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Really Simple Syndication - SolutionsWatch
#SolutionsWatch isn’t just about the Big Ideas. It’s also about the simple tricks, tips and techniques that we can use to regain power over our lives and help create the world we want. Today, James explores one very simple and tragically under-appreciated tool: Really Simple Syndication.
Wine 6.3 Is Released
The latest development-release of the popular Windows compatibility layer WINE has better WinRT support in the Wine Interface Definition Language (WIDL), better debugger support in the NT syscall interface, the WineGStreamer library converted to a Portable Executable (PE) and 24 game and application specific bug-fixes.
GNU Inetutils 2.0 Is Released
The GNU Project is "pleased" to announce Inetutils 2.0. This is the first release of the GNU implementations of many commonly used Internet utilities such as ping, ftp, hostname, ifconfig and telnet in six years.
From Creativity to Exclusivity: The German Government's Bad Deal for Article 17
The implementation process of Article 17 (formerly Article 13) of the controversial [European] Copyright Directive into national laws is in full swing, and it does not look good for users' rights and freedoms.
Building massive virtual communities in Matrix
Matthew, the open source lead for the Matrix project, held a 48 minutes long lecture on Matrix, a open protocol communications system with encrypted chat, chatrooms and more, at FOSDEM 2021. The video is worth watching if you are curious to learn how Matrix works, what their future plans are for shared spaces and other features, and the practical use-cases it can solve for you and your organization.
Tor Browser 10.0.12 Is Released
The latest version of the Tor projects web browser bundle has their re-branded Mozilla Firefox browser updated to version 78.8.0esr, the NoScript for it updated to version 11.2.2 and the Tor client is updated to version 0.4.5.6. Firefox 78.8.0esr contains three high impact security fixes so Tor users who use this bundle should upgrade.
The Benefits Of Code Review For The Reviewer
Code Review is an essential part of the process of publishing code. We often talk about the benefits of code review for projects and for people writing the code. I want to talk about the benefits for the person actually reviewing the code.
Wine Launcher 1.4.46 Is Released
The Russians are working hard on a Wine front-end called Wine Launcher, written for Node.JS, that allows you to launch Windows games in a Wine sandbox by clicking on a nice graphical list of games and other software. The latest version supports Pipewire, VK3D3 using Proton, Winetricks and Squashfs compressed snapshots.
The Word Master is Not Problematic in Most Contexts and Its Origin Hasn’t a Connection to Slavery
Slavery is to the word “master” mostly disconnected; it might, however, be closely connected in the minds of racists or the agenda of highly racist corporations (profiting from racism) that look for ways to distract from their racism
Firefox 86 Is Released With Drastically Improved WebGL Performance
"Total Cookie Protection" if "Strict Mode" is enabled, multiple videos in picture-in-picture mode, 12 security fixes and vastly improved WebGL performance on Linux machines with a dedicated GPU are among the highlights in Mozilla Firefox 86.
Brave Web Browser 1.20.108 Is Released With Fix For Major Security Flaw In Private Tor Windows
Several recent version of the Brave Web Browser have had a very unfortunate DNS-leak flaw in the "private" Tor-based browsing feature. The latest version 1.20.208 has a new version of the Chromium core it is based on (88.0.4324.182), a fix for DNS leaks in supposedly "private" web browser windows and two fixes specific to macOS. You should upgrade if you rely on Brave for "private" web browsing or use it to access Tor onion sites.
Genius Mathematics Tool 1.0.26 Is Released
Genius is a fully featured calculator somewhat similar to programs like Matlab and Octave. It is written by math professor Jiří Lebl with mathematicians in mind. The latest version supports evaluations in the range boxes in the plotting window and it has numerous minor fixes under the hood.
The Linux Foundation and IBM Announce Seven New Open Source Surveillance Projects to "Promote Racial Justice"
A digital content surveillance system designed to flag news articles, headlines, blogs and programming code with by-them forbidden language and a mobile application for recording "potentially racially charged incidents to help enable transparency" are the first two of seven new software projects hosted by the Linux Foundation in collaboration with IBM, RedHat and American Airlines.
Mesa 21.0.0-rc5 Is Released
The Mesa 21 release-cycle got derailed after a strong rc4 on February 5th. It is now back on track with what will likely be the last release-candidate before the final Mesa 21.0 release. Mesa 21 will offer a ton of new features to AMD graphics card users, many performance improvements for Intel iGPUs and there's also early pieces of code for ray-tracing on Intels upcoming Xe HPG gaming GPUs.
NVidia Cripples Proprietary Graphics Driver In Order To Sell Specialized Crypto-Mining Cards
The American technology giant Nvidia has announced that their closed-source graphics driver now features a intentional digital restrictions management (DRM) bug that cripples performance on certain specific workloads such as mining digital Ethereum (ETH) currency. Nvidia story, which does not hold water, is that they are doing this to ensure retail-availability of their RTX 3060 graphics card.
Cine-encoder 3.1 Is Released
cine-encoder is a handy tool for quickly converting between video formats. It support for preserving HDR meta-data and hardware encoding on Nvidia, and only Nvidia, graphics cards. The latest version has a "improved" design, bug-fixes and support for drag and drop.
