This week Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg posted a remarkable reflection on the 23rd anniversary of his command-line data tool, cURL: curl was adopted in Red Hat Linux in late 1998, became a Debian package in May 1999, shipped in Mac OS X 10.1 in August 2001. Today, it is also shipped by default in Windows 10 and in iOS and Android devices. Not to mention the game consoles, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Sony PS5.

Amusingly, libcurl is used by the two major mobile OSes but not provided as an API by them, so lots of apps, including many extremely large volume apps bundle their own libcurl build: YouTube, Skype, Instagram, Spotify, Google Photos, Netflix etc. Meaning that most smartphone users today have many separate curl installations in their phones.

Further, libcurl is used by some of the most played computer games of all times: GTA V, Fortnite, PUBG mobile, Red Dead Redemption 2 etc.

libcurl powers media players and set-top boxes such as Roku, Apple TV by maybe half a billion TVs.

curl and libcurl ships in virtually every Internet server and is the default transfer engine in PHP, which is found in almost 80% of the world's almost two billion websites.

Cars are Internet-connected now. libcurl is used in virtually every modern car these days to transfer data to and from the vehicles.

Then add media players, kitchen and medical devices, printers, smart watches and lots of "smart"; IoT things. Practically speaking, just about every Internet-connected device in existence runs curl.

I'm convinced I'm not exaggerating when I claim that curl exists in over ten billion installations world-wide...

Those 300 lines of code in late 1996 have grown to 172,000 lines in March 2021.
Stenberg attributes cURL's success to persistence. "We hold out. We endure and keep polishing. We're here for the long run. It took me two years (counting from the precursors) to reach 300 downloads. It took another ten or so until it was really widely available and used." But he adds that 22 different CPU architectures and 86 different operating systems are now known to have run curl.

In a later blog post titled "GitHub Steel," Stenberg also reveals that GitHub gave him a 3D-printed steel version of his 2020 GitHub contribution matrix — accompanied by a friendly note. "Please accept this small gift as a token of appreciation on behalf of all of us here at GitHub, and everyone who benefits from your work."

AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica: Richard Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation's board of directors has drawn condemnation from many people in the free software community. An open letter signed by hundreds of people today called for Stallman to be removed again and for the FSF's entire board to resign. Letter signers include Neil McGovern, GNOME Foundation executive director and former Debian Project Leader; Deb Nicholson, general manager of the Open Source Initiative; Matthew Garrett, a former member of the FSF board of directors; seven of the eight members of the X.org Foundation board of directors; Elana Hashman of the Debian Technical Committee, Open Source Initiative, and Kubernetes project; Molly de Blanc of the Debian Project and GNOME Foundation; and more than 300 others. That number has been rising quickly today: the open letter contains instructions for signing it.

The letter said all members of the FSF board should be removed because they 'have enabled and empowered RMS for years. They demonstrate this again by permitting him to rejoin the FSF Board. It is time for RMS to step back from the free software, tech ethics, digital rights, and tech communities, for he cannot provide the leadership we need.' The letter also called for Stallman to be removed from his position leading the GNU Project. "We urge those in a position to do so to stop supporting the Free Software Foundation," they wrote. "Refuse to contribute to projects related to the FSF and RMS. Do not speak at or attend FSF events, or events that welcome RMS and his brand of intolerance. We ask for contributors to free software projects to take a stand against bigotry and hate within their projects. While doing these things, tell these communities and the FSF why." UPDATE: For a quick summary of the controversy, long-time Slashdot reader Jogar the Barbarian recommends this article from It's Foss.

Slashdot reader rushtobugment quotes a story from Hot Hardware: One of the software options for running a Raspberry Pi module is Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), the officially supported Debian-based operating system put out by The Raspberry Pi Foundation. It has been around since 2015 without too much complaint. However, a recent update has some Raspberry Pi OS users up in arms over a key change involving Microsoft.

The latest update installs a Microsoft apt respository on all any machine running Raspberry Pi OS, and does it without any admin consent. As discovered by Reddit user fortysix_n_2, the official reason is an endorsement of Microsoft's integrated development environment, Visual Studio Code, which is fine and dandy. However, it's claimed this even gets installed on headless devices that used a light image without a GUI. As a result, every time you do an "apt update" on your Pi device, the OS pings Microsoft.

