The European Union is slowly waking up to the fact that the US might not continue protecting it (a Republican senator introducing a bill to exit NATO, a new security direction talking about breaking up the EU) and the possibility of a Russian invasion. Multiple military and civilian facilities reporting drone sightings, Polish railway tracks being sabotaged, Portugal and Spain losing electricity for multiple hours, Russian submarines and warships along the EU coasts, severing fiber connections between Sweden and central Europe, the list goes on and on.

Obviously infrastructure will be attacked and communication cannot depend on Starlink, services from US tech companies, nor be centralised.

So, which networks (from software to hardware), can citizens join to bolster their communication in case of war? Meshtastic? Meshcore? Jami? Briar? Freifunk? What exists? What can work? Which limitations are there?

Add links to your favorite projects here!

You can find all of these videos as written articles, plus some extra content, at https://thelibre.news/

Sounds like a misnomer to me.

I just watched "Decentralized Authentication is Our Only Hope" and the dude presented a new method of authentication that went over my head. Back when reading SQRL my first thought was "damn, that's genius".

My credentials lie pretty far from cybersecurity and I'm way out of date on auth (OAuth I understand, but not webauthn and FIDO, etc.), so if somebody could maybe explain why SQRL didn't catch on, that'd be great. Was it too complciated? Did something better come along? Just general inertia?

A KDE developer gives his opinions on the topic.

I see comments on posts such these very often where people complain about opensource products like Linux phones, Linux itself, or pretty much anything else, not being as good as their proprietary, funded, and profits driven alternatives. How are such projects supposed to compete without money and full-time developers? Especially when people are unwilling to donate to them "because they just aren't there yet", how do they expect the projects to quickly get to a point where they are boob friendly and usable?

People will disparage groups that try to make something with barely any funding and time. There are so many negative comments about the PinePhone, Phosh, PostMarketOS, and so on. It's disappointing to have such a community.

As soon as an opensource project asks for funds, integrates a question for funds in their software, uses a restrictive license or something like a business source license, someone will complain about it on social media and blow up the maintainers' repository and socials. Why are we so averse to opensource contributors earning a living writing opensource?

If people don't want to fund opensource (or "source available") until "it's ready" and resist any attempt to make money from it, how it the model supposed to succeed in being an alternative for the majority?

Sorry for the rant, but why can't we as a community be more active in supporting our opensource contributors instead just waiting for the apples to fall into our and their laps?

I just read "Google Continues Working On "Magma" For Mesa Cross-Platform System Call Interface" on Phoronix and didn't get it. That made me realise my knowledge and understanding of these things is barely existent. I did write an MS paint clone on linux in C++ a really long time ago and the entire thing was with opengl (it looked like crap), but since then... nothing.

So my understanding is that the graphics card (or CPU if there's no graphics card), writes to a component which is connected to a screen and every cycle (every 1/60 seconds if 60Hz) the contents are sent or read by the screen. OpenGL provided a common interface to do so, but has been outdated since... a while and replaced by Vulkan. Then there are libraries either built on top of are parallel to OpenGL. Vulkan can be parallel or use OpenGL if that's the only one supported IIRC.
However, I'm not sure if OpenGL is implemented at the hardware level (on the graphics card), software level, or both.

Furthermore, I don't understand where Magma, Meta, and MESA come in.

Maybe my core understanding is wrong or just outdated. I can't tell. Can anybody eplain?

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If you followed ProxMox's wiki page Proxmox VE inside VirtualBox, you might have found yourself unable to connect to the VM, even with port-forwarding. Should that be case, this might help.

Setup

You followed the wiki and have 2 interfaces setup for your VM in virtualbox

1. Host-only network interface (vboxnet0, or another one)
2. NAT interface

Why is this happening?

Proxmox does not use systemd-networkd to configure its network interfaces. Everything is in /etc/network/interfaces. And thus, the VM boots with an unconfigured network.

Resolution

Step 1: Find the IP address of your host-only interface on the host

On Linux, macOS and Solaris Oracle VM VirtualBox will only allow IP addresses in 192.168.56.0/21 range to be assigned to host-only adapters.

- Virtualbox documentation

There's a good chance vboxnet0 will thus have 192.168.56.1\24, vboxnet1 then 192.168.57.1\24, and so on. To check, run

ip a | grep -A2 vboxnet

There are 2 VMs on mine and vboxnet1 has the proxmox VM with the IP 192.168.57.1/24

3: vboxnet0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 0a:00:27:00:00:00 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.56.1/24 scope global vboxnet0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::800:27ff:fe00:0/64 scope link proto kernel_ll 
--
10: vboxnet1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 0a:00:27:00:00:01 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    altname enx0a0027000001
    inet 192.168.57.1/24 brd 192.168.57.255 scope global vboxnet1
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::800:27ff:fe00:1/64 scope link proto kernel_ll 
--
11: vboxnet2: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 0a:00:27:00:00:02 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    altname enx0a0027000002
12: vboxnet3: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 0a:00:27:00:00:03 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    altname enx0a0027000003
13: vboxnet4: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 0a:00:27:00:00:04 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    altname enx0a0027000004

As for the NAT network interface, the virtualbox doc says

The virtual machine receives its network address and configuration on the private network from a DHCP server integrated into Oracle VM VirtualBox. The IP address thus assigned to the virtual machine is usually on a completely different network than the host. As more than one card of a virtual machine can be set up to use NAT, the first card is connected to the private network 10.0.2.0, the second card to the network 10.0.3.0 and so on.

