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How The Grateful Dead Built The Internet
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jun '25

23 Jun '25

Here’s an interesting piece, from the BBC of all places, about the role that a hippie band that started in the 1960s went on to play in the culture of the early Internet <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250618-how-the-grateful-dead-shaped-so…>. Not only were their stage shows technology-heavy, but they somehow managed to attract a major following among technologists of all kinds. Among the other members of that milieu was Steward Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, a resource for those looking for tools to help them live a simpler life, less dominated by faceless corporates and promoting more intimate, personal power. Quote from the introduction: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” Brand went on to co-found the WELL, aka the “Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link”, which started out as a BBS with users connecting via dialup lines, before becoming an Internet-connected service -- one of the earliest examples, if not *the* earliest example, of “social media”, if you will. John Perry Barlow, one of the lyricists for the Grateful Dead, got heavily involved in the WELL and then went on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, dedicated to the preservation of free speech and other civil rights in the online world.

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OpenPGP Versus GnuPG
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jun '25

23 Jun '25

It seems the developers of GnuPG are starting to diverge from the OpenPGP standard, and go their own, incompatible way. I got notes about this from the last few upgrades of my Debian Unstable systems, and so searching about online led me (yet again) to the ever-dependable ArchLinux Wiki <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GnuPG>, which has a section on “OpenPGP compatibility”, with links to more details about the schism. So the Debian folks seem reluctant to go along with this, and they’re not the only ones.

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Bill Gates Gets To Meet The Famous Linus Torvalds
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jun '25

23 Jun '25

Did you know, Torvalds and Gates had never met before <https://www.theverge.com/news/690815/bill-gates-linus-torvalds-meeting-photo>. The third older guy with them is Dave Cutler, mastermind of Windows NT. Not sure if he was the one responsible for putting in drive letters and all those “reserved” file names or not.

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The Kubuntu Focus Team Announces The M2 GEN 6
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jun '25

16 Jun '25

'The Kubuntu Focus team has some exciting news to share. We have launched the sixth generation of the flagship M2 laptop, featuring the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU with 24 threads, Nvidia® GeForce® RTX 50-series GPUs, and many more upgrades. See more about this laptop in the press release, and see the press photos here!' -- source: https://www.einpresswire.com/article/820847974/kubuntu-focus-announces-the-… -- photos: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mTmiw5HuJ8XkJ_yqy-R9YT-BqD-lmG3D Cheers, Peter

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Denmark Is Dumping Microsoft Office and Windows For LibreOffice and Linux
by Peter Reutemann 13 Jun '25

13 Jun '25

'ZDNet reports: Denmark's Minister of Digitalization, Caroline Stage, has announced that the Danish government will start moving away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Why? It's not because open-source is better, although I would argue that it is, but because Denmark wants to claim "digital sovereignty." In the States, you probably haven't heard that phrase, but in the European Union, digital sovereignty is a big deal and getting bigger. A combination of security, economic, political, and societal imperatives is driving the EU's digital sovereignty moves. EU leaders are seeking to reduce Europe's dependence on foreign technology providers, primarily those from the United States, and to assert greater control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technological future. Why? Because they're concerned about who controls European data, who sets the rules, and who can potentially cut off access to essential services in times of geopolitical tension. "Money issues have also played a decisive role," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "Copenhagen's Microsoft software bill has soared from 313 million kroner in 2018 to 538 million kroner -- about $53 million in 2023, a 72% increase in just five years. David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), a Dane, inventor of Ruby on Rails, and co-owner of the software developer company 37Signals, has said: "Denmark is one of the most highly digitalized countries in the world. It's also one of the most Microsoft-dependent. In fact, Microsoft is by far and away the single biggest dependency, so it makes perfect sense to start the quest for digital sovereignty there."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/06/12/0335229 Cheers, Peter

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Apple Quietly Launches Container On GitHub To Bring Linux Development To macOS
by Peter Reutemann 12 Jun '25

12 Jun '25

'A report from NERDS.xyz: Apple has released a new developer tool on GitHub called Container, offering a fresh approach to running Linux containers directly on macOS. Unlike Docker or Podman, this tool is designed to feel at home in the Apple ecosystem and hooks into frameworks already built into the operating system. Container runs standard OCI images, but it doesn't use a single shared Linux VM. Instead, it creates a small Linux virtual machine for every container you spin up. That sounds heavy at first, but the VMs are lightweight and boot quickly. Each one is isolated, which Apple claims improves both security and privacy. Developers can run containerized workloads locally with native macOS support and without needing to install third-party container platforms.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/2116233 Cheers, Peter

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FreeBSD 14.3 Released
by Peter Reutemann 12 Jun '25

12 Jun '25

'Michael Larabel of Phoronix highlights the key updates in today's stable release of FreeBSD 14.3: FreeBSD 14.3 has back-ported a number of improvements from FreeBSD 15 back to the FreeBSD 14 series. Plus a number of routine package updates and other fixes. Some of the FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE highlights include: - Updating the ZFS support against OpenZFS 2.2.7. - Merging of the Realtek RTW88 and RTW89 WiFi drivers based on the Linux 6.14 kernel code. - The LinuxKPI code has been improved to support crypto offload as well as the 802.11n and 802.11ac standards. - The Intel IX Ethernet driver has added support for the x550 1000BAS-BX SFP modules. - Thor2 PCI IDs added to the Broadcom NetXtreme "BNXT" driver along with support for 400G speed modules. - XZ 5.8.1, OpenSSH 9.9p2, OpenSSL 3.0.16, and many other package updates. - Syscons as the legacy system console driver is now considered deprecated. Syscons is not compatible with UEFI, lacks UTF-8 support, and is Giant-locked. ' -- source: https://bsd.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2146224 Cheers, Peter

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Ubuntu Linux 25.10 Quietly Kills Off GNOME On Xorg As Wayland Takes Over
by Peter Reutemann 12 Jun '25

12 Jun '25

'Ubuntu 25.10, known as Questing Quokka, is taking a big turn under the hood. Canonical has dropped support for the GNOME desktop running on Xorg. Starting with this release, the default Ubuntu session now uses Wayland only. Yes, folks, there's no longer an option to log into GNOME on Xorg.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/181234 Cheers, Peter

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New Linux Flaws Allow Password Hash Theft via Core Dumps in Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora
by Peter Reutemann 12 Jun '25

12 Jun '25

'Two information disclosure flaws have been identified in apport and systemd-coredump, the core dump handlers in Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora, according to the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU). Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, both vulnerabilities are race condition bugs that could enable a local attacker to obtain access to access sensitive information. Tools like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to handle crash reporting and core dumps in Linux systems. "These race conditions allow a local attacker to exploit a SUID program and gain read access to the resulting core dump," Saeed Abbasi, manager of product at Qualys TRU, said.' -- source: https://thehackernews.com/2025/05/new-linux-flaws-allow-password-hash.html Cheers, Peter

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Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
by Peter Reutemann 12 Jun '25

12 Jun '25

'The Wikimedia Foundation halted an experiment that would have displayed AI-generated summaries atop Wikipedia articles after the platform's volunteer editor community delivered an overwhelmingly negative response to the proposal. The foundation announced the two-week mobile trial on June 2 and suspended it just one day later following dozens of critical comments from editors. The experiment, called "Simple Article Summaries," would have used Cohere's open-weight Aya model to generate simplified versions of complex Wikipedia articles. The AI-generated summaries would have appeared at the top of articles with a yellow "unverified" label, requiring users to click to expand and read them. Editors responded with comments including "very bad idea," "strongest possible oppose," and simply "Yuck."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/11/1732215 Cheers, Peter

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