"By having this repo, every time an install of Raspberry Pi OS is updated it will ping a Microsoft server. Microsoft will know you're using Raspberry Pi OS/likely Raspberry Pi owner and your IP address...." fortysix_n_2 explains.
Or, as a headline explains on the Windows Central blog, "Microsoft repo silently added to Raspberry Pi OS, folks begin the freak out..."

"As one particularly vocal commenter pointed out, modifying the sources.list in Linux without consent just doesn't happen. It also doesn't just apply to new images, it has been built out to be added to existing machines, too."

UPDATE: An anonymous Slashdot reader spotted Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton's response to the controversy on Twitter. When asked if the foundation could be more transparent, like publishing a blog post about the repositories to be included, Upton responded:

"I can't understand why you think this was a controversial thing to do. We do things of this sort all the time without putting out a blog post about how to opt out."

A British security researcher has discovered this week that a recent security flaw in the Sudo app also impacts the macOS operating system, and not just Linux and BSD, as initially believed. From a report: The vulnerability, disclosed last week as CVE-2021-3156 (aka Baron Samedit) by security researchers from Qualys, impacts Sudo, an app that allows admins to delegate limited root access to other users. Qualys researchers discovered that they could trigger a "heap overflow" bug in the Sudo app to change the current user's low-privileged access to root-level commands, granting the attacker access to the whole system. The only condition to exploit this bug was that an attacker gain access to a system, which researchers said could be done by either planting malware on a device or brute-forcing a low-privileged service account. In their report last week, Qualys researchers said they only tested the issue on Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. They said that are UNIX-like operating systems are also impacted, but most security researchers thought the bug might impact BSD, another major OS that also ships with the Sudo app.

Jake Edge, writing at LWN: The problems with "vendoring" in packages -- bundling dependencies rather than getting them from other packages -- seems to crop up frequently these days. We looked at Debian's concerns about packaging Kubernetes and its myriad of Go dependencies back in October. A more recent discussion in that distribution's community looks at another famously dependency-heavy ecosystem: JavaScript libraries from the npm repository. Even C-based ecosystems are not immune to the problem, as we saw with iproute2 and libbpf back in November; the discussion of vendoring seems likely to recur over the coming years. Many application projects, particularly those written in languages like JavaScript, PHP, and Go, tend to have a rather large pile of dependencies. These projects typically simply download specific versions of the needed dependencies at build time. This works well for fast-moving projects using collections of fast-moving libraries and frameworks, but it works rather less well for traditional Linux distributions. So distribution projects have been trying to figure out how best to incorporate these types of applications.

This time around, Raphael Hertzog raised the issue with regard to the Greenbone Security Assistant (gsa), which provides a web front-end to the OpenVAS vulnerability scanner (which is now known as Greenbone Vulnerability Management or gvm). "the version currently in Debian no longer works with the latest gvm so we have to update it to the latest upstream release... but the latest upstream release has significant changes, in particular it now relies on yarn or npm from the node ecosystem to download all the node modules that it needs (and there are many of them, and there's no way that we will package them individually). The Debian policy forbids download during the build so we can't run the upstream build system as is."

Hertzog suggested three possible solutions: collecting all of the dependencies into the Debian source package (though there would be problems creating the copyright file), moving the package to the contrib repository and adding a post-install step to download the dependencies, or removing gsa from Debian entirely. He is working on updating gsa as part of his work on Kali Linux, which is a Debian derivative that is focused on penetration testing and security auditing. Kali Linux does not have the same restrictions on downloading during builds that Debian has, so the Kali gsa package can simply use the upstream build process. He would prefer to keep gsa in Debian, "but there's only so much busy-work that I'm willing to do to achieve this goal". He wondered if it made more sense for Debian to consider relaxing its requirements. But Jonas Smedegaard offered another possible approach: analyzing what packages are needed by gsa and then either using existing Debian packages for those dependencies or creating new ones for those that are not available. Hertzog was convinced that wouldn't be done, but Smedegaard said that the JavaScript team is already working on that process for multiple projects.

