In computers, file carving consists of recovering and rebuilding, reconstructing or reassembling fragmented files after a disk was formatted, its filesystem or partition corrupted or damaged or the metadata of a file removed. All files contain metadata, metadata means: “data that provides information about other data”. Among more information, files metadata contains the location and structure of a file within the filesystem and physical blocks. File Carving consists of bringing back files even if their metadata with the information of their location within the filesystem isn’t available.
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.5 — the 5th point release in the Firebird 3.0 series.
This sub-release offers many bug fixes and also adds a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes.
Binary kits for Windows and Linux platforms are immediately available for download, Android and Mac OS packages will follow shortly.
Linus Torvalds Decides To Land NVIDIA RTX 30 "Ampere" Support In Linux 5.11
While new feature code is normally not allowed in past the end of the merge window for a given Linux kernel release cycle, Linus Torvalds has decided to merge the newly-published open-source driver code for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics cards for the Linux 5.11 kernel that will debut as stable in February.
Ahead of this weekend's Linux 5.11-rc4 release, Linus Torvalds has merged the new initial open-source code for the NVIDIA RTX 30 / Ampere GPUs via the Nouveau driver. He was fine with allowing this late addition to Linux 5.11 as the new hardware support is all self-contained and doesn't risk regressing the existing NVIDIA GPU support within the Nouveau driver. Thus it's one of the rare times he permits new code to be added after a merge window since there is minimal risk of it regressing the status quo of hardware support.
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
Somewhere, I read, 2021 will be the year of the Linux desktop. Do you agree? Let’s make it the year of Tumbleweed on the desktop. In any case, Tumbleweed has been steadily rolling with 5 snapshots published during this week (0107, 0108, 0110, 0111, and 0113).
With this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 there is more widespread use of "phased updates" for gradually rolling out new stable release updates to help avoid any regressions en masse from coming to light. For years the Ubuntu desktop has employed this phased updates strategy while now with it being plumbed into APT, Ubuntu Server and other versions will by default make use of phased updates.
Going back a number of years in Ubuntu has been Phased Updates that wired into Update Manager has led to the gradual rollout of new stable release updates over a period of about two days. This has been done gradually to ensure that no regressions or potential big problems hit all Ubuntu users at once by over the course of many hours exposing more Ubuntu users to these updates.
At Project Zero we often refer to our goal simply as “make 0-day hard”. Members of the team approach this challenge mainly through the lens of offensive security research. And while we experiment a lot with new targets and methodologies in order to remain at the forefront of the field, it is important that the team doesn’t stray too far from the current state of the art. One of our efforts in this regard is the tracking of publicly known cases of zero-day vulnerabilities. We use this information to guide the research. Unfortunately, public 0-day reports rarely include captured exploits, which could provide invaluable insight into exploitation techniques and design decisions made by real-world attackers. In addition, we believe there to be a gap in the security community’s ability to detect 0-day exploits.
About a year ago, Ondřej Míchal single-handedly rewrote Toolbox in Go, making it massively easier to work on the code compared to the previous POSIX shell implementation. Go comes with much nicer facilities for command line parsing, error handling, logging, parsing JSON, and in general is a lot more pleasant to program in. Plus all the container tools in the OCI ecosystem are written in Go anyway, so it was a natural fit.
Other than the obvious benefits of Go, the rewrite immediately fixed a few bugs that were inherently very cumbersome to fix in the POSIX shell implementation. Something as simple as offering a –version option, or avoiding duplicate entries when listing containers or images was surprisingly difficult to achieve in the past.
What’s more, we managed to pull this off by retaining full compatibility with the previous code. So users and distributors should have no hesitation to update.
Rav1e 0.4 was released on Wednesday as the latest version of this Rust-written AV1 video encoder. The rav1e 0.4 release represents a speed-up for the encoder but depending upon the preset level can still be at fractions of a frame per second.
Rav1e 0.4 development was focused on providing faster performance for x86_64 and AArch64 (64-bit ARM) architectures. A wide variety of optimizations made faster performance possible depending upon the speed level.
Linux.conf.au (aka LCA) is a lovely community conference based in Australasia that will be entering its 22nd year in 2021. The volunteer-run event is known for getting deeply technical on topics varying from the inner workings of the Linux kernel to the inner workings of dealing with communities. This year's event takes place on January 23rd - 25th and is accessible is digital and accessible to everyone, whether you live "down under" or not.
