today's leftovers
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Escape to Freedom - Mandarin
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Escape to Freedom - Spanish
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Escape to Freedom now also available in Mandarin and Spanish
"Escape to Freedom" is a new animated video from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), giving an introduction to the concepts behind software freedom: both what we gain by having it, and what rights are at stake. We now have the video available in Mandarin and Spanish language tracks.
Free software advocacy is a worldwide endeavor. We therefore ask free software supporters for their help in translating our videos. The more languages we make our resources available in, the further we spread the philosophy of software freedom. Our newest video Escape to Freedom was announced last month and -- thanks to our awesome translator volunteers -- has already been translated into Spanish (multiple dialects), Chinese, and French. As of this writing, subtitles are available in those languages and first versions for four other languages are awaiting review by a native speaker in their respective languages: Persian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and Italian.
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Fostering connections at Open Source Summit Latin America
A magnet for open source supporters, the very first edition of Open Source Summit Latin America is opening its virtual doors to a plethora of speakers and attendees alike. Collabora is proudly sponsoring this wide offering of events that will captivate a diverse audience from developers to community leaders. This new annual conference strives to further hold a space for development and growth for all things open source in Latin America.
This jam-packed two day event takes place entirely online from August 23 to 24 and boasts a heavy contribution from the Collabora crew. Participants will have the opportunity to catch 5 different talks from one of our teammates that range from Meson build system applications to remote team connection. Four of the talks will be in English and one talk given by Daniel Almeida will be in Portuguese. This multilingual gathering is sure to capture the accessible nature of open source.
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The new USB Rubber Ducky is more dangerous than ever
Already, previous versions of the Rubber Ducky could carry out attacks like creating a fake Windows pop-up box to harvest a user’s login credentials or causing Chrome to send all saved passwords to an attacker’s webserver. But these attacks had to be carefully crafted for specific operating systems and software versions and lacked the flexibility to work across platforms.
The newest Rubber Ducky aims to overcome these limitations. It ships with a major upgrade to the DuckyScript programming language, which is used to create the commands that the Rubber Ducky will enter into a target machine. While previous versions were mostly limited to writing keystroke sequences, DuckyScript 3.0 is a feature-rich language, letting users write functions, store variables, and use logic flow controls (i.e., if this... then that).
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Dinobabies latest: IBM settles with widow of exec who killed himself after layoff
IBM has settled the age-discrimination case brought against it by the widow of a sales executives who took his own life after being laid off.
Denise Lohnn and Big Blue reached a tentative agreement on March 31, and US District Judge Lewis Liman stayed the case pending a decision on whether sensitive documents at the heart of the legal battle would be made public. On Monday, the court dismissed the case as settled.
That settlement was, funnily enough, brokered about a month after the unsealing of partially redacted internal IBM communications disparaging older Big Blue employees as "Dinobabies" and calling for their extinction at the company [PDF].
Another document [PDF] discussed IBM's "dated maternal workforce" and called for that to change. It also called for IBM to "shift headcount mix towards greater percent of early professional hires."
The emergence of those court filings in February prompted IBM's chief human resources Officer Nickle LaMoreaux to deny that IBM has systematically made an effort to oust older employees, as numerous lawsuits have claimed.
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For developers, too many meetings, too little 'focus' time
Clockwise’s data is gathered from 1.5 million meetings tracked by its platform over the course of 12 months up to May 2022, providing an overview of work practices by 80,000 developers at 5,000 companies. It shows that the average software engineer spends 10.9 hours per week in meetings, with 19.6 hours of “focus” time – defined as two or more hours free to concentrate on work.
The remaining six hours are classed as “fragmented”, which refers to the schedule gaps between meetings that provide little opportunity to settle back into completing a task. Separate research has shown that it can take around 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption, and meetings can often be the cause of context switching that distracts workers from more productive work.
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Ransomware attacks on rise, Finserv Sector shows high resilience with layered defences
According to some reports, there has been an alarming rise in ransomware breaches globally, including India. The continued explosion of connected devices and widespread digitisation in multiple sectors has increased the likelihood of cyberattacks, especially ransomware.
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When Efforts to Contain a Data Breach Backfire
Earlier this month, the administrator of the cybercrime forum Breached received a cease-and-desist letter from a cybersecurity firm. The missive alleged that an auction on the site for data stolen from 10 million customers of Mexico’s second-largest bank was fake news and harming the bank’s reputation. The administrator responded to this empty threat by purchasing the stolen banking data and leaking it on the forum for everyone to download.