just enough to download videos from online and encode, decode, transcode, crop and mux the downloaded videos. Today, we will see how to download a portion of YouTube video with Youtube-dl and FFmpeg in Linux. Before I know this tip, I would usually first download the entire video using Youtube-dl and then trim it down to my desired duration using FFmpeg as shown below.

• Linux bluetooth HeadSet Audio HSP/HFP WH-1000XM3

  I am an archlinux user using Sony WH-1000XM3 bluetooth noise-cancellation headphones. I am also using pulseaudio and it took me a while to switch the bluetooth headphones to HSP/HFP profile so the microphone can work too. Switching the bluetooth profile of your headphones to HeadSet Audio works but it is only monophonic audio and without noise-cancellation and I had to switch to piperwire also. But at least now the microphone works! I was wondering how distros that by default have already switched to pipewire deal with this situation. So I started a fedora 34 (beta) edition and attached both my bluetooth adapter TP-LINK UB400 v1 and my web camera Logitech HD Webcam C270. The test should be to open a jitsi meet and a zoom test meeting and verify that my headphones can work without me doing any stranger CLI magic.

• How to Search Wikipedia by command Line on Ubuntu Linux

  Browsing anything through the terminal shell on Linux gives a professional and power user vibe. There are plenty of pieces of stuff that you actually can do through the terminal shell despite using it on a conventional method. If you’re an internet folk, no wonder you use google or Wikipedia quite often a day. Guess what? In Linux, there are ways to search things on Wikipedia by command line (terminal shell).

• How to install lftp on FreeBSD using the CLI

  I need to download a large file and get the specified file using several connections to speed up downloads on FreeBSD. How do I install lftp and download files using FreeBSD?

• AWS EKS AccessDenied: The aws-auth ConfigMap in your cluster is invalid

  Deleting a managed node group from AW EKS.

• Change Login Screen Background in Ubuntu 20.04 via Graphical Tool

  Want to change the GDM login screen background wallpaper? There’s now a graphical tool to do this in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, as well as Pop!_OS 20.04, Pop!_OS 20.10. Since Ubuntu 20.04, changing the login screen background is not easy because the CSS code are packaged into a .gresource file. Thanks to community, some scripts were made to do the job from the command line. To make life easier, there’s now a graphical tool called GDM Background to change GDM background via a few clicks.

• How to Upgrade Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to 20.04 LTS using command terminal

  Recently, Canonical’s developers have announced that Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) will receive ESM (Extended Security Maintenance) support from April 30, 2021. Thus, this Long term supported Linux distro is now on the verge of losing its regular maintenance updates with admission to the ESM program. If you don’t know what is ESM? It is a period of time offered by Canonical for its Ubuntu LTS systems that have expired the regular LTS support period of 5 years. Companies will continue to receive security updates for a fee. Private users can get ESM support for three instances free of charge. This means the users who still don’t want to upgrade their Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to either 18.04 or 20.04 LTS can continuously use it while having a security update till 2024-04. The last version of Xenial Xerus is Ubuntu 16.04.7.

Linux 5.12-rc8

Ok, so it's been _fairly_ calm this past week, but it hasn't been the
kind of dead calm I would have taken to mean "no rc8 necessary".

So here we are, with an extra rc to make sure things are all settled
down. It's not _that_ rare: this is the fifth time in the 5.x series
we've ended up with an rc8, but I have to admit that I prefer it when
a release doesn't end up needing that extra week.

Because let's keep it to just one extra week, ok? We have occasionally
done rc9's too, but I really don't expect that this time around.

About half of this is once more networking, with driver and bpf
verifier fixes standing out. Other than that it's mostly other driver
updates (gpu, dmaengine, HID, input, nvdimm) and arch updates (mainly
arm and arm64).

And a number of one-liner build fixes for unusual configurations.

So it's not tiny, but it's all small enough that you can easily scan
through the shortlog below and get a fair sense of what's going on.

Let's plan on a final 5.12 release next weekend - but please do give
it one last test to check that it is all solid. Ok?

                  Linus