This week’s 9to5Linux.com’s “Flatpak App of the Week” is the neat and handy Extension Manager utility developed by Matt Jakeman to make our lives easier when using the GNOME desktop environment.
Source: LXer – Flatpak App of the Week: Extension Manager – Browse and Install GNOME Shell Extensions
Monthly Archives: January 2022
Recommended Reading: The soccer insider who dominates the internet
Behind the curtain with soccer’s prophet of the deal
Rory Smith, The New York Times
NBA fans have Adrian Wojnarowski. Soccer fans have Fabrizio Romano. When transfer season kicks into high gear, Romano dominates the internet with his deluge of insider information. In fact, he’s probably tweeting right now. But at times, he has gone from being a reporter on the hot player swaps to being a participant in the proceedings.
‘Shang-Chi’ VFX team on animating dragons and why movies aren’t as colorful anymore
Jeremy Mathai, Slashfilm
Members of the Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings visual effects team discuss how every Marvel movie is unique (but also similar), how VFX companies are cast like actors and how color in movies has changed.
Searching for Susy Thunder
Claire L. Evans, The Verge
Susan Thunder worked in the dial-a-whatever scene of the late 1970s, developing an intimate knowledge of the Bell network for phone scams. “Her specialty was social engineering,” Evans writes as she went searching for “the great lost female hacker of the 1980s” who didn’t want to be found.
Source: Engadget – Recommended Reading: The soccer insider who dominates the internet
You Should Use Contact Paper Around Your Home
Though long-associated with lining drawers and shelves, contact paper has a lot more to offer. And if your only experience with it has been limited to clear (to cover your workbooks in school), white, and the range of pastel-colored patterns available in the ‘90s, you’re in for a surprise.
Source: LifeHacker – You Should Use Contact Paper Around Your Home
Ubisoft execs: “Gamers are always right”—yet they somehow “misunderstand” NFTs
Enlarge / This galaxy brain image is still working out Ubisoft’s apparent “piece-by-piece” puzzle explanation of its NFT plans. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
In the weeks since Ubisoft rolled out non-fungible tokens in one of its video games, critics—particularly those here at Ars Technica—have shot back with questions about their purpose. While Ars is still waiting for a formal response to our December questions, the closest we’re likely to get comes from a Thursday interview with Ubisoft executives that included a bold assertion that players’ “resistance” to NFTs is “based on misunderstanding.” (We hope Ubisoft isn’t saying that to anyone who has read Ars’ lengthy guide to NFTs.)
In the interview, conducted by Australian tech site Finder, two Ubisoft executives (Didier Genevois, head of Ubi’s blockchain team, and Nicolas Pouard, lead on Ubi’s “Quartz” and “Digits” NFT systems) fail to clarify how an online game’s NFT implementation differs on a gameplay basis from existing digital rights management (DRM) solutions, particularly those baked into storefronts like Steam and Ubisoft Connect.
When pressed directly on what benefit a player might expect from engaging with Ubisoft Digits, Pouard first said that “gamers don’t get what a digital secondary market can bring to them.” Eventually, Pouard answered with one potential benefit: “the opportunity to resell their items once they’re finished with them or they’re finished playing the game itself.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Ubisoft execs: “Gamers are always right”—yet they somehow “misunderstand” NFTs
'After Yang' explores the meaning of life through a broken android
In the film After Yang, a father goes to great lengths to save his daughter’s best friend. It just so happens this bestie is a humanoid robot, or technosapien, named Yang. He’s practically a member of the family, but at the end of the day, he’s basically an appliance. Can he be easily replaced, and what’s the value of his artificial life? Like a cross between Black Mirror and Spike Jonze’s Her, After Yang explores humanity and existence through the lens of technology, while director Kogonada (Columbus) crafts a vision of the future that feels truly distinct.
