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Free/Libre/Open Source Software Leftovers

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  • Copyright enforcement with Dr. Miriam Ballhausen

    We invited Dr. Miriam Ballhausen to talk with us about copyright enforcement. She is a German lawyer with the focus on software, data protection, copyright law and specifically Free Software copyright. This is the sixth regular episode of the Software Freedom Podcast for which we invite experts from our community.

    In this sixth episode of the Software Freedom Podcast we talk about Free Software copyright enforcement with our guest Dr. Miriam Ballhausen. Dr. Miriam Ballhausen is a German laywer and is specialised in Free Software copyright questions. Together we cover the basics about Free Software licensing and discuss, how Free Software copyright can be enforced, what are the steps to enforce it and why it is often enforced in Germany. We also explore how the REUSE project could help with being in compliance with Free Software licenses.

  • IBM Has Open Sourced Its Edge Device Platform and Wishes AWS and Microsoft Got On Board

    IBM's Open Horizon is meant to make it easier to manage thousands of IoT devices as edge computing nodes.

  • Open-source contact tracing, part 1

    The main goal of COVID-19 tracing applications is to notify users if they have been recently in contact with an infected person, so that they can isolate themselves or seek out testing. The creation of the applications is usually supported by governments, with the development performed by health authorities and research institutions. The Wikipedia page for COVID-19 apps lists (as of early June 2020) at least 38 countries with such applications in use or under development, and at least eight framework initiatives.

    The applications trace the people that the user has had contact with for a significant period (for example, 15 minutes) with close physical proximity (a distance around one meter). The complete tracing system usually consists of an application for mobile phones and the server software.

    For the distance measurement and detecting the presence of other users, GPS and Bluetooth are the technical solutions used in practice. GPS only appears in a small number of projects because it does not have enough precision, especially inside buildings. It also does not work in enclosed spaces like underground parking and subways.

    Most countries have chosen to develop a distance measurement using Bluetooth, generally the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) variant, which uses less energy than the classical version. This is important as the distance measurement is done by mobile phones, and so Bluetooth will need to be active most of the time.

    The Bluetooth protocol was not designed for these kinds of tasks, though, so research has been done on ways to measure distance accurately. A report [PDF] from the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing project shows that it is possible to measure distance using BLE signal strength, specifically received signal strength indication (RSSI). In a contact-tracing system using Bluetooth, the distance measurement is made by the two phones communicating using a specific message format. Since the formats differ between applications, communication is only guaranteed to work if both phones are using the same application.

  • More alternatives to Google Analytics

    Last week, we introduced the privacy concerns with using Google Analytics (GA) and presented two lightweight open-source options: GoatCounter and Plausible. Those tools are useful for site owners who need relatively basic metrics. In this second article, we present several heavier-weight GA replacements for those who need more detailed analytics. We also look at some tools that produce analytics data based on web-server-access logs, GoAccess, in particular.

  • GNU Taler news: Exchange independent security audit report published

    We received a grant from NLnet foundation to pay for an external security audit of the GNU Taler exchange cryptography, code and documentation. CodeBlau now concluded their audit. You can find the final report here. We have compiled a preliminary response detailing what changes we have already made and which changes we are still planning to make in the future. We thank CodeBlau for their work, and NLnet and the European Commission's Horizion 2020 NGI initiative for funding this work.

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.