Audiocasts/Shows: LINUX Unplugged, Homelab, and Tabliss

• Eating the License Cake | LINUX Unplugged 390

  Successful open-source projects all seem to struggle with one major gorilla. Who it is, and what their options are now. Special Guests: Drew DeVore and Jonathan Corbet.

• The Raspberry Pi is a great way to get started with Homelab! (How to Homelab Episode 4)

  If you're looking for a low-cost way to enter into the world of Homelab, look no further than the Raspberry Pi! These small computers are plenty powerful to run quite a few Homelab apps, and in this video I give you my thoughts on why that is. In a future video, we'll explore running some apps on the Raspberry Pi but I wanted to create this video as an introduction to the concept of using a Pi in this way

• Tabliss Is A "New Tab" Plugin For Firefox and Chrome

  Tabliss is a beautiful, customisable "New Tab" page for Firefox and Chrome, and the browsers that base of Firefox and Chrome (such as LibreWolf and Brave). In particular, it solves the "empty tab" problem that I was having on LibreWolf

Games: Cyber Shadow, Ova Magica, Plex Arcade Flunks

• With some epic 8-bit styled artwork Cyber Shadow is out now | GamingOnLinux

  Cyber Shadow from Aarne "MekaSkull" Hunziker and Yacht Club Games is an epic throwback to the likes of Ninja Gaiden and Shadow Of The Ninja and it's out now with Linux support. Nice the see Yacht Club give a hand to another developer, after their success with the Shovel Knight series.

• Monster taming and farming mix in Ova Magica is up on Kickstarter and already funded

  Ova Magica, a blending of casual farming in the spirit of Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon blended with monster taming and battling like something out of Pokemon is now live on Kickstarter. It managed to get fully funded within the first 2-3 hours, which I'm really not surprised about. The early tech demo was promising and it has such a great idea. Thankfully it's another that will support Linux too and the developer has been very clear about this. The Kickstarter campaign also lists it nice and clear as "The game will be released on PC DRM-Free, on Steam (Windows, Mac OS and Linux), Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S.".

• Plex Arcade is a retro video game streaming service that excludes Linux users

  Unfortunately, there is one big catch -- Linux users are being left out.

Security, Internet and Containers

• Security updates for Tuesday

  Security updates have been issued by CentOS (dnsmasq, net-snmp, and xstream), Debian (mutt), Gentoo (cfitsio, f2fs-tools, freeradius, libvirt, mutt, ncurses, openjpeg, PEAR-Archive_Tar, and qtwebengine), openSUSE (chromium, mutt, stunnel, and virtualbox), Red Hat (cryptsetup, gnome-settings-daemon, and net-snmp), Scientific Linux (xstream), SUSE (postgresql, postgresql12, postgresql13 and rubygem-nokogiri), and Ubuntu (mutt). 

 

• WordPress security & hardening, the definitive guide

  WordPress is massively popular. Around every one in five sites on the Internet uses WordPress in some form. Be that to run a humble blog, or a multi-site Content Management System (CMS) or eCommerce site. As a result, it is no surprise that WordPress websites are a very popular target for both experienced hackers and script-kiddies alike. The last thing any webmaster wants is to find out that their website has been hacked; maybe taken hostage and is part of a botnet, spreading malware, or partaking in Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. In this article we’ll be sharing a number of tips and strategies to help you harden your WordPress website.

• The Mozilla Blog: Why getting voting right is hard, Part V: DREs (spoiler: they’re bad)

  This is the fifth post in my series on voting systems (catch up on parts I, II, III and IV), focusing on computerized voting machines. The technical term for these is Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems, but in practice what this means is that you vote on some kind of computer, typically using a touch screen interface. As with precinct-count optical scan, the machine produces a total count, typically recorded on a memory card, printed out on a paper receipt-like tape, or both. These can be sent back to election headquarters, together with the ballots, where they are aggregated.

• Jessica Rosenworcel’s appointment is good for the internet

  With a new year comes change, and one change we’re glad to see in 2021 is new leadership at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). On Thursday, Jan. 21, Jessica Rosenworcel, a longtime FCC commissioner, was appointed as acting chair. It’s an important role that will drive policy discussions affecting the internet and all of us who use it. Her appointment gives us hope that under her wing, the agency will develop strong policies that look out for everyday people. Here are a few reasons Jessica Rosenworcel’s appointment is good for the internet. [...] We look forward to working with the FCC to reinstate net neutrality protections and close the digital divide. Jessica Rosenworcel’s ascent to acting chair of the FCC bodes well for the future of both issues. And we can imagine a brighter future for a healthy internet if she were to be nominated for the role permanently.

• Compute confidently at the Edge with Rancher and Longhorn 1.1 | SUSE Communities

  Today’s announcement of Longhorn 1.1, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox project, is exciting news for users of Rancher, SUSE’s Kubernetes management platform and the Kubernetes community. Longhorn is an enterprise-grade, cloud native container storage solution that went GA in June 2020. Since then, adoption has increased by 235 percent. Now Longhorn is the first cloud native storage solution designed and built for the edge, with ARM64 support, new self-healing capabilities and increased performance visibility.

• Longhorn 1.1 Offers ‘ReadWriteMany’ Support Across Containers

  SUSE has announced the release of Longhorn 1.1 which allows DevOps teams to manage persistent data volumes in any Kubernetes environment while bringing an enterprise-grade but vendor neutral approach to cloud-native storage.