Linux 5.11 Supports Syscall User Dispatch Which Could Allow More Windows Games With DRM To Run Under Wine In The Future
Many Windows games use direct system calls in their implementation of DRM and anti-cheat features. This is a problem because Windows API re-implementations like Wine do not get to see these syscalls and the Linux kernel has no idea what to do with them. The newly released Linux 5.11 kernel has a solution.
Linux Has Landed On Mars
NASA has landed a new rover called Perseverance on Mars. It has it's own miniature helicopter named Ingenuity that can take off, navigate, and land on Mars without human intervention. Ingenuity runs a custom Linux-based operating system, Linux has now reached Mars.
Krita Announces Four Seasons of Leon and Kiki Drawing Contest
The free software drawing program project Krita has announced a drawing contest. If you are good at drawing then you can draw a picture with Kiki and Leon and win a drawing tablet from Huion, who is sponsoring the contest. Huion does not offer any official GNU/Linux support for their tablets.
Firefox 85 Is Released With Dismal Out-Of-The-Box Performance
Firefox 85 partitions network connections and caches in order to further prevent cross-site tracking and "supercookies", it has fixes for 5 "high" and 6 "medium" impact security issues and support for Adobe Flash is dropped. Graphical performance is absolutely horrible out of the box, but it can be tweaked to perform decently using the hidden about:support settings page.
Patently Obvious: The Year The Lawyers Came To FOSS
The GNOME foundation was sued by Rothschild Patent Imaging on August 28th, 2019. The lawsuit alleged that the GNOME Shotwell photo manager was infringing on Rothschild patents. The GNOME foundation eventually settled with the Rothschilds in March 2020. Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the GNOME foundation, went through the entire process in a 25 minute presentation at the Seattle GNU/Linux conference this weekend.
FreeBSD Fridays: Introduction to RISC-V on FreeBSD
Video: Join Mitchell Horne as he discusses the past, present, and future of FreeBSD’s support for the RISC-V CPU architecture. x86-64 is the most well-supported platform FreeBSD runs on. RISC-V support is not yet complete in all areas, but it is rapidly getting here.
AMD Launches 3 High-End RX 6000-Series GPUs For 4k Gaming
AMD has announced 3 high-end graphics cards based on the RDNA2 architecture. Their new mid-range RX 6800 card, comparable to a Nvidia 2080ti, will cost $579 when it becomes available on November 18th. AMDs new RX 6900 XT flagship GPU will cost a whopping $999 when it launches on December 8th.
Prepare To Re-Format If You Are Using An Older XFS Filesystem
Linux 5.10 brings several new features to the XFS filesystem. It solves the year 2038 problem, it supports metadata checksumming and it has better metadata verification. There's also a new configuration option: CONFIG_XFS_SUPPORT_V4. Older XFS filesystems using the v4 layout are now deprecated and there is no upgrade path beyond "backup and re-format". The Linux kernel will support older XFS v4 filesystems by default until 2025 and optional support will remain available until 2030.
Linux Is Dropping WiMAX Support
It's no loss. There is a reason why you have probably never seen a WiMAX device or heard of it, WiMAX was a wireless last-mile Internet solution mostly used in a few rural areas in a limited number of countries between 2005 and 2010. There is very little use for it today so it is almost natural that Linux is phasing out support for WiMAX and the one WiMAX device it supports.
Fedora 33 Is Released
Fedora 33 comes with GNOME 3.38, LLVM 11, Python 3.9, Mesa 20.2 and Linux 5.8. The default file system is btrfs on the workstation edition and the desktop spins while the server editions uses XFS. Spins with GNOME (the default workstation edition), KDE Plasma, LXQt, Cinnamon and Xfce are available.
AMD Announces Record High Q3 2020 Profits And $35 Billion Deal To Buy Xilinx
AMD announced their Q3 2020 quarterly results early due to an all-stock acquisition of the American semiconductor company Xilinx for $35 billion. AMD pulled in $2.8 billion in revenue in Q3 2020, up 58% compared to Q3 2019. Their quarterly earnings were even more impressive. Q3 2020 was AMD's best quarter in history in terms of both revenue and earnings.
Corbett Report: YouTube Is Purging Again
YouTube has been removing small independent content creators from its platform with regular purges since 2016. YouTube did another big purge this week. Independent content creators who are only on YouTube should take notice and get a presence on alternative platforms. Investigate journalist James Corbett of the Corbett Report is prepared to get purged from YouTube. His videos are available on his own self-hosted website and a number of other video platforms. Most independent creators are not even though YouTube has been suppressing and removing independent creators in favor of large corporate media outlets for nearly half a decade.
Node.js 15.0 Is Released
Support for the QUIC protocol, a new AbortController class, a updated N-API with new methods for managing ArrayBuffers, V8 updated to version 8.6 and NPM updated to version 7.0 are among the highlights in the latest Node.js framework for creating JavaScript-based network services like web servers, chat servers and all kinds of real-time applications.
Recording Industry Association of America Gets Youtube-dl Kicked Off GitHub
Microsoft GitHub has removed all traces of the very useful youtube-dl utility for downloading videos from YouTube and other websites, including this one, following a questionable DMCA request from the Recording Industry Association of America.