Category: News

GNU Taler news: Zero-Knowledge Age Restriction for GNU Taler

Posted on by Michael G
We propose a design for a privacy-friendly method of age restriction in e-commerce that is aligned with the principle of subsidiarity. The design is presented as an extension of a privacy-friendly payment protocol with a zero-knowledge scheme that cryprographically augments coins for this purpose. Our scheme enables buyers to prove to be of sufficient age for a particular transaction without disclosing it. Our modification preserves the privacy and security properties of the payment system such as the anonymity of minors as buyers as well as unlinkability of transactions. We show how our scheme can be instantiated with ECDSA as well with a variant of EdDSA, respectively, and how it can be integrated with the GNU Taler payment system. We provide formal proofs and implementation of our proposal. Key performance measurements for various CPU architectures and implementations are presented.

Rumors, delays, and early testing suggest Intel’s Arc GPUs are on shaky ground

Posted on by Michael G
All of that makes Arc a lot more serious than Larrabee, Intel’s last effort to break into the dedicated graphics market. Larrabee was canceled late in its development because of delays and disappointing performance, and Arc GPUs are actual things that you can buy (if only in a limited way, for now). But the challenges of entering the GPU market haven’t changed since the late 2000s. Breaking into a mature market is difficult, and experience with integrated GPUs isn’t always applicable to dedicated GPUs with more complex hardware and their own pool of memory. Regardless of the company’s plans for future architectures, Arc’s launch has been messy. And while the company is making some efforts to own those problems, a combination of performance issues, timing, and financial pressures could threaten Arc’s future. There’s a lot of chatter that Intel might axe Arc completely, before it’s really truly out of the gate. I really hope those rumours are wrong or overblown, since the GPU market desperately needs a 3rd serious competitor. I hope Intel takes a breather, and allows the Arc team to be in it for the long haul, so that we as consumers can benefit from more choice in the near future.

Talking Drupal: Talking Drupal #359 – Contribution Events

Posted on by Michael G

Today we are talking about Contribution Events.

www.talkingDrupal.com/359

Topics

  • What are contribution events
  • What is the contribution event
  • What are the key goals
  • Can you give us a quick overview of how you started teh community initiative
  • Why did each of you feel this was important
  • How did you get involved
  • What was involved in the first event
  • What were lessons learned
  • What were the successes of the first event
  • How can someone have a contribution event
  • Are there differences in having events centered on various areas
  • What are the most important resources
  • How can someone get involved

Resources

Guests

Kristen Pol – www.drupal.org/u/kristen-pol @kristen_pol Surabhi Gokte – www.drupal.org/u/surabhi-gokte @SurabhiGokte

Hosts

Nic Laflin – www.nLighteneddevelopment.com @nicxvan John Picozzi – www.epam.com @johnpicozzi Ryan Price – ryanpricemedia.com – @liberatr

MOTW

Anonymous Login This is a very simple, lightweight module that will redirect anonymous users to the login page whenever they reach any admin-specified page paths, and will direct them back to the originally-requested page after successful login.

Python 3.11.0rc1 is now available

Posted on by Michael G

This is the first release candidate of Python 3.11

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110rc1/

This release, **3.11.0rc1**, is the penultimate release preview.  Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixes are allowed between this release candidate and the final release. The second candidate and the last planned release preview is currently planned for Monday, 2022-09-05 while the official release is planned for Monday, 2022-10-03.

There will be no ABI changes from this point forward in the 3.11 series and the goal is that there will be as few code changes as possible.

Call to action

Core developers: all eyes on the docs now

* Are all your changes properly documented?

* Did you notice other changes you know of to have insufficient documentation?

Community members

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to prepare their projects for 3.11 compatibilities during this phase. As always, report any issues to the Python bug tracker.

Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is **not** recommended for production environments.

