today's leftovers

• Ransomware Operators Demand $14 Million From Power Company [iophk: Windows TCO]

  Available under the RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) model, Sodinokibi is operated by a threat actor likely affiliated to “Pinchy Spider,” the group behind the GandCrab ransomware.

  While investigating the malware itself, AppGate discovered that it includes functionality to escalate privileges by leveraging 32-bit and 64-bit exploits for the CVE-2018-8453 vulnerability in the Win32k component of Windows.

• MedSeg: AI(Artificial Intelligence)-based Free Online Segmentation Tool for Radiological Images

  The project is built with HTML5/ JavaScript and uses TensorFlow.js for AI. It's deployed currently on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The developers uses several open-source libraries and packages most of them are battle tested in enterprise projects here is a list of them included resources that helped in creating this project, we are really proud in Medevel to see it's listed there... [....] MedSeg is a free, openly available segmentation tool that requires little training and no prior set-up to start using. You may manually segment your images or take advantage of their developed AI-models to ease the segmentation process of your interest. MedSeg may also contribute in your own segmentation work by developing further AI-models for your need.

• Databricks Contributes MLflow Machine Learning Platform to The Linux Foundation

  Databricks, the company behind big data processing and analytics engine Apache Spark, contributes open source machine learning platform MLflow to The Linux Foundation. The announcement was made by Matei Zaharia, the creator of Apache Spark and MLflow projects, in his keynote presentation at the recent Spark AI Summit 2020 Conference which was held as a global virtual event. MLflow was created to help data scientists and developers with the complex process of ML model development which typically includes the steps to build, train, tune, deploy, and manage machine learning models. It manages the entire ML lifecycle, from data preparation to production deployment, including experiment tracking, packaging code into reproducible runs, and model sharing and collaboration, and is designed to work with any ML library.

• Open Source FinOps Foundation Brings New Focus to Cloud Costs

• Firefox 80 To Support VA-API Acceleration On X11

  While recent Firefox releases have seen VA-API video acceleration working when running natively under Wayland, the Firefox 80 release later this summer will bring VA-API support by default to those running on a conventional X.Org Server. The bits are now landed that VA-API support within Mozilla's Firefox web browser should be working fine on X11.

• Vulkan 1.2.146 Released With DirectFB Support, Extended Fragment Density Map

  The Khronos Group is celebrating the US Independence Day with the release of a new Vulkan spec. Vulkan 1.2.146 is out today with many documentation corrections/clarifications along with two new extensions.

Programming Leftovers

• RasPi: New keyboards for Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark

• Heap Data Structure Tutorial

  Data is a set of values. Data can be collected and put in a row, or in a column, or in a table or in the form of a tree. The structure of data is not only the placement of data in any of these forms. In computing, the data structure is any of these formats, plus the relationship among the values, plus the operations (functions) perform on the values. You should already have basic knowledge on tree data structure before coming here, as the concepts there, will be used here with little or no explanation.

• Perl Weekly Challenge 67: Number Combinations and Letter Phone

  Perl does not have a built-in combinations function, but there are several modules (for example Math::Combinatorics) providing the functionality. However, this being a coding challenge, I don’t want to use a third-party ready-made solution and prefer to show a way to do it yourself. If we knew in advance how many items we want in each combination, nested loops might be the best solution. But if we want to be flexible about the number of items in each combination, then it is often simpler to use a recursive approach. Here, the combinations subroutine is recursive and is called once for every item wanted in the combination.

• Lucky Number Per7

  I swear it was Perl 5 just a moment ago. I turned my back for all of 5 minutes ... I don't need the new features, but I don't like boilerplate and I'm happy to accommodate those who seek progress. Harking back to lessons from the past, SysAdmins of a certain age may remember the venerable a2p program for converting awk scripts to perl and the horrendous (but working) code that it produced. We had one of those running in production less than 2 years ago until I finally decided to re-write it in Modern Perl. A bit like moving house, as a community we need to face the pain every so often and address the risks and ptifalls, not as reasons to keep to the status quo, but as a checklist of problems to be solved.

• Episode #271: Unlock the mysteries of time, Python's datetime that is!

  Time is a simple thing, right? And working with it in Python is great. You just import datetime and then (somewhat oddly) use the datetime class from that module. Oh except, there are times with timezones, and times without. And why is there a total_seconds() but not total_minutes(), hours() or days() on timedelta? How about computing the number of weeks? What if you wanted to iterate over the next 22 workdays, skipping weekends? Ok, we'd better talk about time in Python! Good thing Paul Ganssle is here. He's a core developer who controls time in CPython.

• GSoC’20 First Evaluation

  In the last blog, I wrote about my first two weeks on the GSoC period. In this blog, I would write about the activities to which I have worked further and implemented multiple datasets. [...] Why multiple datasets to GCompris activities? As previously all of the activities were having a generalized dataset so for some of the age groups as for 3-5 yrs the activity seems quite difficult to play, and also for some of the age groups the activity seems to be quite easy. So, multiple datasets help in resolving this issue and we have multiple data for various age groups and all the activities can be more adaptive for the children.

today's howtos

• How to Install Wine 5.12 in Ubuntu 20.04 / Linux Mint 20

  Wine 5.12 was released a day ago as the latest development release of the compatibility layer allows to run Windows apps on Linux and Mac OS. The official apt repository has made the packages for all current Ubuntu releases.

• Install And Configure KVM In Ubuntu 20.04 Headless Server

• How to use bootstrap script in AWS ( EC2 Instance )

• How To Install Homebrew on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

• How to list the installed Packages on Ubuntu

• Rollback a package installation under openSUSE

• Why Stack Exchange is Broken (and Reddit too)

  I’m going to begin this rant by saying that there are some things that that the Stack Exchange network is really good with: mainly, programming help. However, it really sucks when it comes to providing help with a specific application where there is already a community. For the past year, I have been the #1 person to answer questions on tor.stackexchange.com. I’m not saying that to pat myself on the back; just to say that I have actually been doing this for a little while.

• How to install TeamViewer on Linux (Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS)