Feral's GameMode 1.5 Now Supports Changing The CPU Governor Differently For iGPUs

With Feral's GameMode 1.5 the big change facing users is for those running integrated graphics. In a change led by an Intel open-source graphics driver developer, GameMode now supports setting an alternative CPU frequency scaling governor for integrated graphics use-cases. Up to now GameMode has defaulted to always using the "performance" CPU frequency scaling governor for normally delivering the best performance, but for integrated graphics that in some situations can lead to lower performance. Due to the integrated graphics and CPU cores sharing the same power envelope, ramping up the CPU performance can throw the graphics performance out of balance and at least for some games lead to lower performance. So with GameMode 1.5, the user can now opt for "powersave" or an alternative governor instead when using an iGPU.

Feral Interactive's open source 'GameMode' system performance booster has a new release

Feral Interactive don't just port a lot of games to Linux, they also work on some open source bits here and there. One of their projects is GameMode, which just got a new release. GameMode is a "daemon/lib combo for Linux that allows games to request a set of optimisations be temporarily applied to the host OS and/or a game process". In simple terms, it can help ensure your Linux PC is giving the game all it can to run smoothly. Looks like someone new is handling the project too, with Alex Smith having left Feral Interactive.

Firefox Extension Spotlight: Privacy Badger

People can?t be expected to understand all of the technically complex ways their online behavior is tracked by hidden entities. As you casually surf the web, there are countless techniques different third party actors use to secretly track your online movement. So how are we supposed to protect our privacy online if we don?t even understand how the game works? To help answer this, the good folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a non-profit devoted to defending digital privacy) built Privacy Badger?a browser extension designed to give you highly advanced tracking protection, while requiring you to do nothing more than install it on Firefox. No configuration, no advanced settings, no fuss. Once you have Privacy Badger installed, it automatically scours every website you visit in its relentless hunt for hidden trackers. And when it finds them, blocks them.

This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 322

What could an “Open” ID system look like?: Recommendations and Guardrails for National Biometric ID Projects

Digital ID systems are increasingly the battlefield where the fight for privacy, security, competition, and social inclusion is playing out. In our ever more connected world, some form of identity is almost always mediating our interactions online and offline. From the corporate giants that dominate our online lives using services like Apple ID and Facebook and Google’s login systems to government IDs which are increasingly required to vote, get access to welfare benefits, loans, pay taxes, get on transportation or access medical care. Part of the push to adopt digital ID comes from the international development community who argue that this is necessary in order to expand access to legal ID. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for “providing legal identity for all, including birth registration” by 2030. Possessing legal identity is increasingly a precondition to accessing basic services and entitlements from both state and private services. For the most marginalised communities, using digital ID systems to access essential services and entitlements from both state and private services are often one of their first interactions with digital technologies. Without these commonly recognized forms of official identification, individuals are at risk of exclusion and denial of services. However, the conflation of digital identity as the same as (or an extension of) “legal identity”, especially by the international development community, has led to an often uncritical embrace of digital ID projects. In this white paper, we survey the landscape around government digital ID projects and biometric systems in particular. We recommend several policy prescriptions and guardrails for these systems, drawing heavily from our experiences in India and Kenya, among other countries. In designing, implementing, and operating digital ID systems, governments must make a series of technical and policy choices. It is these choices that largely determine if an ID system will be empowering or exploitative and exclusionary. While several organizations have published principles around digital identity, too often they don’t act as a meaningful constraint on the relentless push to expand digital identity around the world. In this paper, we propose that openness provides a useful framework to guide and critique these choices and to ensure that identity systems put people first. Specifically, we examine and make recommendations around five elements of openness: multiplicity of choices, decentralization, accountability, inclusion, and participation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for SAP Solutions on IBM POWER9: An open foundation to power intelligent business decisions

At Red Hat Summit 2019, we unveiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, the next generation of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, which provides the scale, flexibility and innovation to drive enterprise workloads across the hybrid cloud. Even with the advancements across the platform, we recognize that there’s no singular panacea to overcome every unique IT challenge. To meet these needs, Red Hat delivers specialized offerings built around Red Hat Enterprise Linux to address specific hardware, applications and environment requirements, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 continues this strategy with the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for SAP Solutions on IBM Power Systems (POWER9).

OpenShift 4.3: Quay Container Security Integration

In the Red Hat OpenShift 4.2 Web UI Console, we introduced a new Cluster Overview Dashboard as the landing page when users first log in. The dashboard is there to help users resolve issues more efficiently and maintain a healthy cluster. With the latest 4.3 release, we added an image security section to the cluster health dashboard card. This section will appear on the dashboard when the Container Security Operator gets installed.

Deploying OpenSCAP on Satellite using Ansible

In many environments today, security is one of the top priorities. New information security vulnerabilities are discovered regularly, and these incidents can have a significant impact on businesses and their customers. Red Hat customers I talk to are frequently looking for tools they can use to help evaluate and secure their environments. One of these tools is OpenSCAP, which is included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and can perform compliance and vulnerability scanning on RHEL servers. Satellite makes OpenSCAP easier to use by allowing you to deploy the OpenSCAP agent to hosts, manage the OpenSCAP policies centrally, and to view OpenSCAP reports from the Satellite web interface.

Using IF ELSE condition in Django template

IF tag evaluates the variable and variable is considered True if it exists and is not empty (if that variable is any iterable) and is not a False boolean value. Which means we can use a boolean variable, a list or a set with IF tag.

Ensemble/Voting Classification in Python with Scikit-Learn

Ensemble classification models can be powerful machine learning tools capable of achieving excellent performance and generalizing well to new, unseen datasets. The value of an ensemble classifier is that, in joining together the predictions of multiple classifiers, it can correct for errors made by any individual classifier, leading to better accuracy overall. Let's take a look at the different ensemble classification methods and see how these classifiers can be implemented in Scikit-Learn.

PyCharm 2019.3.2

We’ve been taking some time to polish PyCharm further, so be sure to update to the newest version! You can get it from within PyCharm (Help | Check for Updates), using JetBrains Toolbox, or by downloading the new version from our website.

EuroPython 2020: Pre-launch Website Ready

In the last couple of weeks we have put together a pre-launch site for EuroPython 2020, which has all the information around the event, as we currently know and can share with you.