After a virtuoso opening sequence, where families compete in a virtual dance contest in their living rooms, Yang (Justin H. Min) malfunctions. He’s not just some robotic butler; he’s a culture technosapien meant to help Jake’s adoptive daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), learn about her Chinese heritage. Mika has a stronger relationship with Yang, who practically raised her. And for reasons that aren’t clear at the start, Jake is a bit disconnected from his family and struggling through a mid-life crisis. (Running a traditional tea shop in the future would do that to you.) Saving Yang is both an attempt to connect to Mika, and to appease his overworked wife Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), who’s concerned about her listless husband.
Stories around artificial beings and androids aren’t anything new — they stretch back to early Jewish legends of golems, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But these days, it feels as if it’s only a matter of time until we’re living alongside our own personal androids. Robotic vacuums are smarter and more affordable, we’re regularly shouting voice commands at our phones and smart appliances, and even Tesla claims it’s working on an AI-powered humanoid robot (though at this point, that’s basically just a marketing stunt). So it’s worth exploring how androids could affect our family lives, where they take on roles of childcare and companionship.
Jake’s journey to fix Yang isn’t much different than what we’d go through to get a computer or smartphone repaired today. He tries to contact the store he bought it from, but it’s no longer in business. Yang was also refurbished, which opens the door to surprising issues (something used electronics buyers are all too familiar with).
It turns out Yang had more than one previous owner, and he basically lived a long (and somewhat tragic) life. He was also an experimental model that could record small portions of memories, similar to the small bits of videos we see in Apple’s Live Photos. As Jake learns more about Yang, he realizes that he was a thinking being with a fully formed personality. He’s not just a helper bot following his programming, he was also endlessly curious about the world around him.
After Yang is a quiet film, filled with contemplative silences and Farrell’s forlorn eyes (not a bad thing, to be clear). Kogonada manages to build a world that feels dramatically different from our own, without the flashy holograms and special effects we see in lesser sci-fi films like the Ghost in the Shell remake. Everyone wears loose, robe-like outfits. There’s a strong Japanese influence throughout all of the environments, from the Muji-esque minimalism and organic materials in their homes, to natural wood and small gardens in self-driving cars. It’s a world far more advanced than ours — genetically optimized clones also appear — but it’s also in harmony with nature, like near-future sci-fi through the eyes of Hayao Miyazaki.
The fusion of the natural and man-made world mirrors the way an artificial being like Yang starts to become more human. It’s clear that he’s driven by some sort of artificial intelligence, but the film doesn’t say if his designers also managed to replicate a form of consciousness. Yang is programmed with facts about China, as well as language lessons for Mika, but he speaks more like a wise friend than a robotic teacher.
Like Blade Runner, it seems as if Yang is fully aware of his own limitations. He can show emotion and feelings towards people, but he probably doesn’t have the full range of human emotion. He also chases the unknowable, like the way Farrell’s character finds himself drawn to sell and explore the world of tea, even though he’s not a huge tea fanatic. It’s clear that both characters are searching for some meaning in their lives, but Yang has made peace with his existence in a way that Jake admires (and struggles with himself).
In a world where we actually have robotic companions, it’s not hard to imagine that we’d form deep bonds and mourn them when they’re gone. Losing your robot could eventually be as traumatic as losing a dear pet. But that would also reflect a world where our androids can also profoundly affect our lives. They’d be more than appliances – they’d be family.
Source: Engadget – ‘After Yang’ explores the meaning of life through a broken android
How to Use For Each Loops with Terraform to Provision Resources
Learn how to use Terraform for_each loops to quickly provision multiple resources such as virtual machines. Tutorial with examples.
Source: LXer – How to Use For Each Loops with Terraform to Provision Resources
Twitter's misinformation policy doesn't cover the 2020 elections anymore
Twitter is no longer taking action on tweets spreading misinformation about the 2020 US elections, the website has revealed to CNN. Elizabeth Busby, the company’s spokesperson, told the news organization that the social network hasn’t been enforcing its “civic integrity policy” when it comes to content about the Presidential elections for almost a year now — since March 2021. Busby said that’s because the policy was meant to be used within the duration of an event and that President Biden has already been in office for more than a year.
The website amended its civic integrity policy before the Presidential elections to add labels to tweets with “false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process.” In some cases, Twitter could remove tweets under the policy. The rules cover tweets “inciting unlawful conduct to prevent a peaceful transfer of power or orderly succession.” If you’ll recall, former President Trump was banned on the social network following the 2021 Capitol attack after deciding that his tweets can be used to incite violence. The rules also cover unverified information “election rigging,” which the administration’s opponents are echoing until this day. In fact, YouTube has just removed a copy of a TV ad by Missouri Rep. Billy Long that claims “the Democrats rigged the election” in 2020.
YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi explained the Google-owned website made it clear that “false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election” are prohibited on the platform. Long said YouTube’s action was “un-American and straight from the communist playbook,” though, and that it just proves “Big Tech certainly has and will continue to influence elections.”
Source: Engadget – Twitter’s misinformation policy doesn’t cover the 2020 elections anymore
Did eating meat really make us human?
Enlarge (credit: Kryssia Campos | Getty Images)
Twenty-four years ago, Briana Pobiner reached into the north Kenyan soil and put her hands on bones that had last been touched 1.5 million years ago. Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist, was digging up ancient animal bones and searching for cuts and dents, signs that they had been butchered by our early ancestors trying to get at the fatty, calorie-rich bone marrow hidden within. “You are reaching through a window in time,” says Pobiner, who is now at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. “The creature who butchered this animal is not quite like you, but you’re uncovering this direct evidence of behavior. It’s really exciting.”
That moment sparked Pobiner’s lasting interest in how the diets of our ancestors shaped their evolution and eventually the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens. Meat, in particular, seems to have played a crucial role. Our more distant ancestors mostly ate plants and had short legs and small brains similar in size to a chimpanzee’s. But around 2 million years ago, a new species emerged with decidedly humanlike features. Homo erectus had a larger brain, smaller gut, and limbs proportioned similarly to those of modern humans. And fossils from around the same time, like those excavated by Pobiner in Kenya, show that someone was butchering animals to separate lean meat from the bone and dig out the marrow. For decades, paleontologists have theorized that the evolution of humanlike features and meat eating are strongly connected.
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Source: Ars Technica – Did eating meat really make us human?
Rust-Written Replacement To GNU Coreutils Progressing, Some Binaries Now Faster
Along with the broader industry trend of transitioning security-sensitive code to memory-safe languages like Rust, there has been an effort to write a Rust-based replacement to GNU Coreutils. For nearly a year that Rust Coreutils has been able to run a basic Debian system while more recently they have been increasing their level of GNU Coreutils compatibility and in some cases now even outperforming the upstream project…
Source: Phoronix – Rust-Written Replacement To GNU Coreutils Progressing, Some Binaries Now Faster
How to create fillable forms in ONLYOFFICE Docs 7.0
ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source office suite distributed under GNU AGPL v3.0. It comprises web-based viewers and collaborative editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations highly compatible with OOXML formats. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to create a fillable form with ONLYOFFICE Docs.
Source: LXer – How to create fillable forms in ONLYOFFICE Docs 7.0
Keychron Q2 mechanical keyboard review: Enthusiast luxury at a decent price
Enlarge / The Keychron Q2. (credit: Scharon Harding)
Not everyone appreciates the luxury of a mechanical keyboard. Many are happy with the flat keys that come with their laptop; they don’t need to deal with the price premiums, varieties, and complexities of mechanical switches. Among those who do make the leap to mechanical switches, plenty are happy to settle on a keyboard preloaded with a specific switch type. But the Keychron Q2 is for those wiling to go an inch or two further down the rabbit hole.
