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Do a presentation at NTLUG.
What is the Linux Installation Project?
Real companies using Linux!
Not just for business anymore.
Providing ready to run platforms on Linux
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- RedHat: RHSA-2023-0628:01 Important: git security update
An update for git is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 Extended Update Support. Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score,
- RedHat: RHSA-2023-0625:01 Important: libksba security update
An update for libksba is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability
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- Surprise! China's top Android phones collect way more info
Best to revisit that plan to bring home a cheap OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo, or Realme handset from your holiday. Don't buy an Android phone in China, boffins have warned, as they come crammed with preinstalled apps transmitting privacy-sensitive data to third-party domains without consent or notice.…
- Get Started with GIMP on Rocky Linux: An Easy Guide to Installing and Maintaining with DNF or Flatpak Package Managers
GIMP is a powerful and versatile open-source image editing software that rivals commercial image editing software like Adobe Photoshop. It offers several benefits, such as being free and open-source, highly customizable, compatible with multiple operating systems, regularly updated, and maintained by a large community of developers. This tutorial demonstrates how to install GIMP on Rocky Linux 9 or 8 via the appstream dnf or flatpak package manager with tips on maintenance and removal.
- How to manage flatpaks privileges with Flatseal
Flatpaks represent a relative new, cross-distribution way of distributing software on Linux: applications are packaged together with their dependencies and runs in a sandbox, isolated from the rest of the system, except for some specific areas they need to access to work correctly. The system resources a flatpak needs to access are visible when it is installed from the command line; with Flatseal we can inspect and manage them graphically.
- Join the conversation
The Fedora community invites you to join the conversation and help to advance the Fedora Project and free software in general.
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- Few Americans Understand How Online Tracking Works, Finds Report
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Many people in the United States would like to control the information that companies can learn about them online. Yet when presented with a series of true-or-false questions about how digital devices and services track users, most Americans struggled to answer them, according to a report published (PDF) on Tuesday by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The report analyzed the results of a data privacy survey that included more than 2,000 adults in the United States. Very few of the respondents said they trusted the way online services handled their personal data. The survey also tested people's knowledge about how apps, websites and digital devices may amass and disclose information about people's health, TV-viewing habits and doorbell camera videos. Although many understood how companies can track their emails and website visits, a majority seemed unaware that there are only limited federal protections for the kinds of personal data that online services can collect about consumers. Seventy-seven percent of the participants got nine or fewer of the 17 true-or-false questions right, amounting to an F grade, the report said. Only one person received an A grade, for correctly answering 16 of the questions. No one answered all of them correctly. Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents said they had "little control over what marketers" could learn about them online, while 73 percent said they did not have "the time to keep up with ways to control the information that companies" had about them. "The big takeaway here is that consent is broken, totally broken,"Joseph Turow, a media studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was the lead author of the report, said in an interview. "The overarching idea that consent, either implicit or explicit, is the solution to this sea of data gathering is totally misguided -- and that's the bottom line." The survey results challenge a data-for-services trade-off argument that the tech industry has long used to justify consumer tracking and to forestall government limits on it: Consumers may freely use a host of convenient digital tools -- as long as they agree to allow apps, sites, ad technology and marketing analytics firms to track their online activities and employ their personal information. But the new report suggests that many Americans aren't buying into the industry bargain. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they didn't think it was fair that a store could monitor their online activity if they logged into the retailer's Wi-Fi. And 61 percent indicated they thought it was unacceptable for a store to use their personal information to improve the services they received from the store. Only a small minority -- 18 percent -- said they did not care what companies learned about them online. "When faced with technologies that are increasingly critical for navigating modern life, users often lack a real set of alternatives and cannot reasonably forgo using these tools," Lina M. Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in a speech (PDF) last year. In the talk, Ms. Khan proposed a "type of new paradigm" that could impose "substantive limits" on consumer tracking.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- EV Batteries Getting Second Life On California Power Grid