Mint's programmers, led by lead developer, Clement "Clem" Lefebvre, have built their own take on Google's open-source Chromium web browser. ZDNet reports: Some of you may be saying, "Wait, haven't they offered Chromium for years? Well, yes, and no. For years, Mint used Ubuntu's Chromium build. But then Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, moved from releasing Chromium as an APT-compatible DEB package to a Snap. The Ubuntu Snap software packing system, along with its rivals Flatpak and AppImage, is a new, container-oriented way of installing Linux applications. The older way of installing Linux apps, such as DEB and RPM package management systems for the Debian and Red Hat Linux families, incorporate the source code and hard-coded paths for each program.

While tried and true, these traditional packages are troublesome for developers. They require programmers to hand-craft Linux programs to work with each specific distro and its various releases. They must ensure that each program has access to specific libraries' versions. That's a lot of work and painful programming, which led to the process being given the name: Dependency hell. Snap avoids this problem by incorporating the application and its libraries into a single package. It's then installed and mounted on a SquashFS virtual file system. When you run a Snap, you're running it inside a secured container of its own. For Chromium, in particular, Canonical felt using Snaps was the best way to handle this program. [...]

Lefebvre wrote, "The Chromium browser is now available in the official repositories for both Linux Mint and LMDE. If you've been waiting for this I'd like to thank you for your patience." Part of the reason was, well, Canonical was right. Building Chromium from source code is one really slow process. He explained, "To guarantee reactivity and timely updates we had to automate the process of detecting, packaging and compiling new versions of Chromium. This is an application which can require more than 6 hours per build on a fast computer. We allocated a new build server with high specifications (Ryzen 9 3900, 128GB RAM, NMVe) and reduced the time it took to build Chromium to a little more than an hour." That's a lot of power! Still, for those who love it, up-to-date builds of Chromium are now available for Mint users.

"As promised, SiFive has unveiled a new computer featuring the company's SiFive FU740 processor based on RISC-V architecture," reports Liliputing: The company, which has been making RISC-V chips for several years, is positioning its new SiFive HiFive Unmatched computer as a professional development board for those interested in working with RISC-V. But unlike the company's other HiFive boards, the new Unmatched model is designed so that it can be easily integrated into a standard PC...

SiFive says the system can support GNU/Linux distributions including Yocto, Debian, and Fedora.
"SiFive is releasing the HiFive Unleashed in an effort to afford developers the ability to build RISC-V based systems, using readily available, off-the-shelf parts," explains Forbes: SiFive says it built the board to address the market need for easily accessible RISC-V hardware to further advance development of new platforms, products, and software using the royalty-free ISA...

A short video demo shows the HiFive Unmatched installed in a common mid-tower PC chassis, running the included Linux distro, with an AMD Radeon graphics card pushing the pixels. In the video, the HiFive Unmatched is compiling an application and is shown browsing the web and opening a PDF. SiFive also notes that video playback is accelerated in hardware with the included version of Linux.
"At the moment, these development PCs are early alternatives, most likely targeted at hobbyists and engineers who may snap them up when they become available in the fourth quarter for $665," notes VentureBeat.

But they add that "While it's still early days, it's not inconceivable that RISC-V processors could someday be alternatives to Intel-based PCs and PC processors." The startup has raised $190 million to date, and former Qualcomm executive Patrick Little recently joined SiFive as CEO. His task will be to establish the company's RISC-V processors as an alternative to ARM. This move comes in the wake of Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of the world's leading processor architecture.

If Little is also looking to challenge Intel and AMD in PCs, he'll have his work cut out for him. For starters, SiFive is currently focused on Linux-based PCs, not Microsoft Windows PCs. Secondly, SiFive wouldn't build these processors or computers on its own. Its customers — anyone brave enough to take on the PC giants — would have to do that.

"I wouldn't see this as SiFive moving out of the box. It's more like they're expanding their box," said Linley Group senior analyst Aakash Jani. "They're using their core architecture to enable other chip designers to build PCs, or whatever they plan to build."

"No one asked Microsoft to port its Edge browser to Linux," writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet, adding "Indeed, very few people asked for Edge on Windows.