Our General Manager, Deb Nicholson will be presenting on how to build and maintain kinder, gentler and more sustainable open source communities in her talk, "Move Slow and Try Not to Break Each Other." on Sunday at 11:40am.
At last count there are 14 proposals for Firefox on Glean, the effort that, last year, brought the Glean SDK to Firefox Desktop. What in the world is a small, scrappy team in a small, scrappy company like Mozilla doing wasting so much time with old-school Waterfall Model overhead?!
Because it’s cheaper than the alternative.
Design is crucial before tackling difficult technological problems that affect multiple teams. At the very least you’re writing an API and you need to know what people want to do with it. So how do you get agreement? How do you reach the least bad design in the shortest time?
In December there were 241 alerts generated, resulting in 39 regression bugs being filed on average 6.4 days after the regressing change landed.
Welcome to the December 2020 edition of the performance sheriffing newsletter. Here you’ll find the usual summary of our sheriffing efficiency metrics, followed by a review of the year. If you’re interested (and if you have access) you can view the full dashboard.
“With everyone from SMBs to governments now going fully digital, we see significant demand for integrated, secure, and GDPR-conforming digital document lifecycle solutions,” says Uli Brandner, CEO and owner of CIB labs. “We have continuously invested into LibreOffice to play an important role in our solution stack, and are now taking the next step by setting up a dedicated company with a laser-sharp focus on delivering fully cloud-based versions – in-line with our ongoing push for browser-based products.
Being able to build on the multi-decade value of existing OpenSource solutions, as well as the equally many years of experience of our LibreOffice engineering team there, gets us both a significant head start, and the confidence to deliver quality solutions.”
LibreOffice engineering consultancy and “LibreOffice powered by CIB” will remain an important part in CIB’s portfolio, now being served and further improved by allotropia software GmbH. “For our customers, this generates the win-win-win situation of having an established, rock-solid partner like CIB, delivering state-of-the-art opensource software, plus the agility of an innovative startup developing new solutions”, adds Uli Brandner.
In prior years, this annual series covered individual apps. This year, we are looking at all-in-one solutions in addition to strategies to help in 2021. Welcome to day 6 of 21 Days of Productivity in 2021.
In the long, long ago, when compiling a kernel was the only way to get wifi drivers, a graphical environment was mainly for running a web browser and opening lots of terminal windows. The look and feel was a mishmash of whatever toolkit the author of the program chose to use. And then, in 1996 Matthias Ettrich proposed and later released the first version of KDE. It was based on the then proprietary Qt toolkit (since made Free and Open Source). This release sparked what can only be called a desktop revolution on Linux, with the creation of the GNOME Desktop using the at-that-time FOSS GTK Toolkit. Between KDE and GNOME, Linux went from a only computer people use Linux operating system to a robust desktop environment for everyone.
Celebrating the FSF’s 35th anniversary: Stories from the Licensing and Compliance Lab
Since 2001, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Licensing and Compliance Lab has provided the legal muscle to defend free software, and has supported software users, programmers, legal professionals, and activists who want their software to remain free. FSF representatives had done copyleft enforcement before this, but the founding of the Lab was a big step toward formalizing and organizing this work. You may have already read licensing and compliance manager Donald Robertson’s comprehensive accounting of the current functions of the team, but today, following our thirty-fifth anniversary celebration, we’re taking a look back at the role this team has played over the course of the FSF’s thirty-five year-long history, and some milestones along the way.
Like the other accounts written for this series, which focused on the campaigns team and the tech team's histories, this is far from a complete story of the FSF’s licensing work: there are important milestones that we were barely able to touch upon, and important people involved whose stories and voices aren’t represented here. It’s also possible that some details may have been missed or lost to time.
Meet the New Linux Distro Inspired by the iPad
I’ve seen a tonne of Linux distros come and go in the 12 years I’ve been blogging about Ubuntu, but precious few have been designed exclusively for tablet use.
So when I came across JingOS, a new Ubuntu-based distro touting a touch-centric UI, I was naturally intrigued. Tablet-based Linux distros aren’t exactly common.
JingOS’s developers say it is “the world’s first iPadOS-style Linux distro”. I don’t imagine anyone is going to take issue with that statement, especially once they’ve seen how it looks!
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