Therefore we don't need to note down a IP and subnet here.

Step 2: Note the names of the network interfaces in the VM

Linux names the interfaces dynamically, which can be a pain sometimes, so the interface names here might be different from yours!

Lists the network interfaces and their information with

ip address # Or simply `ip a`

I have:

• enp0s3 as the host-only interface
• enp0s8 as the NAT interface

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host noprefixroute 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: enp0s3: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,DOWN,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 08:00:27:e4:f4:50 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: enp0s8: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,DOWN,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast master vmbr0 state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 08:00:27:bc:39:f4 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
4: vmbr0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 08:00:27:e4:f4:50 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.100.2/24 scope global vmbr0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fee4:f450/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

In my output you can already see the problem. vmbr0, which is the bridge interface for VMs that Proxmox will create has 2 problems:

1. It's using the wrong network interface as a slave (enp0s8 is the NAT network interface; it's the second one)
2. Had it chosen the right interface (host-only interface has enp0s3 in my setup), the IP address and subnet would've been wrong anyway!

Step 2: Update /etc/network/interfaces

Time to:

• assign a manually chosen IP address to the bridge interface (vmbr0)
  • I picked 192.168.57.2/24
• set the bridge interface as the master of the correct interface (enp0s3 is the host-only interface in my case)
• let DHCP configure the NAT interface (enp0s8 in my case)

IP_SUB="192.168.57.2/24"
IFACE_HOST_ONLY="enp0s3"
IFACE_NAT="enp0s8"
cd /etc/network/
cp interfaces interfaces.bak
# Write configuration
echo " # Manually edited, might be overwritten by Proxmox
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto $IFACE_NAT
iface $IFACE_NAT inet dhcp

auto $IFACE_HOST_ONLY
iface $IFACE_HOST_ONLY inet manual

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
        address $IP_SUB
        bridge-ports $IFACE_HOST_ONLY
        bridge-stp off
        bridge-fd 0
" > interfaces

# Reload networking
ifreload -a

Step 3: test

You should now be able to access Proxmox VE from the host-only network interface using the IP address you chose. In my case that's https://192.168.57.2:8006/

Conclusion

It would be great if Proxmox used systemd-networkd and shoved configuration files into /etc/systemd/network. They are much easier to read, honestly and systemd does a good job at managing stuff. It would work "auto-magically" regardless of environment.

Hopefully this helped somebody and you didn't have to spend a few hours trying to figure this out.

To preface this, no I do not have kids nor am I a child educator. The involvement I have with children is having been one.

TL; DR educate yourself, educate your kids, ease into stuff, explain why

So, what's this about? Well, I've seen it in my private circles, online, and quite recently by multiple governments proposals that children shouldn't access social media, have smartphones, or in some cases even no access to technology. It's a stance I find is borne in fear, uncertainty, doubt, and often ignorance. Now, I cannot claim to be much more educated on the subject than everybody else, but just like everybody has an asshole, I have opinion.

Abstinence is not often a solution to a problem. Sure, you could get pedantic and say abstaining from deadly things like alcohol, drugs and stupid actions, but to that I respond: it's all about the dose. Nigh everything has a lethal dose, even water. Anyway, abstinence from sex is the most common example of abstinence I know of, and it is not known to help. In fact, places that preach and teach abstinence only are more likely to have teenage pregnancies, youth and adults alike who know little to nothing about their bodies, safe sex, consent, and so on.

A lack of education and experience is not a solution I can feel comfortable with. Don't misconstrue my distaste for abstinence as a call for complete freedom. As with many things, everything in moderation (even moderation).

What am I actually proposing then? Education, my fellow humans. Educated actions. Children aren't stupid, they are just vessels that have just started being filled with knowledge, understanding and experience. Teach them about the things they are using or will use. Help them understand the advantages and disadvantages of things. Help them make informed decisions and provide guardrails based upon existing knowledge.

A specific example, too much screentime has been shown to impact mental and oral development in children. They get less time practicing how to flap their lips, discovering their physical limits, training their bodies and aiding physical development, and many other things. (Adults are of course not immune)
However, this world runs on screens and the things displaying things on them. Being unable to operate these devices leaves people behind technologically and reduces independence. Some people never get comfortable with electronic devices. Some because they lack the experience, some out of resistance, some are just afraid of looking dumb, and there are of course many other reasons.
The solution isn't to ban screentime entirely, but to introduce it slowly, provide alternatives, and explain why. But not just "I don't like it" or "you're too young". I hated those as a kid and probably you did too.

I understand that not all parents are educated enough to make informed decisions and that is a much bigger topic than for this brain dump. However just because it isn't that way, doesn't mean we should give up and not try to improve it.

A single contributor (oelmekki) had started integrating ActivityPub into GitLab, which could have been a huge win for the source forge, but despite praising him for it GitLab didn't assign enough resources to help him out. Unsurprisingly oelmekki ran out of steam and now, a year or so later, Gitlab just closed the epic.

Comments have started coming in from the community (and customers) expressing their frustration with GitLab over the decision. The ticket was reopened but without an official communication.

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