"But, here it is. So, how good — or not — is it..?" The new release comes ready to run on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE Linux distributions... Since I've been benchmarking web browsers since Mosaic rolled off the bit assembly line, I benchmarked the first Edge browser and Chrome 86 and Firefox 81 on my main Linux production PC.... First up: JetStream 2.0, which is made up of 64 smaller tests. This JavaScript and WebAssembly benchmark suite focuses on advanced web applications. It rewards browsers that start up quickly, execute code quickly, and run smoothly. Higher scores are better on this benchmark.

JetStream's top-scorer — drumroll please — was Edge with 136.971. But, right behind it within the margin of error, was Chrome with a score of 132.413. This isn't too surprising. They are, after all, built on the same platform. Back in the back was Firefox with 102.131. Next up: Kraken 1.1. This benchmark, which is based on the long-obsolete SunSpider, measures JavaScript performance. To this basic JavaScript testing, it added typical use-case scenarios. Mozilla, Firefox's parent organization, created Kraken. With this benchmark, the lower the score, the better the result. To no great surprise, Firefox took first place here with 810.1 milliseconds (ms). Following it was Chrome with 904.5ms and then Edge with 958.8ms.

The latest version of WebXPRT is today's best browser benchmark. It's produced by the benchmark professionals at Principled Technology. This company's executives were the founders of the Ziff Davis Benchmark Operation, the gold-standard of PC benchmarking. WebXPRT uses scenarios created to mirror everyday tasks. These include Photo Enhancement, Organize Album, Stock Option Pricing, Local Notes, Sales Graphs, and DNA Sequencing. Here, the higher the score, the better the browser. On this benchmark, Firefox shines. It was an easy winner with a score of 272. Chrome edges out Edge 233 to 230.
The article concludes that "Oddly, Edge, which turned in a poor performance when I recently benchmarked it on Windows, did well on Linux. Who'd have guessed...? Edge is a good, fast browser on Linux. If you're a Windows user coming over to Linux or you're doing development work aimed at Edge, then by all means try Edge on Linux. It works and it works well."

Yet Vaughan-Nichols admits he's still not going to switch to Edge. "Chrome is more than fast enough for my purposes and I don't want my information tied into the Microsoft ecosystem. For better or worse, mine's already locked into the Googleverse and I can live with that."

PeerTube (developed by Framasoft) is "the free and decentralized alternative to video platforms, providing you over 400,000 videos published by 60,000 users and viewed over 15 million times," according to its web site. But now they're exploring livestreaming, writes Debian developer Phil Hands (Slashdot reader #2,365): Holding DebConf20 online this year highlighted the effort involved in setting up Live Streaming using Free Software — something that is beyond the reach of many smaller events which is where PeerTube with Live Streaming should be a perfect fit.
In June PeerTube had posted a roadmap with a humble request for donations in lieu of a crowdfunding campaign: At a time when no one knows what the future holds, we deem it inappropriate to start a crowdfunding campaign and threaten not to do our best on PeerTube if we don't get the necessary funds. We believe in the public utility of PeerTube, so much so that we commit to working on it for six months to make this v3 happen, even if we must do it with our own funds (which we had already done for v2).

We still hope that by sharing this roadmap as widely as possible, some of you will support us in our approach with a donation that will allow us to fund this project.
And this week PeerTube's official Twitter feed announced that "Thanks to Debian's €10,000 donation we've just reached the 4th step of our PeerTube fundraising" — livestreaming. "Many thanks to all those who donated. And it's not too late to contribute."

"We hope this unconventional gesture from the Debian project will help us make this year somewhat less terrible," added the Debian blog, "and give us, and thus humanity, better Free Software tooling to approach the future." It describes their donation as "a strong sign of recognition from an international project — one of the pillars of the Free Software world — towards a small French association which offers tools to liberate users from the clutches of the web's giant monopolies."

And secondly, "it's a substantial amount of help in these difficult times, supporting the development of a tool which equally belongs to and is useful to everyone. The strength of Debian's gesture proves, once again, that solidarity, mutual aid and collaboration are values which allow our communities to create tools to help us strive towards Utopia."