Hundreds of used electric vehicle battery packs are enjoying a second life at a California facility connected to the state's power grid, according to a company pioneering technology it says will dramatically lower the cost of storing carbon-free energy. Reuters reports: B2U Storage Solutions, a Los Angeles-based startup, said it has 25 megawatt-hours of storage capacity made up of 1,300 former EV batteries tied to a solar energy facility in Lancaster, California. The project is believed to be the first of its kind selling power into a wholesale market and earned $1 million last year, according to Chief Executive Freeman Hall. B2U's technology allows the EV battery packs to be bundled together without having to be taken apart first. Founded in 2019, the company is backed by Japanese trading company Marubeni Corp. By extending the batteries' lives, project developers can save both resources and costs. Hall estimates that a system like B2U's could lower grid-scale battery capital costs by about 40%. "Second life and re-use helps the overall lifecycle be more energy efficient, given all the efforts that go into making that battery," Hall said in an interview. "So you're getting maximum value out of it." Batteries are worked hard during their years powering vehicles, and over time their range deteriorates. But they still hold value as stationary storage, which has gentler demands, Hall said. The batteries in the B2U system are up to 8-years old and once powered vehicles built by Honda and Nissan.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Maryland Motor Vehicles Agency Wants To Know About Your Sleep Apnea
"Man goes to the doctor for a sleep apnea diagnosis, a few months later he gets a letter from the state of Maryland about his sleep apnea -- and they won't tell him how they found out about it," writes Slashdot reader schwit1. NBC4 Washington reports: Dr. David Allick, a dentist in Rockville, was diagnosed with mild sleep apnea in June 2022. Months later, he received a letter from the MVA requesting additional information about his diagnosis in order "to determine your fitness to drive." The September 2022 letter noted failure to return the required forms, which included a report from his physician, could result in the suspension of his license. Allick said he isn't clear how the state learned about his medical diagnosis. But more importantly, he said he was previously unaware of a little-known Maryland law requiring people to report their sleep apnea diagnosis to state driving authorities. Allick said he still has questions about what prompted the ordeal. "Everybody I talked to -- nobody's heard of anything like this," he said, also acknowledging: "I'm sure they want to keep the roads safe." schwit1 adds: "How is this not a HIPAA violation?" The investigation team at NBC4 Washington found that Allick is one of 1,310 people whose sleep apnea diagnoses "have led to medical reviews by the Maryland MVA." The state department didn't have data on how many of these Maryland drivers have had their license suspended.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Wyze Security Cameras Will Go Offline Tonight For Two Hours
If you have Wyze cameras or a Wyze home security system, you will need to make other arrangements to monitor your property from 12AM PT to 2AM PT tomorrow morning. The Verge reports: The smart home company sent an email to its customers this week stating that system maintenance on February 8th at 12AM PT will impact every feature of the system that relies on the app or website. That includes being able to alert Noonlight, the professional monitoring company Wyze uses for its Sense security system, about a potential break-in. Not only will your security system be down, but if you use Wyze cameras to keep an eye on things going bump in the night, you'll have to stay awake. Wyze cameras won't be able to upload any video to the cloud or send alerts for motion or other events to the app. While it's a good thing that Wyze is giving customers a heads-up, the flip side is that everyone is getting a heads-up. It's posting a sign that any location using this equipment will be unprotected between these hours, with basically no notice to create a backup plan or take other precautions, depending on your security concerns. It's also worrisome that the professional security customers have paid for and rely on can be completely disabled for "maintenance."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Saudi Arabia Is Trying To Pivot From Big Oil To Big Tech