I say “an inch or two” because the Q2 comes completely assembled (or with just the switches and keycaps missing), letting you pick your level of customization—and it offers options that only a mechanical keyboard enthusiast would consider.
| Specs at a glance: Keychron Q2 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Cheapest | Most expensive | As reviewed | |
| Switches | None, hot-swappable | Gateron G Pro Red, Blue, or Brown, hot-swappable | |
| Keycaps | Doubleshot PBT | ||
| Connectivity options | USB-C to USB-C cable, USB-C to USB-A adapter | ||
| Backlighting | RGB | ||
| Size (without keycaps) | 12.89 x 4.76 x 0.79-1.33 inches (327.5 x 121 x 20-33.8 mm) |
||
| Weight | ~3.13 lbs (1,420 g) | 3.63 ± 0.02 lbs (1,645 ± 10 g) |
|
| Warranty | 1 year | ||
| Price (MSRP) | $149 | $179 | |
| Other perks | Barebones kit; keycap puller; switch puller; screwdriver; hex key; 4x extra gaskets; 2x extra rubber feet; 2x extra hex screws; 2x extra Philips screws | Pre-assembled with volume knob; keycap puller; switch puller; screwdriver; hex key; 4x extra gaskets; 2x extra rubber feet; 2x extra hex screws; 2x extra Philips screws | |
Those options include a gasket-mounted design, sound-dampening foam, and pre-lubricated switches, which should eliminate pinging noises or cheap stabilizer rattling. The Q2 is a surprisingly hefty 65% keyboard built for the long haul, and while the starting price of $150 isn’t cheap, it’s more digestible than other high-end rivals.
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Source: Ars Technica – Keychron Q2 mechanical keyboard review: Enthusiast luxury at a decent price
NIR Continues Successfully Serving The Needs Of Mesa, Better Suited Than LLVM
Prominent Mesa developer Jason Ekstrand who formerly led Intel’s “ANV” Vulkan driver effort and being one of their open-source driver developers originally involved with the NIR intermediate representation work wrote a detailed and excellent blog post outlining its successes eight years running. While it still gets brought up into discussions from time to time (including quite recently stemming from a RISC-V graphics thread) why Mesa doesn’t use LLVM IR or SPIR-V directly as its intermediate representation, NIR continues as a striking success and used by all major Mesa drivers…
Source: Phoronix – NIR Continues Successfully Serving The Needs Of Mesa, Better Suited Than LLVM
The US plans to reduce roadway deaths with smarter road design
Enlarge / The intersection of Interstates 10 and 610 in Houston, Texas, during evening rush hour. (credit: Getty Images)
Statistics help tell stories, and one often touted by technologists and engineers and police officers and even the federal government told a tale. The statistic: 94 percent of US traffic crashes are the result of human error. The number felt right. It also appealed to a very American idea: that individuals are in charge of their own destinies. Rather than place the burden of road safety on systems—the way roads are built, the way cars are designed, the way streets are governed—it placed it on the driver, or the walker, or the cyclist.
The statistic was based on a misunderstanding of a 2015 report from the US Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is in charge of US road safety. The report studied crashes between 2005 and 2007 and determined that the driver was the “critical reason” behind the vast majority of crashes. But a driver’s actions were typically the last in a long chain of events. The driver’s fiddly movement of the wheel, in other words, was the final thing to go wrong—a process that started with, perhaps, the surveying of the highway, or the road design laid out on the desk of an engineer, or the policy crafted by lobbyists decades ago that made it impossible for anyone to get across town without a car.
Earlier this month, after pleas from researchers, advocates, and another Biden administration official, the US DOT nixed that 94 percent statistic from its website. And on Thursday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg began to tell a very different story about US road deaths. “Human fallibility should not lead to human fatalities,” he said during a press conference in Washington, DC. His goal, he said, is zero road deaths.
Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – The US plans to reduce roadway deaths with smarter road design
New tools to simplify wrapping your head around Kubernetes
Where to begin when you’re ready to get your K8s on. Engineer Nelson Elhage offers several reasons Kubernetes is so complex but this does at least mean that multiple companies offer tools to try to help you master it.