Last month, Microsoft officials said they'd release a preview of the new Chromium-based Edge browser for Linux some time in October. On October 20, Microsoft made good on the promise, making available the Edge Dev Channel build for Linux. ZDNet reports: The new release supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE Linux distributions. Microsoft is planning to release weekly builds, like it does with the Dev Channel builds for other platforms. To get started, users can download and install a .deb or .rpm package directly from the Edge Insider site, which will configure a system to get future automatic updates. Or users can install Edge from Microsoft's Linux Software Repository. More detailed instructions are available on Microsoft's Chredge-on-Linux blog post.

Krystalo writes: Edge is finally coming to Linux. At Ignite 2020 today, Microsoft announced that Edge for Linux will be available in the Dev preview channel starting in October. Linux users will be able to download the preview from the Microsoft Edge Insider website or from their native Linux package manager. Microsoft will start with the Ubuntu and Debian distributions, with support for Fedora and openSUSE coming afterwards. "Linux stands out in that, while it has a relatively small desktop population in terms of what you might call typical consumer or end user, developers are often overrepresented in that population, and especially in areas like test automation, or CI/CD workloads for their web apps," Edge program manager Kyle Pflug told VentureBeat. "Edge on Linux is a natural part of our strategy to reduce fragmentation and test overhead for web developers. By providing the same rendering behavior and tools across platforms, developers can build and test sites and web apps in their preferred environment and be confident in the experience their customers will have."

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: 253 emails have been leaked from private (high-level) mailing lists of Debian, in which its representatives vocally complain about the talk Linus Torvalds gave at the most recent DebConf conference. Some people insist that he should be permanently banned from future conferences because the language he uses is inappropriate and infringes on the project's Code of Conduct. This could set a very bad precedent for the open source community, which has recently seen an influx of various CoC policies applied to a number of high-profile projects mostly after very vocal concerns from the people who barely participate in the open source community. Some observers believe that it's a plot by Microsoft to destroy the open source movement from the inside.
UPDATE: "Note: The complaints and the event itself happened in 2014," the article points out.

27 years ago today, in 1993, Debian first appeared in the world. August 16th has since been recognized as "DebianDay," celebrated shortly before the annual Debian Conference — with lots of ways to get involved, according to Debian.org: Today is also an opportunity for you to start or resume your contributions to Debian. For example, you can scratch your creative itch and suggest a wallpaper to be part of the artwork for the next release, have a look at the DebConf20 schedule and register to participate online (August 23rd to 29th, 2020), or put a Debian live image in a DVD or USB and give it to some person near you, who still didn't discover Debian.

Our favorite operating system is the result of all the work we do together. Thanks to everybody who has contributed in these 27 years, and happy birthday Debian!
And the same day is also the 25th anniversary of CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network: On the 16th August 1995, Andreas König uploaded Symdump 1.20 to CPAN. There were other things already on CPAN, but this was the first true upload, to be followed by more than 6,500 people who have released over 35,000 distributions in 230k releases.

So it seems appropriate that 16th August be designated CPAN Day, to celebrate CPAN, and all the authors who've made it what it is.
That blog post urges readers to celebrate the anniversary "by doing something related to CPAN: release something, blog about your favourite module, or email its author thanking her or him."

Finally, a Slashdot reader reminds us that Mutt is also enjoying a birthday: The email client that aims to suck a little bit less celebrates its 25th anniversary!

Long-time Slashdot reader mrflash818 ("Linux geek since 1999") shared a ZDNet article pointing out that SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has an onboard operating system that's "a stripped-down Linux running on three ordinary dual-core x86 processors. The flight software itself runs separately on each processor and is written in C/C++."

Interestingly, back in 2018 a Slashdot headline asked whether C++ was "a really terrible language," and Elon Musk replied on Twitter with his single-word answer. "Yes."

ZDNet points out that "ordinary" processors are often needed because of the multi-year development time for the spacecraft they power. Their article notes that the International Space Station actually runs on 1988-vintage 20 MHz Intel 80386SX CPUs: Of course, while those ancient chips work for the station's command and control multiplexer/demultiplexer, they're not much good for anything else. For ordinary day-in and day-out work, astronauts use HP ZBook 15s running Debian Linux, Scientific Linux, and Windows 10. The Linux systems act as remote terminals to the control multiplexer/demultiplexer, while the Windows systems are used for email, the web, and fun.

