[PCLinuxOS] Screenshot Showcase

Bandwidth limiting on OpenBSD 6.8

I will explain how to limit bandwidth on OpenBSD using its firewall PF (Packet Filter) queuing capability. It is a very powerful feature but it may be hard to understand at first. What is very important to understand is that it's technically not possible to limit the bandwidth of the whole system, because once data is getting on your network interface, it's already there and got by your router, what is possible is to limit the upload rate to cap the download rate.

OpenBSD pf.conf man page about queuing

Plamo 7.3 リリース

Kirigami Application for Recording, Alarms and Timers, RSS and Much More!

Krita Join the new Development Fund!

This month, we’re campaigning for our brand-new Development Fund! Based on Blender’s development fund code, we now have an updated donation system where everyone can manage their own subscriptions.

Prometheus Q&A: How the Kubernetes monitoring tool is evolving

Prometheus is a time-series event monitoring tool for cloud-native, containerized environments -- particularly for use in Kubernetes ecosystems. In fact, because both are based on tools designed for internal use at Google, Prometheus inherently complements Kubernetes and integrates with the orchestration platform.

But Prometheus has also proven to be complicated to use in the past, with vendors building integrations to abstract the tool's complexities away for their users. However, that might be changing, as the group overseeing the open source project has spent the past year taking deliberate steps to address some of the tool's shortcomings and reach a broader audience.

[...]

Hartmann: Yes, this is something we have called experimental, but it's been stable for two or three years.

We attached a version number to it; we wrote a specification; we wrote the test suite. Now we can start to break it up again, as we have the stable [code] base everyone can test against. Other [ways] we treat the 'experimental' differently: We introduced feature flags … but it's not enabled by default. And it [still] might change -- we [the Prometheus team] will not lock ourselves down to treat everything … experimental as stable forevermore. By doing this, we can do things [we] didn't even consider.

At the last Prometheus dev summit, … We decided to accept PromQL, which is the language to [manage] all Prometheus data in the complete Kubernetes ecosystem.

MariaDB’s cloud database-as-a-service SkySQL gets an availability and scalability boost

MariaDB Corp., the company behind the popular open-source MariaDB database, today announced a major update to its cloud offering today with expanded support for Amazon Web Services Inc. deployments.

It’s also making its cloud database more scalable, with enhancements the company says should ensure higher availability too.

Detroit’s digital divide reminds us how far America has to go for internet equity

It’s been 13 months since the global COVID-19 pandemic hit America. The result, nationwide shutdowns and a country mourning the loss of more than 550K Americans that have died due to COVID-19.

For many upper and middle-class Americans, the ever-extending quarantine has meant a slight adaptation, or even a respite, from past routines as they largely shifted to working from home. It has meant signing on to their laptops every day at home while they invested in ring lights and headphones for the optimal Zoom experience. For those with kids, simultaneously juggling work and their children’s Zoom classes has created a new set of challenges to maintain some semblance of normalcy.

But for millions of others, the pandemic has meant additional uncertainty. Tens of millions of adults remain out of work. Minority communities and urban centers have been disproportionately affected by not only unemployment, sickness and death, but another systematic inequity: lack of high-speed internet access. It has prohibited tens of thousands of students, and their parents, from making the transition from classrooms and workplaces to video-everything.

In other words, the digital divide has become a chasm.

Beta testers for MyGNUHealth Personal Health Record

I am very happy to announce that the documentation for MyGNUHealth beta is now online.
We would love beta testers both in the desktop (KDE Plasma) and in the PinePhone, so if everything goes well, shortly we will be able to release the first stable release.
We would like to count with **translators** of the documentation and the application itself. We are working with the KDE community in these areas.

LFCA: Learn Cloud Costs and Budgeting – Part 16

Over the years, there has been an exponential adoption of Cloud services as organizations seek to tap into the numerous benefits offered by the Cloud to streamline their businesses. Most businesses have either integrated their on-premise infrastructure with the Cloud or shifted their core services to the cloud altogether.

'Millions' of Dell PCs will grant malware, rogue users admin-level access if asked nicely

This is made possible by five security vulnerabilities in Dell's dbutil_2_3.sys driver, which it bundles with its PCs. These are grouped under the label CVE 2021-21551, and they can be abused to crash systems, steal information, and escalate privileges to take total control. These programming blunders can only be exploited by applications already running on a machine, or a logged-in user.