Major new features of the 3.11 series, compared to 3.10

Among the new major new features and changes so far:

  • PEP 657 – Include Fine-Grained Error Locations in Tracebacks
  • PEP 654 – Exception Groups and except*
  • PEP 673 – Self Type
  • PEP 646 – Variadic Generics
  • PEP 680 – tomllib: Support for Parsing TOML in the Standard Library
  • PEP 675 – Arbitrary Literal String Type
  • PEP 655 – Marking individual TypedDict items as required or potentially-missing
  • bpo-46752 – Introduce task groups to asyncio
  • PEP 681 – Data Class Transforms
  • bpo-433030– Atomic grouping ((?>…)) and possessive quantifiers (*+, ++, ?+, {m,n}+) are now supported in regular expressions.
  • The Faster Cpython Project is already yielding some exciting results. Python 3.11 is up to 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. On average, we measured a 1.22x speedup on the standard benchmark suite. See Faster CPython for details.

    • (Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Pablo know.)

The next pre-release of Python 3.11 will be 3.11.0rc2, currently scheduled for  Monday, 2022-09-05.

More resources

And now for something completely different

A quark star is a hypothetical type of compact, exotic star, where extremely high core temperature and pressure have forced nuclear particles to form quark matter, a continuous state of matter consisting of free quarks. 

Some massive stars collapse to form neutron stars at the end of their life cycle, as has been both observed and explained theoretically. Under the extreme temperatures and pressures inside neutron stars, the neutrons are normally kept apart by degeneracy pressure, stabilizing the star and hindering further gravitational collapse. However, it is hypothesized that under even more extreme temperature and pressure, the degeneracy pressure of the neutrons is overcome, and the neutrons are forced to merge and dissolve into their constituent quarks, creating an ultra-dense phase of quark matter based on densely packed quarks. In this state, a new equilibrium is supposed to emerge, as a new degeneracy pressure between the quarks, as well as repulsive electromagnetic forces, will occur and hinder total gravitational collapse.

If these ideas are correct, quark stars might occur, and be observable, somewhere in the universe. Theoretically, such a scenario is seen as scientifically plausible, but it has been impossible to prove both observationally and experimentally because the very extreme conditions needed for stabilizing quark matter cannot be created in any laboratory nor observed directly in nature. The stability of quark matter, and hence the existence of quark stars, is for these reasons among the unsolved problems in physics.

We hope you enjoy the new releases!

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation.


https://www.python.org/psf/

Your friendly release team,
Ned Deily @nad 
Steve Dower @steve.dower 
Pablo Galindo Salgado @pablogsal

a2ps @ Savannah: a2ps 4.14.91 released [alpha]

Posted on by Michael G

This alpha release marks the return of GNU a2ps to the Translation Project.

Some other minor issues have also been fixed.

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature:
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/a2ps/a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz
  https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/a2ps/a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

36c2514304132eb2eb8921252145ced28f209182  a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz
1LQ+pPTsYhMbt09CdSMrTaMP55VIi0MP7oaa+zDvRG0  a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz

The SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the
hexadecimal encoding that most checksum tools default to.

Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg –verify a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz.sig

The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:

  pub   rsa2048 2013-12-11 [SC]
        2409 3F01 6FFE 8602 EF44  9BB8 4C8E F3DA 3FD3 7230
  uid   Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>
  uid   keybase.io/rrt <rrt@keybase.io>

If that command fails because you don’t have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the ‘gpg –verify’ command.

  gpg –locate-external-key rrt@sc3d.org

  gpg –recv-keys 4C8EF3DA3FD37230

  wget -q -O- ‘https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=a2ps&download=1’ | gpg –import –

As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:

  wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
  gpg –keyring gnu-keyring.gpg –verify a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz.sig

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.69
  Automake 1.16.1
  Gnulib v0.1-5347-gc0c72120f0

NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 4.14.91 (2022-08-08) [alpha]
 * Build:
   – Re-add a2ps to the Translation Project, and remove po files from git.
 * Bug fixes:
   – Remove reference to @COM_distill@ variable in a2ps_cfg.in.
 * Documentation:
   – Format –help output consistently to 80 columns.
   – Fix a couple of message typos.