Tux Machines

Do you waddle the waddle?

Other Sites

LinuxGizmos.com

HackerBox 0115 Wispier Upgrades Wardriving with Dual-Band Wi-Fi and GPS

HackerBox is a monthly subscription service offering development kits targeted at hobbyists, students, and electronics enthusiasts. HackerBox 0115, titled “Wispier,” is a follow-up to the earlier Wispy kit (HackerBox 0089). This latest version expands the wardriving platform with 5 GHz Wi-Fi scanning, updated firmware, improved form factor, and GPS-based geolocation.

ESPHome Updates Framework and Expands Chip Support in 2025.6.0 Release

The June 2025 release of ESPHome (2025.6.0) introduces several technical updates, including a major framework upgrade, new device support, and foundational changes to ensure future compatibility and performance.

ASUS Broadens Its 3.5″ SBC Lineup with New Intel Core Ultra Models

ASUS IoT has introduced two new 3.5-inch single board computers, the C5153ES-IM-AA and C7156ES-IM-AA, both based on Intel Core Ultra processors. According to ASUS, these boards are designed for embedded and industrial use cases, offering high performance, wide input voltage support from 9 to 36 volts, and multiple expansion options.

Bela Upgrades Embedded DSP Platforms with PocketBeagle 2 Support and New Web IDE

Bela.io has unveiled the Gem Stereo and Gem Multi, two new open-source boards that expand PocketBeagle 2 into a real-time digital signal processing platform. Designed for audio and sensor applications, the boards target creative, educational, and research projects requiring low-latency performance and flexible I/O.

9to5Linux

Darktable 5.2 Open-Source RAW Image Editor Released with New Features

Highlights of Darktable 5.2 include support for viewing snapshots side by side with the current image, a new “Raster Mask Import” module, and a new multi-preset export section that allows you to export selected images with multiple presets in a single run.

Calibre 8.5 Open-Source E-Book Manager Improves the Kobo Driver

Calibre 8.5 is here one and a half months after Calibre 8.4 with an updated Kobo driver that now includes an option to change how your Kobo e-book reader displays series numbers using a template and support for the latest Tolino firmware.

Ubuntu Buzz !

Sections in LaTeX with Gummi Editor

After successfully creating a sample LaTeX document in the previous tutorial, now we will try to understand the document structure in LaTeX with our Gummi Editor. We will learn, with pictures and examples, about sections (or similar to "headings" according to LibreOffice Writer) and basically how a document is organized. Now let's start our exercise!  

Disempowering Technologies: How Google and Microsoft Harm Universities

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 29, 2022

Guest post by Dr. Andy Farnell

Previously in this mini-series: UK Education Under Attack From Microsoft and Google

To avoid parroting the earlier article I'll more quickly summarise these areas and then move to speak about changes.

Disempowering technologies take away legitimate control from their operator. For example, not being able to stop a Windows upgrade at a critical moment. I've quit counting the classroom hours lost to inefficient and dysfunctional Microsoft products that ran amok out of my control while students stared out the window.

A graduate of mine started work on an NHS support team for IT and security. I made a joke about Windows running an update during a life or death moment in the emergency ward. He looked at me with deadly seriousness, to say "you think that doesn't happen?"

Entitled seizure of the owner’s operational sovereignty is one aspect of disempowerment. Another is discontinuation. The sudden removal of support for a product one has placed at the centre of one's workflow can be devastating. Google notoriously axe services in their prime of life. Weep at the headstones in the Google Graveyard.

Students education is suddenly "not supported". They experience risks from software with poor long-term stability - something large corporations seem unable to deliver. By contrast my go-to editor and production suite Emacs is almost 50 years old.

Dehumanising devices that silence discourse operate at the mundane level of issue ticketing and "no-reply emails". But more generally, dehumanising technology ignores or minimises individual identity. It imposes uniformity, devalues interpersonal relations and empathy.

When unaccountable algorithms exclude people from services - because their behaviour is deemed "suspicious" - it is not the validity of choices in question, rather the very conceit of abdicating responsibility to machines in order to make an administrator's job more "convenient".

So-called "AI" systems in this context are undisciplined junkyard dogs whose owners are too afraid to chain them. Is it even debatable that anyone deploying algorithms ought to face personal responsibility for harms they cause, as they would for a dog that bites?

In other dehumanising ways, enforced speech or identity is as problematic as censorship or disavowal. So technology fails equally as a drop-down form forcing an approved gender pronoun, or as automatic "correction" of messages to enforce a corporate "speech code". Sorry computer, but you do not get to "correct" what I am.