The End of AMP

I am hopeful that 2021 will be the beginning of the end for two of my least favorite things – the pandemic and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

For the past few months, I’ve been focusing on Google’s Page Experience update due to launch in May and what it means for publishers. The largest and most talked-about item in the update is Google announcing that sites with passing core web vitals will receive a ranking boost on mobile. However, there is another important item in the update – the end of special treatment for AMP pages.

Telecom reform in Austria: consumers must benefit from Router Freedom

Austria is reforming its telecommunications law to incorporate the new European directives on electronic communications. The Austrian government has now an unique opportunity to leverage router freedom at the legislative level to protect consumers and the market.

It should go without saying that anyone should be able to freely choose and use a router and modem of their choice for Internet connection, like one does with smartphones and other devices. Router Freedom refers to the right that consumers of any Internet Service Provider (ISP) have to choose and use a private modem and router instead of equipment supplied by the ISP. This right is consolidated in the EU by the Net Neutrality Regulation. However, as part of a major reform of the telecommunications sector in Europe (the EECC directive), new rules are being introduced that may have a negative impact on Router Freedom, because they affect the status of routers being considered as terminal equipment.

Like other European countries Austria is in a process of implementing the reform of the telecom sector. The Austrian government has proposed the draft (German) of the new Telecommunications Act (TKG) with provisions affecting the ability consumers have to use their own device to connect to the Internet. Austria has with this reform an unique opportunity to leverage consumers' rights by guaranteeing Router Freedom on the legislative level, fostering an open market.

‘I can’t fix my tractor’: Senator Tester calls on the FTC to step up on Right to Repair

In the next few days, the FTC is expected to release the results of an investigation into the anticompetitive practices manufacturers use to block repair. U.S. PIRG and other Right to Repair advocates hope that this report will acknowledge the need to enforce existing laws and create regulations that empower repair markets. If comments by commissioners Wilson and Chopra are any indication, we expect the FTC report to bear good news for our Right to Repair.

Data quality for AI [Ed: IBM still trying to use overhyped buzzwords to compensate for its collapse as a company]

If we were in a movie on AI, the main character of our story would be a data scientist – let’s call her Ria. Ria works in a multinational company, and one Monday morning she receives a request for her help on a project to build an AI model. The project is a high-visibility project and has the possibility of large revenue savings for the company if Ria and her team can build an AI model to solve the problem. Ria is excited and immediately starts asking for data access so that she and her team can get started on the project. Ria and her team analyze the data to find data quality issues, clean the data, build features, and build a model. After several months, Ria and her team are struggling to build a high-accuracy model. With every iteration, they discover more data quality issues, go back to the design table to brainstorm the issue, figure out ways to fix it, and write the code for data remediation. After weeks and months effort, Ria believes that the whole project would have been more streamlined if they had gotten a report on the data quality when they had gotten the data at the beginning. Does this sound familiar?

Many studies have shown that data preparation is one of the most time-consuming pieces of the machine learning lifecycle. One reason is that the data issues are discovered in a trial and error fashion, new code must be written for every issue found, and someone must keep a manual log of all of the changes applied to the data so that there is a lineage of how the data was changed over the course of building a machine learning pipeline. However, this information, unless explicitly recorded, might not be available.

Can you mine Doge on your Chromebook?

Ah, cryptocurrency. The dream of a digital asset that is based not on paper money backed by gold or silver but built on secure transactions and a decentralized network that is open to all. Well, it’s a lot more complicated than that and in the year 2021, there are more cryptocurrencies than any sane person can keep track of. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Bitcoin which is widely considered the first-every cryptocurrency and also birthed the blockchain technology behind most cryptocurrencies. I’ll spare you the long, drawn-out details of how it works because honestly, I’m really not that well-versed in the technology myself. To dumb it down, many cryptocurrencies are built on blockchain tech that utilizes various types of computers and networks to confirm digital transactions. In the process, digital coin, or crypto, is mined as a reward to the miners confirming the transactions. These are called mining rewards. Again, there’s way more to it than that but you can go to Wikipedia or a million other sites to find out more details on how it all works.