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The country of Saudi Arabia has scrounged up several billion dollars in investments from major tech companies, which are interested in building cloud computing centers in the region. According to Reuters, the Saudi Minister of Communication and Information Technology Abdullah Alswaha discussed the investments at LEAP, an international technology conference that began today in Riyadh, the country's capital city. Players like Microsoft and Oracle are investing billions of dollars into the country, with Microsoft forking over $2.1 billion while Oracle invests $1.5 billion. Huawei, a Chinese tech company, is also investing a reported $400 million. "The investments... will enhance the kingdom of Saudi Arabia's position as the largest digital market in the Middle East and North Africa," Alswaha said at LEAP, as quoted by Reuters. While the timeline of these investments is not clear, Oracle told Reuters that its funds will be distributed over several years. Alswaha is tempting these companies with government contracts, and while details are scant, it's likely that Saudi Arabia is giving them prime real estate for a low cost to build their cloud computing centers in Riyadh. "The investments are a part of Saudi Arabia's planned pivot away from oil and toward tech, which the country is calling Vision 2030," adds Gizmodo. "That pivot is already underway as Tonomus, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's own architecture, engineering, and sustainability amalgamation called NEOM made a $1 billion investment in artificial intelligence and the metaverse." One of the three areas of Neom that has been officially announced and underway is The Line, "a linear city with Utopian vistas straight out of a Hollywood movie," reported CNBC last October. "Composed of two parallel skyscrapers that cut right through the desert for 170 kilometers from the coast to the mountains, The Line will be 200 meters wide and soar to a height of 500 meters (higher than most of the world's towers) -- and for an added surreal touch, will be encased on all sides with gigantic mirrors."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Microsoft Will Wipe Free Teams Business Users' Data If They Don't Upgrade To a Paid Tier
Microsoft is retiring the existing Teams Free version for small business in favor of the similarly-titled Teams (free) on April 12th, and legacy data won't carry over. Engadget reports: Your office will have to pay for at least the Teams Essentials plan ($4 per user per month) to preserve chats, meetings, channels and other key info. As Windows Central explains, the new Teams (free) tier will require a new account. Data in the old app, now rebadged as Teams Free (classic), will be deleted. Anything you haven't saved by then will be gone, including shared files you haven't downloaded.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Zoom To Lay Off 1,300 Employees, Or About 15% of Its Workforce
Zoom on Tuesday announced plans to cut about 1,300 workers, or 15% of its workforce, according to a blog post on the company's website. CNBC reports: CEO Eric Yuan wrote in the blog post that as the world continues to adjust to life after the Covid pandemic, the company needs to adapt to the "uncertainty of the global economy" as well as "its effect on our customers." "We worked tirelessly and made Zoom better for our customers and users. But we also made mistakes," Yuan said. "We didn't take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyze our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities." Yuan said the cuts will impact every organization across Zoom, and employees who are laid off will be offered up to 16 weeks of salary and health-care coverage. The CEO also said he plans to reduce his own salary for the coming fiscal year by 98%, and he is also forgoing his 2023 corporate bonus. "As the CEO and founder of Zoom, I am accountable for these mistakes and the actions we take today -- and I want to show accountability not just in words but in my own actions," Yuan wrote in the post.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Developers Created AI To Generate Police Sketches. Experts Are Horrified
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Two developers have used OpenAI's DALL-E 2 image generation model to create a forensic sketch program that can create "hyper-realistic" police sketches of a suspect based on user inputs. The program, called Forensic Sketch AI-rtist, was created by developers Artur Fortunato and Filipe Reynaud as part of a hackathon in December 2022. The developers wrote that the program's purpose is to cut down the time it usually takes to draw a suspect of a crime, which is "around two to three hours," according to a presentation uploaded to the internet. "We haven't released the product yet, so we don't have any active users at the moment, Fortunato and Reynaud told Motherboard in a joint email. "At this stage, we are still trying to validate if this project would be viable to use in a real world scenario or not. For this, we're planning on reaching out to police departments in order to have input data that we can test this on." AI ethicists and researchers told Motherboard that the use of generative AI in police forensics is incredibly dangerous, with the potential to worsen existing racial and gender biases that appear in initial witness descriptions. "The problem with traditional forensic sketches is not that they take time to produce (which seems to be the only problem that this AI forensic sketch program is trying to solve). The problem is that any forensic sketch is already subject to human biases and the frailty of human memory," Jennifer Lynch, the Surveillance Litigation Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Motherboard. "AI can't fix those human problems, and this particular program will likely make them worse through its very design." The