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Microsoft

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Filed under
Linux
Microsoft
Legal

Windows vs Linux: What's the best operating system?

Filed under
GNU
Linux
Microsoft

The way you utilise your PC can often depend on the operating system you use as well as your level of technical knowledge. Even though most people will turn to macOS or Windows when deciding on an OS, if you want something you can customise, there's nothing better than Linux.

Despite the fact that it isn’t as popular as Windows, Linux offers far more avenues for customisation than any other OS as it's built on an open source foundation. It's certainly more intimidating to the average user as a result, but it can be incredibly powerful, and rewarding, if you possess the skills to fully take advantage of it.

Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages with both systems that are useful to know before making the decision on which is best for you.

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Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Visual Studio

Filed under
Microsoft
Software

Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment. It is used to develop computer programs, as well as websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps.

Visual Studio is proprietary software and is not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

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GitHub Copilot and open source laundering

Filed under
Microsoft
Legal

We have seen an explosion in machine learning in the past decade, alongside an explosion in the popularity of free software. At the same time as FOSS has come to dominate software and found its place in almost all new software products, machine learning has increased dramatically in sophistication, facilitating more natural interactions between humans and computers. However, despite their parallel rise in computing, these two domains remain philosophically distant.

Though some audaciously-named companies might suggest otherwise, the machine learning space has enjoyed almost none of the freedoms forwarded by the free and open source software movement. Much of the actual code related to machine learning is publicly available, and there are many public access research papers available for anyone to read. However, the key to machine learning is access to a high-quality dataset and heaps of computing power to process that data, and these two resources are still kept under lock and key by almost all participants in the space.1

The essential barrier to entry for machine learning projects is overcoming these two problems, which are often very costly to secure. A high-quality, well tagged data set generally requires thousands of hours of labor to produce,2 a task which can potentially cost millions of dollars. Any approach which lowers this figure is thus very desirable, even if the cost is making ethical compromises. With Amazon, it takes the form of gig economy exploitation. With GitHub, it takes the form of disregarding the terms of free software licenses. In the process, they built a tool which facilitates the large-scale laundering of free software into non-free software by their customers, who GitHub offers plausible deniability through an inscrutable algorithm.

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Microsoft acknowledges that a Windows 11 update is causing serious connection issues

Filed under
Microsoft

June’s Patch Tuesday update releases for Windows 11 have once gain proved to be problematic. Microsoft has acknowledged a new known issue with the operating system following the installation of the KB5014697 update. The KB5014697 update was supposed to address a number of security flaws in Windows 11, but it also introduced connectivity issues for some users, Microsoft is currently investigating the problem which affects Windows 11’s Wi-Fi hotspot feature.

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Proprietary Software Leftovers

Filed under
Microsoft
Security

Proprietary: Apple and Mcrosoft

Filed under
Microsoft
Mac
  • Shared Photo Library

    With iOS 16, it seems there will be options for family sharing, which sounds great now that we have five phones in our family snapping pictures and storing them in the cloud.

  • iPods are over

    The first iPod was announced in October 2001, and most people agree that it revolutionized the way we listen to music nowadays. By that time, there were other music players, but no manufacturer was able to bring together an easy way for us to buy music - with some decent quality - and offer a well designed product. Obviously, some audiophile may disagree with my “decent quality” statement, but it really was for the average user that didn’t want (or need) to go deeper in all technicality in this regard.

  • House Armed Services chair calls national security software, systems 'too vulnerable' [iophk: Windows TCO]

    “We’re talking about software systems that, you know, operate our missiles and our ships and everything, they just don’t, they are not as protected as they should be,” Smith said. “When it comes to cyber, protecting our systems, I think, is our greatest problem right now — even more so than our ability to exploit other people’s systems, though we certainly need to develop that capability as well.”

OSI and GNOME (and Microsoft Bribes)

Filed under
Microsoft
GNOME

Proprietary Software and Microsoft Holes

Filed under
Microsoft
Security

  • Calls to 'Stop the Deal' as US Military Contractor Moves to Buy NSO Group

    Digital rights advocates sounded the alarm on Tuesday following reports that U.S. military contractor L3Harris Tech plans to acquire NSO Group, a private Israeli firm widely condemned for selling surveillance technology to repressive governments across the globe.

    "The spyware peddled by NSO Group is unsafe in any hands."

  • Microsoft Patch Tuesday, June 2022 Edition

    Microsoft on Tuesday released software updates to fix 60 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a zero-day flaw in all supported Microsoft Office versions on all flavors of Windows that’s seen active exploitation for at least two months now. On a lighter note, Microsoft is officially retiring its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser, which turns 27 years old this year.

  • Ransomware Group Debuts Searchable Victim Data

    Cybercrime groups that specialize in stealing corporate data and demanding a ransom not to publish it have tried countless approaches to shaming their victims into paying. The latest innovation in ratcheting up the heat comes from the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group, which has traditionally published any stolen victim data on the Dark Web. Today, however, the group began publishing individual victim websites on the public Internet, with the leaked data made available in an easily searchable form.

  • Internet Explorer's run finally comes to an end

    Microsoft released the first version of Internet Explorer in 1995, the antediluvian era of web surfing dominated by the first widely popular browser, Netscape Navigator. Its launch signaled the beginning of the end of Navigator: Microsoft went on to tie IE and its ubiquitous Windows operating system together so tightly that many people simply used it by default instead of Navigator.

    The Justice Department sued Microsoft in 1997, saying it violated an earlier consent decree by requiring computer makers to use its browser as a condition of using Windows. It eventually agreed to settle the antitrust battle in 2002 over its use of its Windows monopoly to squash competitors. It also tangled with European regulators who said that tying Internet Explorer to Windows gave it an unfair advantage over rivals such as Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera and Google’s Chrome.

Microsoft Has Loads of Unpatched and Actively-exploited Security Holes, Microsoft-sponsored Media Obsesses Over "Linux"

Filed under
Microsoft
Security
  • Microsoft Releases June 2022 Security Updates

    Microsoft has released updates to address multiple vulnerabilities in Microsoft software. An attacker can exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

    CISA encourages users and administrators to review Microsoft’s June 2022 Security Update Summary and Deployment Information and apply the necessary updates.

  • New botnet and cryptominer Panchan attacking Linux servers [Ed: This is not an issue with Linux itself, but this Microsoft-funded site wants to shift attention away from actively-exploited and unpatched Microsoft flaws; it also spreads FUD about Go for merely being used to develop some malware]

    Panchan is written in the Go programming language and utilizes Go’s concurrency features to maximize its spread and execute payloads.

  • This new Linux rootkit malware is already targeting victims [Ed: Again, this is not an issue with Linux itself; it's some malware that can sometimes be installed on Linux, but that helps distract from deliberate back doors in Windows]
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More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. 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 the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.