Issue #229 / Dec 2019

For the most popular social media platform in the world, Facebook certainly is taking a lot of heat. In 2016, they were an unwitting vehicle for manipulative ads from foreign powers, echoing and amplifying false narratives in the US presidential election, then later in Brexit and other elections around the globe.

Arch Linux and CentOS 8.0.1905

In the news: The Art of PostgreSQL; Red Hat Announces CentOS Stream; Linus Torvalds Agrees to Kernel Lockdown; Richard Stallman Resigns from Free Software Foundation; Oracle Announces Autonomous Linux; Attackers Find a New Way to Install Cryptominers; and GitLab 12.3 Brings More Security to DevOps Engineers.

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on string handling routines and speeding up database workloads.

FreieFarbe is an association dedicated to promoting free standards for color graphics.

What are vector graphics and how could we make them better?

Openfire is an instant messaging and group chat server that lets users communicate via the popular XMPP standard.

As a cloud market leader, Amazon Web Services has had to  put a great deal of thought into data security. Encryption options and key management play an important role.

Charly Kühnast, sys admin columnist for 15 years, is searching for lost microseconds.

If you have a download folder full of photos and music, Mediapurge can help you sort files and even remove duplicates, but beware of its quirks.