program asks users to provide information either through a template that asks for gender, skin color, eyebrows, nose, beard, age, hair, eyes, and jaw descriptions or through the open description feature, in which users can type any description they have of the suspect. Then, users can click "generate profile," which sends the descriptions to DALL-E 2 and produces an AI-generated portrait. "Research has shown that humans remember faces holistically, not feature-by-feature. A sketch process that relies on individual feature descriptions like this AI program can result in a face that's strikingly different from the perpetrator's," Lynch said. "Unfortunately, once the witness sees the composite, that image may replace in their minds, their hazy memory of the actual suspect. This is only exacerbated by an AI-generated image that looks more 'real' than a hand-drawn sketch."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- More Than 30% of Steam Users Now Run Windows 11
The latest Steam Hardware and Software Survey results are now available, showing a significant milestone for Microsoft's operating system. From a report: According to Valve, Windows 11 crossed a 30% share on Steam in January 2023. Windows 11's growth on Steam is directly related to Windows 10's decline. The latter remains the most popular OS among the gaming audience, but its market share lost 1.96 points in January 2023. Windows 10 holds approximately 63.46% of all Steam customers. Windows 11, on the other hand, gained 1.91% points. This allowed the operating system to cross the 30% mark and reach its all-time high of 30.33%. Despite being out of support since 2020 (no paid security updates since January 2023), Windows 7 still has 1.6% of all Steam users. In January 2023, its 64-bit version lost 0.06 points. Overall, 96.02% of all Steam customers use Windows (0.13). macOS is second with 2.61% (+0.13), and Linux is third with 1.38% (no changes last month).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Mozilla, Like Google, is Looking Ahead To the End of Apple's WebKit Rule
Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple will no longer require its competitors to use the WebKit browser engine in iOS. From a report: Mozilla conducted similar experiments that never went anywhere years ago but in October 2022 posted an issue in the GitHub repository housing the code for the iOS version of Firefox that includes a reference to GeckoView, a wrapper for Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. Under the current Apple App Store Guidelines, iOS browser apps must use WebKit. So a Firefox build incorporating Gecko rather than WebKit currently cannot be distributed through the iOS App Store. As we reported last week, Mozilla is not alone in anticipating an iOS App Store regime that tolerates browser competition. Google has begun work on a Blink-based version of Chrome for iOS. The major browser makers -- Apple, Google, and Mozilla -- each have their own browser rendering engines. Apple's Safari is based on WebKit; Google's Chrome and its open source Chromium foundation is based on Blink (forked from WebKit a decade ago); and Mozilla's Firefox is based on Gecko. Microsoft developed its own Trident rendering engine in the outdated Internet Explorer and a Trident fork called EdgeHTML in legacy versions of Edge but has relied on Blink since rebasing its Edge browser on Chromium code.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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- Suspect in Finnish psychotherapy center blackmail hack arrested
Suomi sentence expected for shrink records theft
French police have arrested a 25-year-old Finnish man accused of hacking a psychotherapy clinic, stealing more than 22,000 patients' therapy notes, demanding ransom payments from them and also leaking this very private info on a Tor website.…
- China's Yangtze Memory lays off staff and evicts them from company housing
So much for the workers' paradise: Big Tech gives its discards months of severance pay
Adding insult to injury, staff laid off by Chinese memory-maker Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YTMC) not only lost their jobs, but were evicted from their company-subsidized apartments in Wuhan, according to Chinese media outlet Caixin.…
- China to stop certifying fax machines, ISDN and frame relay kit
Modems and pagers soon to beep their last, ATM switches on the outer too
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology tolled the bell on Monday for network access reforms that will mean the end for some well-loved but arguably obsolete communications technologies.…
- Google pushes fake abortion clinic ads to lower-income women, report says
At least those who live in Phoenix and Atlanta
Google is more likely to push ads for fake abortion clinics toward lower-income women in two major US cities in states that ban the procedure after six weeks, such as in the contested case in Georgia, and 15 weeks for Arizona, according to research by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) .…
- Zoom and gloom: Vid-chat biz sheds 15 percent of staff – by email
CEO admits hyper-growth during pandemic was careless
Video chat outfit Zoom has "made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15 percent and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues" – and communicated it in an email.…
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