News

Celebrating an important step forward for Open Source AI

by
Celebrating an important step forward for Open Source AI

By: Ayah Bdeir, Imo Udom and Nik Marda TL;DR: Mozilla is excited about today’s new definition of open source AI, and we endorse it as an important step forward. This past year has been marked by more and more people recognizing the societal benefits of open source AI. In October, a large coalition of people […]

The post Celebrating an important step forward for Open Source AI appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Playing with old apps

by

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 22 Aug 2024, Week 34

Community News

We don’t have the habit of recommending apps (besides F-Droid and F-Droid Basic clients as expected 😛), but this week a common theme was brought up, “what’s up with VLC?”.

We’ve pinged the VLC team in the past and it looked like a new release was just around the corner, I mean the app works fine but it hasn’t seen a stable release in 18 months, and while past CVEs don’t seem to affect it, there’s always the fear of the unknown or just the impression that “it is old”.

Regarding the release delay, we understood that there are some issues regarding publishing VLC on some alternative centralized store but since same store owner was praising VLC not only on mobile devices but also on TVs we expected it to be fixed by now, yet it isn’t. And worse, it feels like that drama is delaying a stable release for F-Droid too. Eager users pinged us or opened Forum threads concerned that maybe F-Droid skipped a beat, as at least VLC is pushing nightly packages to their site just fine.

Hoping the story above clears some things, F-Droid includes some other players that might strike your fancy, and these got updated in the last 2 months (not years):

Removed Apps

3 old apps were removed
  • BART Runner: Timetables for trains in the U.S., as the API used appears to be no longer available.
  • QuickLyric: Fetch and display song lyrics, stopped working
  • Sharing: Share files and apps using browser, just got a name change, users should uninstall (old appid com.ammar.filescenter) and reinstall the new Sharing app that was added

Newly Added Apps

8 more apps were newly added
  • Cardabase: Save EAN-13 club cards on your phone
  • Ciyue: A simple mdict dictionary
  • Conversations Classic: Encrypted, easy-to-use XMPP instant messenger for your mobile device (a fork of Conversations from different developers wanting to preserve the old look and feel)
  • gttrpg: Quick access for your DnD data with a built in way to track your character data
  • kitshn (for Tandoor): An unofficial client for the self-hosted Tandoor recipe management software
  • Material Notes: Simple, local, material design notes
  • Solar: Monitor off-grid solar setups over bluetooth
  • µLauncher: A distraction-free minimal homescreen for Android

Updated Apps

150 more apps are no longer old

(expand for the full list)

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

Linux scores a surprising gaming victory against Windows 11

by
The conversation around gaming on Linux has changed significantly during the last several years. It’s a success story engineered by passionate developers working on the Linux kernel and the open-source graphics stack (and certainly bolstered by the Steam Deck). Many of them are employed by Valve and Red Hat. Many are enthusiasts volunteering their time to ensure Linux gaming continues to improve. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a history lesson, but it’s an appropriate way to introduce yet another performance victory Linux is claiming over Windows. I recently spent some time with the Framework 13 laptop, evaluating it with the new Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and the AMD Ryzen 7 7480U. It felt like the perfect opportunity to test how a handful of games ran on Windows 11 and Fedora 40. I was genuinely surprised by the results! ↫ Jason Evangelho I’m not surprised by these results. At all. I’ve been running exclusively Linux on my gaming PC for years now, and gaming has pretty much been a solved issue on Linux for a while now. I used to check ProtonDB before buying games on Steam without a native Linux version, but I haven’t done that in a long time, since stuff usually just works. In quite a few cases, we’ve even seen Windows games perform better on Linux through Proton than they do on Windows. An example that still makes me chuckle is that when Elden Ring was just released, it had consistent stutter issues on Windows that didn’t exist on Linux, because Valve’s Proton did a better job at caching textures. And now that the Steam Deck has been out for a while, people just expect Linux support from developers, and if it’s not there on launch, Steam reviews will reflect that. It’s been years since I bought a game that I’ve had to refund on Steam because it didn’t work properly on Linux. The one exception remains games that employ Windows rootkits for their anticheat functionality, such as League of Legends, which recently stopped working on Linux because the company behind the game added a rootkit to their anticheat tool. Those are definitely an exception, though, and honestly, you shouldn’t be running a rootkit on your computer anyway, Windows or not. For my League of Legends needs, I just grabbed some random spare parts and built a dedicated, throwaway Windows box that obviously has zero of my data on it, and pretty much just runs that one stupid game I’ve sadly been playing for like 14 years. We all have our guilty pleasures. Don’t kink-shame. Anyway, if only a few years ago you had told me or anyone else that gaming on Linux would be a non-story, a solved problem, and that most PC games just work on Linux without any issues, you’d be laughed out of the room. Times sure have changed due to the dedication and hard work of both the community and various companies like Valve.

How To Block Bots In Your Login And Registration To The Website In WordPress: Itay Verchik IVBS…

by
How to Block Bots in Your Login and Registration Forms on Your WordPress Website:
https://itayverchik.com/bot-blocking/

Are bots trying to log in or register on your WordPress website? In this video, we’ll show you how to block bots and protect your site from unwanted registrations and login attempts.
Learn the tools and techniques that can help you secure your site and keep it running smoothly.

Key Topics Covered:

Understanding the Bot Threat: Why it’s important to protect your site from bots and how they can affect your website’s security and performance.

Using reCAPTCHA: How to add reCAPTCHA to your login and registration forms to ensure only real users can pass through.

WordPress Plugins for Bot Protection: A review of the best WordPress plugins like Wordfence, WP Bruiser, and CleanTalk, which offer comprehensive bot protection.

Limiting Login Attempts: How to set up limits on the number of login attempts to prevent brute force attacks.

Securing Registration Forms: Tips on hardening your registration forms to prevent unwanted bot sign-ups.

Using a Firewall for Extra Protection: How to activate a firewall for additional security against bots and cyber threats.

Monitoring and Testing: How to ensure your bot protection measures are working and how to monitor suspicious activity on your site.

By the end of this video, you’ll know how to effectively block bots and protect your WordPress site from common threats, keeping your users and site safe.

If you found this video helpful, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel, hit the bell for notifications on new videos, and share your thoughts in the comments below. Share this video with other website owners who want to enhance their WordPress security and block unwanted bots.

Thank you for watching! If you have any questions about how to block bots in your login and registration forms on your WordPress website or if you encountered any challenges during the process, leave a comment here and I’ll be happy to help. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell to get updates on new videos. Share this video with other website owners looking to enhance their site’s security and block unwanted bots.

To Sign Up For The Keywords Tracking System:
https://say-v.com/

Join now the community of Webmasters and SEO Marketers completely free:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/itayverchik

To purchase Elementor Pro, the world’s best WordPress page designer:
https://trk.elementor.com/2500

Don’t Have A Web Hosting Account Yet Or Are You Just Not Satisfied With Your Existing Hosting?
Get A 25% Discount For Cloudways Web Hosting For The First 3 Months:
https://platform.cloudways.com/signup?id=314159&coupon=VERCHIK