Source: LXer – New tools to simplify wrapping your head around Kubernetes
Zstd-Compressed Linux Firmware Back To Being Eyed
Back in summer 2020 was a proposal for Zstd-compressed Linux firmware so that the growing number of firmware binaries shipped by the linux-firmware tree could be Zstd-compressed to save disk space while being able to more quickly decompressed the data compared to other firmware compression options…
Source: Phoronix – Zstd-Compressed Linux Firmware Back To Being Eyed
Wine-Staging 7.1 Adds Bindless Textures Patch To Fix Some Game Rendering Issues
Along with Wine 7.1 releasing on Friday, Wine-Staging 7.1 is also available as the more bleeding-edge version of Wine that carries more than five huundred extra patches atop the code-base…
Source: Phoronix – Wine-Staging 7.1 Adds Bindless Textures Patch To Fix Some Game Rendering Issues
Eclipse OpenJ9 0.30 Released For Latest JVM Alternative
In addition to this week bringing Oracle’s GraalVM 22.0 release, Eclipse has released OpenJ9 0.30 as the latest version of their open-source Java Virtual Machine (JVM)…
Source: Phoronix – Eclipse OpenJ9 0.30 Released For Latest JVM Alternative
Crypto Co-Founder Revealed To Be Infamous Fraudster, Investors Shaken
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Investors are shaken after the co-founder of a multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency protocol was accused of being a serial scammer with a record of conviction and deportation, and the co-founder of a fraudulent Canadian exchange that imploded. On Thursday, a Twitter user who goes by zachxbt.eth “with a track record of unmasking crypto scams and nefarious behavior,” according to CoinDesk, accused “Sifu,” a core member of the founding team behind the popular Avalanche-based Wonderland DeFi (or decentralized finance) protocol and its TIME token, of actually being Michael Patryn.
Patryn, who changed his legal name twice, was the co-founder of QuadrigaCX, a Canadian exchange that shut down after Patryn’s partner Gerald Cotten suddenly died in India in 2018 while owing users around $190 million in crypto at the time’s exchange rate. Patryn and Cotten reportedly parted ways in 2016. Later, investigators determined that Cotten was operating QuadrigaCX as a Ponzi scheme near the end of its life. Patryn has been convicted of several crimes, including computer fraud and bank and credit fraud, as Bloomberg reported in 2019. After the original tweets that revealed Sifu is Patryn, Daniele Sestagalli, the founder of Wonderland, confirmed the allegation. Sestagalli is a prolific developer who is behind multiple DeFi projects, including Abracadabra’s Magic Internet Money (MIM) token.
“I want everyone to know that I was aware of this and decided that the past of an individual doesn’t determine their future. I choose to value the time we spent together without knowing his past more than anything,” Sestagalli wrote on Twitter. He later posted a statement explaining that he found out about Sifu’s real identity a month ago, and has now decided to ask Patryn to step down. “I am of the opinion of giving second chances, as I have mentioned on Twitter. I’ve seen the community very divided about my choice of maintaining him as the treasury manager after finding out who he was and his past,” Sestagali wrote. “Regardless, what has happened has happened. Now having taken some time to reflect, I have decided that he needs to step down till a vote for his confirmation is in place. Wonderland has the say to who manages its treasury not me or the rest of the wonderland team.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Crypto Co-Founder Revealed To Be Infamous Fraudster, Investors Shaken
Basis Universal 1.16 Released With OpenCL Support, Other Improvements
Version 1.16 of the Basis universal GPU texture codec developed by well known developer Rich Geldreich’s Binomial LLC…
Source: Phoronix – Basis Universal 1.16 Released With OpenCL Support, Other Improvements
Celebrating Data Privacy Day
Happy International Data Privacy Day! While January 28 marks a day to raise awareness and promote best practices for privacy and data protection around the world, we at Mozilla do this work year-round so our users can celebrate today — and every day — the endless joy the internet has to offer.
Source: LXer – Celebrating Data Privacy Day