Announcing Istio 1.8.3

Istio 1.8.3 will not contain a security fix as previously announced on discuss.istio.io. There is no currently planned date at this time. Be assured that this is a top priority for the Istio Product Security Working Group, but due to the details we cannot release more information at this time. An announcement regarding the delay can be found here.

Open source "vaccine passports:" Linux Foundation Public Health talks development, security, and digitally restoring trust [Ed: This institution has become Stalin]

[Older] Bash Advanced Variable Idioms for Case Sensitivity Management

Whenever we work with textual strings, sooner or later the issue of case comes up. Does a word need to be fully uppercase, fully lowercase, with a capitalized letter at the start of the word or sentence, and so on.

An idiom is a natural language expression of a simple programming task. For example, in the sleep 10 command (which will pause the terminal one is working in for ten seconds), the word sleep is a natural language expression of what is a time based coding construct, developed in the Bash GNU coreutils software package.

There are a number of special variable-bound idioms (i.e. suffixes which can be added to a variable name, indicating what we would like to do with a given variable), which can be used in Bash to more easily do these types of conversions on the fly instead of having to use for example the Sed Stream Editor with a Regular Expression to do the same.

Building The Linux Kernel With Clang Continues To Be Useful, New Features Pursued - Phoronix

At last month's Linux.Conf.Au virtual conference was a presentation by Google engineer Nick Desaulniers on the current state of building the Linux kernel with LLVM Clang as an alternative to GCC.

Over the past year the "ClangBuiltLinux" effort has continued maturing with more Linux kernel code issues resolved to improve the portability across compilers. The industry interest has been around using Clang to build the Linux kernel for reasons including ensuring better code portability / testing, making use of various LLVM/Clang functionality not offered currently by GCC, some vendors using Clang as their preferred code compiler for licensing or other reasons, and in the case of Google they have already been using Clang to build their Linux kernel for a while and have been working to upstream more of the support.

WordPress Plugins

Welcome back to WordPress 101 series. In this 4th part of the series, we’ll learn about WordPress plugins, the biggest reason behind WordPress’s massive usage on the Internet.

From creating a simple blog to launching an e-commerce store, WordPress does it all very well. It solves some of the most frustrating problems when starting a new online business.

Any business needs improvements. One may start a business website with a few products in the store. As the store sells more products, the website needs to be upgraded for better customer satisfaction. From launching a new customer forum to an entire professional customer support system, everything is extremely easy in WordPress.

Mike Taylor: Obsolete RFCs and obsolete Cookie Path checking comments

The other day I was reading Firefox’s CookieService.cpp to figure out how Firefox determines its maximum cookie size (more on that one day, maybe) when the following comment (from 2002, according to blame) caught my eye:

The following test is part of the RFC2109 spec. Loosely speaking, it says that a site cannot set a cookie for a path that it is not on. See bug 155083. However this patch broke several sites -- nordea (bug 155768) and citibank (bug 156725). So this test has been disabled, unless we can evangelize these sites.
Note 1: Anything having to do with broken websites is wont to catch my attention, especially olde bugs (let’s face it, in 2002 the internet was basically the High Middle Ages. Like yeah, we were killing it with the technological innovation on top of windmills and we’re getting pretty good at farming and what not, but it’s still the Middle Ages compared to today and kind of sucked).

Note 2: The two sites referenced in the Firefox comment are banks (see 155768 and 156725). And one of the axioms of web compatibility is that if you break a bank with some cool new API or non-security bug fix, game over, it’s getting reverted. And I’m pretty sure you can’t legally create test accounts for banks to run tests against and Silk Road got taken down by the feds.

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® ECharts™ as a Top-Level Project : The Apache Software Foundation Blog

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® ECharts™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache ECharts is an intuitive, interactive, and powerful charting and visualization library ideally suited for commercial-grade presentations. The project originated in 2013 at Baidu and entered the Apache Incubator in January 2018.

[...]

The project has recently released ECharts 5, which provides rendering ability for tens of millions of data points, and supports accessibility requirements in compliance with W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (WAI-ARIA) standards.

Building on EChart’s core features, ECharts 5 makes it even easier for developers to tell the story behind the data through 15 new features and improvements in story-telling and data expression, optimized visualization and responsive design, interaction and performance enhancement, developer experience, internationalization, and more.

Arduino Blog » eMBee ONE turns an Arduino and an Altoids tin into an ’80s-style pocket computer

Matthew Begg wanted a pocket computer that had some of the charm of his 1980s vintage Casio FX-730P, so he decided to build his own.

His prototype device uses an Arduino Nano to boot into BASIC, and features a 1.54″ OLED display as well as a PCB-based QWERTY keyboard. Power is provided via a pair of AAA batteries, along with a boost converter. Most notably, however, the entire thing is meant to fit inside of an Altoids tin.

ESP8266 board with 24-pin ATX connector drives RGB LED strips

“Adding Open Hardware to Open Software for a More Equitable IoT” talk at FOSDEM 2021 discussed the importance of open-source hardware and software for IoT devices, notably to avoid getting a brick after the cloud service is suddenly terminated.

Adrian McEwen then specifically talked about his “My Baby’s Got LED” ESP8266 open-source hardware board powered by… a USB charger? nope. A battery? You’ve got to be kidding. Instead, the ESP8266 board is equipped with an ATX connector taking a standard power supply found in PC towers and desktops.

How to use Red Hat Insights to maintain your Linux systems

Red Hat Insights is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product that helps administrators report on applicable errata and known configuration issues as well as proactively identify security issues. Insights makes you aware of potential service-impacting problems before they happen, letting you plan how to address them before there is an issue that might affect production. Access to Red Hat Insights is included with every Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscription, so there is nothing extra to buy. This article covers the basics of how to register with Red Hat Insights, how to use it, and a couple of examples to demonstrate its remediation capabilities.

Reducing the scope of software.opensuse.org

We have some exciting news to share regarding the consolidation of our web pages.

[...]

Both sites were offering similar functionality for downloading install media. Both sites had to be updated with every Alpha, Beta, or changes to media descriptions. The new reduced scope of software-o-o will be purely browsing of available software. The scope of get-o-o won’t change. It will be media downloads and pointers to relevant documentation such as installation or upgrade instructions. We believe that these changes will help to keep it small and simple.

We’re happy to reduce duplication of efforts while not introducing further fragmentation as get.opensuse.org has been around for quite some time already.

Failbetter Games launched a Kickstarter for Mask of the Rose: a Fallen London romance | GamingOnLinux

Mask of the Rose: a Fallen London romance is an upcoming romantic visual novel set in the same universe as Fallen London, Sunless Sea, and Sunless Skies. Considering their history you know it's going to be good, with deep writing and probably plenty of really weird characters to meet.

"Mask of the Rose begins in 1862, just months after London was stolen by bats and relocated to the Neath: a vast cavern far below the earth. Down here, the sun doesn't shine, and Parliament has sunk into the Thames. Queen Victoria never emerges from her palace. Cats spy on their owners and whisper their secrets abroad. And it's rapidly becoming clear that London isn't going to be returning to the Surface any time soon…"