Systems of exclusion proliferate on university campuses, which are often seen as private experimental testing-grounds for "progressive" tech. Software developers can be cavalier, over-familiar and folksy in their presumptions. A growing arrogance is that everyone will choose, or be forced to switch to their system. Yet if they are anything universities ought to be a cradle of possibility, innovation and difference. They are supposed to be the place where the next generation of pioneers will grow and go on to overturn the status-quo.

That fragile creativity and diversity evaporates the moment anyone assumes students carry a smartphone, or a contactless payment card for the "cashless canteen". Assumptions flatten possibility. Instruments of exclusion always begin as "opportunity". Callous "progressives" insist that students "have a choice" while silently transforming that choice into assumptions, and then assumptions into mandates.

Destroying "inefficient" modes of interaction, like cash and library cards that have served us for centuries, gives administrators permission to lock their hungry students out of the refectory and library in the name of "convenience". They are aided by interloping tech monopolies who can now limit access to educational services when administrators set up "single-sign-in" via Facebook, Microsoft, Google or Linked-In accounts. Allowing these private companies to become arbiters of identity and access is cultural suicide.

Systems of extraction and rent-seeking are also flourishing in education. Whether that's Turnitin feasting on the copy-rights of student essays, or Google tracking and monitoring attention via "approved" browsers, then serving targeted advertising. Students are now the product, not the customers of campus life.

The more we automate our student's experience the more brutal it gets. Systems of coercion attached to UKVI Tier-4 attendance monitoring seem more like the fate of electronically tagged prisoners on parole. How anyone can learn in that environment of anxiety, where a plane to Rwanda awaits anyone who misses a lecture, is hard to fathom 1.

Gaslighting and discombobulation is psychological warfare in which conflicting and deliberately non-sequitur messages are used to sap morale, undermine confidence and sow feelings of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

That could hardly be a more fitting description of university administrators and ICT services whose constant mixed messages and contradictory policies disrupt teaching and learning.

We must inform all students by email - except where that violates the "bulk mail" or "appropriate use" policies. Staff should be readily available to students, except where it suits ICT to disable mail forwarding. We are to maintain inclusive and open research opportunities, except where blunt web censorship based on common keywords thwarts researchers of inconvenient subjects like terrorism, rape, hacking or even birth control.

Time-wasting technologies are those that force preformative make-work and bullshitting activities. They offer what Richard Stallman calls "digital disservices". For example; copying data, row by row, from one spreadsheet to another might be justified in an air-gapped top-secret facility. It is unacceptable where administrators, following a brain-dead "policy", have stupidly disabled copying via some dreadful Microsoft feelgood security "feature". This is the kind of poorly thought out "fine grained" drudge-making security that Microsoft systems seem to celebrate and the kind of features that power-hungry, controlling bosses get moist over. It is anti-work. This lack of trust is grossly insulting to workers toiling on mundane admin work under such low security stakes.

Technologies that distract are pernicious in education. Nothing saps learning more than tussling for the attention of students and staff as they try to work. Yet my university-approved Microsoft Office365 running on a Google Chrome browser seems designed to arrest my focus and frustrate all attempts to concentrate. Advertisements and corporate spam have no place in my teaching workflow, so I refuse to use these tools which are unfit for purpose.

Finally, only the military is guilty of more gratuitous waste than academia. To see garbage skips filled to the brim with "obsolete" computers, because they will not run Windows 11 is heartbreaking. Crippled at the BIOS level, they are designated as e-waste due to the inability of IT staff to use a simple screwdriver to remove hard-drives containing potential PII. Meanwhile students beg me for a Raspberry Pi because they cannot afford the extra hardware needed for their studies.

Footnotes:

1

Except for those overseas students who might appreciate a free flight back home for Christmas.