Usually, though, chips that go into space aren't ordinary chips. CPUs that stay in space must be radiation-hardened. Otherwise, they tend to fail due to the effects of ionizing radiation and cosmic rays. These customized processors undergo years of design work and then more years of testing before they are certified for spaceflight. For instance, NASA expects its next-generation, general-purpose processor, an ARM A53 variant you may know from the Raspberry Pi 3, to be ready to run in 2021...

The Dragon spacecraft's touchscreen interface is rendered using Chromium and JavaScript. If something were to go wrong with the interface, the astronauts have physical buttons to control the spacecraft.
Today the SpaceX software team answered questions on Reddit, revealing they use Chromium with a reactive library developed in-house, and that "All of our on-board computers either run Linux (with the PREEMPT_RT patch) or are microcontrollers that run bare-metal code...." Later they emphasized that for the Falcon 9 and Dragon software, "All of the application-level autonomous software is written in C++. We generally use object oriented programming techniques from C++, although we like to keep things as simple as possible.

"We do use open source libraries, primarily the standard C++ library, plus some others. However, we limit our use of open source libraries to only extremely high quality ones, and often will opt to develop our own libraries when it is feasible so that we can control the code quality ourselves."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Mint's programmers, led by lead developer, Clement "Clem" Lefebvre, has dropped support for Ubuntu's Snap software packing system. [...] So, what's not to like? Well, a lot, thinks Clem. As he wrote in July 2019, the idea is fine: "When snap was announced it was supposed to be a solution, not a problem. It was supposed to make it possible to run newer apps on top of older libraries and to let third-party editors publish their software easily towards multiple distributions, just like Flatpak and AppImage." But, he said, "What we didn't want it to be was for Canonical to control the distribution of software between distributions and third-party editors, to prevent direct distribution from editors, to make it so software worked better in Ubuntu than anywhere else and to make its store a requirement."

Clem was worried then that Canonical was moving in that direction because: "Ubuntu is planning to replace the Chromium [Google's open-source browser and foundation for Chrome] repository package with an empty package, which installs the Chromium snap. In other words, as you install APT [Debian's program for installing and managing DEB files] updates, Snap becomes a requirement for you to continue to use Chromium and installs itself behind your back. This breaks one of the major worries many people had when Snap was announced and a promise from its developers that it would never replace APT. A self-installing Snap Store which overwrites part of our APT package base is a complete NO-NO. It's something we have to stop and it could mean the end of Chromium updates and access to the snap store in Linux Mint."

Fast forward to now, and that's still the case with Chromium, and Clem has had enough: "In the Ubuntu 20.04 package base, the Chromium package is indeed empty and acting, without your consent, as a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can't audit them, hold them, modify them, or even point snap to a different store. You've as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you."

Today is Anzac Day, a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand for those who served, marked on the anniversary of the 1915 campaign that led to the first major casualties for Australian and New Zealand Army Corp forces during World War One.

"More than 87,000 Turks died, along with an estimated 44,000 men from the British Empire and France, including 8,500 Australians and nearly 3,000 New Zealanders," remembers the BBC, "one in four of the Kiwis sent to Gallipoli."

Taking special note is free and open source software engineer Daniel, who is also a Debian developer, who writes: In 1981, the movie Gallipoli made the career of Mel Gibson. In 2018, The Guardian lamented that Australia had reached peak Anzac after committing $500 million to expand a war memorial.

At the other end of the spectrum, a group of students in Kosovo organized a very low-budget Remembrance Day hackathon in 2019 and it has now been used as the foundation for a data-driven online Anzacathon while traditional memorials will remain closed due to coronavirus.

The video helps us reflect not only on the legacy of the Anzacs but our own plight today.
Living in Europe, Pocock describes the origins of the project. "Last year I had asked myself: are there any sites where there is only one Australian casualty, where nobody has visited them for Anzac Day?"

The activities list on the Anzacathon page now suggests updating its list of lone Anzac graves around the world, by sharing your own information from the Anzac honour roll of your school, village, company, or club.

