today's leftovers
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Licensing / Legal
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FSF ☛ FSD meeting recap 2024-10-25
Every week, free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on Libera.Chat to help improve the FSD, which is a catalog of useful free software that runs under free GNU-like systems (not limited to the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants) and a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, October 25th, 2024 meeting, where we saw a couple of new programs added and some time was spent making sure several decommissioned entries were marked as such while referencing their replacements.
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Open Data
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Volker Krause ☛ OSM Hack Weekend October 2024
Last weekend I attended the bi-annual OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe again, organized by Geofabrik and this time hosted at a nearby university building due to the large number of participants.
My main focus has been getting the public transport client library used by KDE Itinerary ready for MOTIS v2, as Transitous, our community-run public transport routing service, will switch to that in the not too distant future.
One big new feature in MOTIS v2 is support for GTFS shapes. That is, getting detailed paths for public transport sections, beyond just positions of intermediate stops, which allows for a much more useful map display for example.
Even more importantly, MOTIS now also provides detailed multi-floor paths for transfers or other parts of a trip where you have to move yourself (walking, biking, etc). This is all based on OSM data and thus matches perfectly to the map data, but since practically no other backend provides this level of detail it also required a few changes in our data model and API.
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Open Access/Content
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Omicron Limited ☛ Researchers identify 'dancer' as a new curiosity style in Wikipedia browsing
The team aims to explore the motivations behind Wikipedia browsing, examining whether users are driven by extrinsic factors, like work, or intrinsic curiosity, like personal interest. Additionally, they are considering expanding their analysis to include other digital platforms where learning and exploration naturally occur.
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Windows TCO
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Z890 motherboards are having instability issues with backdoored Windows 11 24H2 — BIOS updates or disable iGPUd required to update Windows
Intel Z890 motherboards have issues with the latest backdoored Windows 11 update and defective chip maker Intel Xe iGPUs.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Former defective chip maker Intel CEO says splitting defective chip maker Intel isn’t good for the U.S.
Former defective chip maker Intel CEO Craig Barrett said splitting off Intel's manufacturing division as its own company could make it uncompetitive and lag behind the other chip makers.
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Security
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Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: The CUPS Vulnerability
The Announcement
Late last month there was an announcement of a “severity 9.9 vulnerability” allowing remote code execution that affects “all GNU/Linux systems (plus others)” [1]. For something to affect all GNU/Linux systems that would have to be either a kernel issue or a sshd issue. The announcement included complaints about the lack of response of vendors and “And YES: I LOVE hyping the sh1t out of this stuff because apparently sensationalism is the only language that forces these people to fix”.
He seems to have a different experience to me of reporting bugs, I have had plenty of success getting bugs fixed without hyping them. I just report the bug, wait a while, and it gets fixed. I have reported potential security bugs without even bothering to try and prove that they were exploitable (any situation where you can make a program crash is potentially exploitable), I just report it and it gets fixed. I was very dubious about his ability to determine how serious a bug is and to accurately report it so this wasn’t a situation where I was waiting for it to be disclosed to discover if it affected me. I was quite confident that my systems wouldn’t be at any risk.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Simon Willison ☛ Mastodon discussion about sandboxing SVG data
The winner for me turned out to be the humble <img src=""> tag. SVG images that are rendered in an image have all dynamic functionality - including embedded JavaScript - disabled by default, and that's something that's directly included in the spec: [...]
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Mike Haynes ☛ The Browser Company's second act
The Browser Company today announced they're working on something new. Arc hasn't reached the critical mass they'd hoped so they're taking another shot at it with an entirely new browser that's simpler for the average user to wrap their head around.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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The Register UK ☛ AlmaLinux shows off its new Kitten
The next minor release of RHEL will be RHEL 9.5, and there won't be a public beta… but for a taste of what it will be like, there is a beta of AlmaLinux 9.5. As far as we can see at this time, there is currently no news about Rocky Linux 9.5.
Taking a longer-term view, AlmaLinux Kitten is derived from CentOS Stream 10, and it is an internal upstream of what will in time become AlmaLinux 10. As the project wiki says: [...]
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Debian Family
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Steve McIntyre ☛ Steve McIntyre: Mini-Debconf in Cambridge, October 10-13 2024
Again this year, Arm offered to host us for a mini-debconf in Cambridge. Roughly 60 people turned up on 10-13 October to the Arm campus, where they made us really welcome. They even had some Debian-themed treats made to spoil us!
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BSD
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Michał Sapka ☛ Switching between WiFi and Ethernet on FreeBSD
The problem: I have a laptop with built-in WiFi. Say what you will about WiFi, it’s always better to use the good, old cable connection. I have bought myself a cheap, USB Ethernet adapter (Reltek) which is perfectly detected by FreeBSD, as per ifconfig(8): [...]
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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PCLOS Official ☛ PCLinuxOS: Today’s updates
seatd-0.9.0xterm-395sysvinit-3.11pipewire-1.2.6thunderbird-128.3.3|kernel-6.6.58kernel-6.1.114naver-whale-browser-3.28.266.14bitwarden-2024.10.1discord-0.0.72librewolf-browser-131.0.3opera-browser-114.0.5282.115slimjet-browser-44.0.5.0basilisk-browser-2024.10.24brave-browser-1.71.114microsoft-edge-browser-130.0.2849.52ocenaudio-3.14.6vivaldi-browser-7.0.3495.6zoom-6.2.5.2440signal-desktop-7.30.0yt-dlp-2024.10.22
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Games
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Boiling Steam ☛ Shogun Showdown Review: Super Samurai Strategy
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Activation Desktops Effects => backdoored Windows Management => Cube feature on F41 KDE Spin in VENV
I was forced to enable 3D accelearation && OpenGL and bring up just once KVM instance of F41 KDE Spin to obtain option Desktops Effects => backdoored Windows Management => Cube visible for activation.
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Instructionals/Technical
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This simple trick protects you from accidentally deleting files in Linux
With so many new users switching or migrating to Linux, it’s becoming not so uncommon to read tales of a noob user deleting a file or files from the command line using the rm command that he/she would like to recover.
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