Other Recent Tux Machines' Posts

Tux Machines and Prevailing in Court [original]
Microsofters spent a fortune in vain
Kernel News and Security Lapses, Patches
Linux related
Ubuntu 24.10 Support Ends July 10th – Upgrade Soon
Time is nearly up on Ubuntu 24.10 ‘Oracular Oriole’, which goes End of Life (EOL) on July 10, 2025
TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 Linux Laptop Unveiled with AMD Ryzen AI 300
TUXEDO Computers unveiled today the 10th generation (Gen10) of the TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Linux-powered laptop as a portable business companion powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300.
With Version 9.0 Release, ONLYOFFICE Becomes an Even Better Choice for Linux Users
ONLYOFFICE is getting better with each release
 
GNU/Linux and Hardware Leftovers
mostly GNU/Linux picks
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
FOSS picks
Standards: Open Document Format (ODF), DER, miniDVD
ODF and more
Security Leftovers
patches, breaches, and more
This Week in GNOME and GNOME Foundation Report
GNOME outlines
Web Browsers/Web Software Leftovers
mostly Web related
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
FOSS picks
Open Hardware/Modding: ESP32, Raspberry Pi, and More
Hardware leftovers
today's howtos
Instructionals/Technical picks
Security Leftovers
many incidents and such
GNU/Linux Leftovers
and some FOSS
today's howtos
idroot and more
Audiocasts and New GNU/Linux Videos
Invidious mostly
Programming Leftovers
Development picks
Darktable 5.2 Open-Source RAW Image Editor Released with New Features
Darktable 5.2 has been released today as a new stable update to this powerful, open-source, free, and cross-platform photography workflow application and raw developer software.
Games: Proton 10.0-2, Kindergarten 3, and More
latest 10 from GamingOnLinux
Android Leftovers
One of the best RPGs of all time is coming to Android on August 5
Plasma 6.4 on Arch Linux Requires Manual Package Installation
Arch Linux Plasma 6.4 users still on X11 must install plasma-x11-session
Free and Open Source Software
Critter is a chess UCI engine
This Week in Plasma: Plasma 6.4 has arrived!
This week we released Plasma 6.4
Ready to ditch Windows? 'End of 10' makes converting your PC to Linux easier than ever
There's also a list of five reasons to upgrade your old computer to Linux, which are...
Grace Hopper to Boost Tumbleweed Armv9 Builds
Grace Hopper to Boost Tumbleweed Armv9 Builds
Security Leftovers
incidents mostly
Today in Techrights
Some of the latest articles
GNU/Linux Leftovers
stories on various aspects, some software
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
FOSS picks for today
Security Leftovers
Security picks for now
Open Hardware/Modding: Adafruit, RP2040, and More
Hardware projects
Steam OS as a Desktop, New Steam Games with Native GNU/Linux Clients, and More Steam
Steam picks
today's howtos
many howtos for now
today's leftovers
shows and more
Red Hat Focus on Buzzwords, Hype, and Products
Red Hat's latest
Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi, PocketBeagle, and More
Hardware news
Programming Leftovers
Development news
antiX Linux: A ‘Proudly Anti-Fascist’ Distro That’s ‘Suitable for Old and New Computers’
We find a Linux distro that runs on computers big and small—and centers its identity on an antifascist stance
Android Leftovers
Samsung’s Android XR Headset Scheduled for October Launch
Immich 1.135 Photo and Video Backup Adds iOS Home Screen Widgets
Immich 1.135 brings ~200 improvements, including iOS home screen widgets
Calibre 8.5 Open-Source E-Book Manager Improves the Kobo Driver
Calibre developer Kovid Goyal released Calibre 8.5 today as a new stable update to this open-source, free, and cross-platform e-book manager software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems.
Fwupd 2.0.12 Linux Firmware Updater Adds Support for HP Portable USB-C Hubs
Fwupd 2.0.12 has been released today as the twelfth maintenance update to the fwupd 2.0 series of this open-source Linux firmware update utility, adding support for more devices, new features, and bug fixes.
6 reasons I chose ZorinOS as the absolute best way to move from Windows to Linux
I am a Windows user through and through. However, I often dabble with Linux
Valve's Steam Deck kickstarted a movement that might actually bring us "the year of the Linux desktop"
The Steam Deck kicked off a revolution for handheld gaming PCs
Denmark’s Government Ditches Microsoft for Open Source
A part of the Danish government is phasing out the use of Microsoft products
Free and Open Source Software, and Review
This is free and open source software
Soplos Linux – desktop-oriented Linux distribution based on Debian
Sophos Linux is a Linux distribution based on Debian. It’s available in 2 editions: Soplos Linux Tyron and Soplos Linux Tyson
This Linux app makes sharing files to Android a breeze - here's how
I'm always on the lookout for apps to make it easier to work between Linux and Android
Games: SteamOS, GOG, Godot, and More
new articles from GamingOnLinux
Gemini Protocol Turns 6! [original]
today!
Today in Techrights
Some of the latest articles