Today, we get another diminutive desktop option, but this one is designed for Linux and privacy. From a report: Yes, Purism is finally launching a tiny desktop, and it will come pre-installed with the Debian-based PureOS. Called "Librem Mini," the cute bugger has 4 USB-A ports on the front, along with a 3.5mm audio jack, and the power button. On the rear, there are two more USB-A ports, a single USB-C port, Ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort, and the power port. "Announcing the Purism Librem Mini. Our small form-factor mini-PC that puts freedom, privacy and security first. We're really excited about the Librem Mini, it's a device our community have wanted and we've wanted to offer for some time. The Librem Mini is accessible, small, light and powerful featuring a new 8th gen quad core i7 processor, up to 64 GB of fast DDR4 memory and 4k 60 fps video playback. It's a desktop for your home or oïfce, a media center for your entertainment, or an expandable home server for your files and applications," says Purism.

Microsoft has announced that its cross-platform automation tool and configuration framework PowerShell 7 is now generally available. From a report: Available for Windows, macOS and Linux, PowerShell 7 sees Microsoft moving from .NET Core 2.x to 3.1 which enables greater backwards compatibility with existing Windows PowerShell modules thanks to the resurrection of numerous .NET Framework APIs. The cross-platform nature of PowerShell 7 means that Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian and other Linux distro are embraced. Joey Aiello, product manager of PowerShell, says: "If you weren't able to use PowerShell Core 6.x in the past because of module compatibility issues, this might be the first time you get to take advantage of some of the awesome features we already delivered since we started the Core project!"

"Now budding Python developers can read up on the National Security Agency's own Python training materials," reports ZDNet: Software engineer Chris Swenson filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the NSA for access to its Python training materials and received a lightly redacted 400-page printout of the agency's COMP 3321 Python training course. Swenson has since scanned the documents, ran OCR on the text to make it searchable, and hosted it on Digital Oceans Spaces. The material has also been uploaded to the Internet Archive...

"If you don't know any programming languages yet, Python is a good place to start. If you already know a different language, it's easy to pick Python on the side. Python isn't entirely free of frustration and confusion, but hopefully you can avoid those parts until long after you get some good use out of Python," writes the NSA...

Swenson told ZDNet that it was "mostly just curiosity" that motivated him to ask the NSA about its Python training material. He also said the NSA had excluded some course material, but that he'll keep trying to get more from the agency... Python developer Kushal Das has pulled out some interesting details from the material. He found that the NSA has an internal Python package index, that its GitLab instance is gitlab.coi.nsa.ic.gov, and that it has a Jupyter gallery that runs over HTTPS. NSA also offers git installation instructions for CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and Windows, but not Debian.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: In May 2019, South Korea's Interior Ministry announced plans to look into switching to the Linux desktop from Windows. It must have liked what it saw. According to the Korean news site Newsis, the South Korean Ministry of Strategy and Planning has announced the government is exploring moving most of its approximately 3.3 million Windows computers to Linux. The reason for this is simple. It's to reduce software licensing costs and the government's reliance on Windows. As Choi Jang-hyuk, the head of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, said, "We will resolve our dependency on a single company while reducing the budget by introducing an open-source operating system."

How much? South Korean officials said it would cost 780 billion won (about $655 million) to move government PCs from Windows 7 to Windows 10. [...] Windows will still have a role to play for now on South Korean government computers. As the Aju Business Daily, a South Korean business news site, explained: Government officials currently use two physical, air-gapped PCs. One is external for internet use, and the other is internal for intranet tasks. Only the external one will use a Linux-based distro. Eventually, by 2026, most civil servants will use a single Windows-powered laptop. On that system, Windows will continue to be used for internal work, while Linux will be used as a virtual desktop via a Linux-powered cloud server. This looks to eventually end up as a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) model. The report notes that the Ministry of National Defense and National Police Agency are already using the Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS-based Harmonica OS 3.0.

"Meanwhile, the Korean Postal Service division is moving to TMaxOS," reports ZDNet. "The Debian Linux-based South Korean Gooroom Cloud OS is also being used by Defense and the Ministry of Public Administration and Security."